Once again, uploading some old game reviews.

This review is for Final Fight by Capcom for the Arcades. An oldie, yet a goodie. A goodie so good that I had to review it now, almost 20 years after its release. Though the game has been released on multiple platforms, it all started in the Arcades. It could be called Capcom’s first moderate arcade success before Street Fighter II. The game was also the inspiration for four guys from Street Fighter Alpha. With that said, how is this game really? Read on to find out!

Name: Final Fight
Game Ownership: Are you kidding?
Game Status: Beat game.
How it was Acquired: Emulation
Played at: MAME
Condition when Bought: N/A
Game Type: Beat em Up

Preliminary Comments:
Rant: Any game in which there is a guy named “Guy” is a great video game.

Fact: In Street Fighter Alpha 3, Cody has a special move that pokes fun at the “hit three times, turn away, hit three more times” glitch in the game.

Graphics - 7.5
Graphics were surprisingly nice. There seems to be a lot more detail in this game than normal for games of this genre at the time. From the screenshot above, you can see that there is a lot of shading and detailing in the game. Even though the clothes for some of the guys were a bit too lightly colored than something a normal gangbanger would wear, they still work well with the game. Something that did suprise me was that the scenery and backgrounds weren’t all in a bunch of weird, fruity colors. The pallete for the buildings and such did make it look more realistic than the other games of that time. Enemies and characters looked good as well. Although all of them seemed to be unrealistically buff, it was still able to fit with the game. There is a pretty good selection of enemies in the game. Even though every enemy animation was reused at least once, each character looked different enough so that you wouldn’t really notice. Animation was unfortunately not the same story. It is the common choppy move animation that is found in other games of that time. It is too bad that they didn’t try to correct this, but I guess it was the best they could do.

Sound - 5.5
Probably the most annoying thing about this game is the music. The music isn’t cool or original or catchy or anything for that matter. The entire soundtrack sounds like it was made in 30 minutes in someone’s basement using a keyboard and a low grade synthesizer. A lot of the music is reused as well, meaning that if you didn’t like the song the first time around, you’ll absolutely hate it hearing it again. I do have to say though that a lot of the problems with the music were due to the instruments used to make them. I’ve heard plenty of remixes from this game in the Street Fighter Alpha series and Namco x Capcom that sound great. If there was some way to update this game to get the remixes, that would be nice. Sound effects do fare a little better. They did work with the game and did give a slight feel of injury.

Story - 5.0
It’s an average story for a game like this. Mike Haggar, newly elected mayor of Metro City, has promised to put an end to the torrents of crime plaguing the city. However, the main gang known as the Mad Gears has another plan. They have kidnapped Haggar’s daughter, and unless he allows the Mad Gears to do “business as usual,” she will die. Haggar himself has decided to hunt the Mad Gears down and get his daugher back. And so, Haggar and his friends Cody and Guy set off into the city to take out the Mad Gears and save his daughter. It’s decent enough for a game like this, though it scores no points in the originality department.

Fun - 7.5
Like any other old-school beat ‘em up game, Final Fight is kinda short, but still pretty fun to play through. If you like a game in which there are a bunch of bad guys on the screen for you to just wail on, then this is a great game for you to play. The game features three characters: Guy, Cody, and Haggar. Character balance between them is pretty good. Guy and Cody are the better strikers while Haggar can do a jumping piledriver to enemies for a good chunk of damage. A small criticism I have is that Cody and Guy play too similarly. The only difference between them are their graphics and animations. Other than that, they are basically the same character.

Something that I would like to praise about the game is it’s large variety of enemy characters. Although every basic enemy pose and attack gets reused at least twice in the game, the developers changed the look and actions of the enemies enough to give the illusion that they are different. It was a creative use of reuse that I thought was worth mentioning. Not only that, but the boss designs were pretty interesting. In fact, two of the bosses make an appearance in the Street Fighter series of games in which they do the same actions that they did in this game, which is pretty cool.

There are two ways to attack enemies. You could either just hit them with a series of punches and kicks or you could throw them into other enemies. Not only that, but there are three different weapons that you can use that will randomly appear. You can use a pipe, a sword, or a knife (which can be thrown). An annoying aspect of the game, however, is that the enemies tend to gang up on you and just crush you. To combat this, the developers gave each character a special “desperation move” which knocks away all enemies in the vicinity of your character. Though it sounds like this can be abused, each enemy your character hits takes a small part of your lifebar away. Doing the desperation move too often can result in an early death of your character.

Difficulty - 6.5
Of course, it is an arcade game, meaning its whole point is to take your money. I expected a high level of difficulty going in, but some of the things in this game is a little bit cheap. There are times when you’ll get knocked down, but before you can get up, you get pummeled to death with no way to avoid it. Even though the desperation move can normally help out in these situations, having to use it constantly puts a strain on your life bar, which makes the game harder. Other times, bosses have certain moves that will take out half of your life in one hit, which is very annoying. I’m just lucky that I played this on an emulator so that I don’t have to go running to the change machine every minute. Other than little cheap things like that, the difficulty was pretty much fair. It seems like the developers reserved all the difficulty for the bosses and just spread a bunch of easy kill enemies around, which really does make the game fun.

Replayable - 6.5
Even though there are tons of games out there extremely similar to this one, it is still worth going back to every now and then. Something that the game does well that not many other arcade games do is that it can be fun alone or with friends. It is a great game to pass time with, as well as a good game for new gamers to play.

Posted in Arcade |