Final Fight One

"FFOne does not fail to please!"

First off, FFOne is amazing! I never thought I'd see the day that such a killer game would appear on the Gameboy. Being almost 21 years old, I have owned both the SNES version and played the Arcade Version quite a bit in the past. I admit, FFOne is not a perfect conversion from the Arcade but boy does it rock!
I think it's best to call FFOne a hybrid of the SNES and Arcade versions with a few extras thrown in. Why?

1. It's partially censored like the SNES version (no women or blood, and ''Oh my car!'', but the boss names weren't changed. Also, the character sprites and stages (except for stage 4) are recycled from the SNES Version.

2. Like the arcade version, there are more punks on the screen at once, and there's two-player support. More of the Arcade game's Sound effects are present (mostly the grunts and yells made by Cody, Guy, and Haggar.), and the missing stage is back. Not only that, but a lot of transition sequences missing from the SNES version are back, e.g. Trying to leave the bar in Stage 3, only to be ambushed by Andore Jr. and carried away to the fight pit.

3. Extras: The remixed background music, SFA3 Cody and Guy, boss dialogues, color changes, and stage select are very nice touches on the part of Capcom. The Auto-save feature is a very welcome addition.

Overall, this game does not fail to please. The censorship doesn't bother me one bit because the male replacements for the women fight exactly the same as the women did. But, I recommend setting the difficulty to ''easy'' if you are new to Final Fight because the normal difficulty is a tad too difficult. Even I, being a veteran, have trouble with the normal difficulty! One little problem: I don't know anyone else with a GBA and FFOne, so I can't play two-player.

Another note about the difficulty settings: Based on playing the SNES version of the game, I noticed that the Normal Difficulty in FFOne corresponds to the Hard Difficulty in the SNES Version. I say this because the punks in normal difficulty attacked in the same order as the SNES version's hardest difficulty setting.

My Score: 9.9 out of 10. Why 9.9? not much replay value to it and it's a bit short by today's standards. The generic ending is kind of disappointing seeing that there are five playable characters.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 10/09/01, Updated 10/09/01