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Review: Fighter’s History |
This game is NOT as good as Street Fighter II.
Nowhere. Fucking. Near.
Almost immediately, it seems I have comitted a vile, smelly crime by stating a truth so obvious as to be insulting to both you reading this, and to one of the greatest collections of ones and zeros known to man by it’s very mention. I feel the need to state this ridiculous comparison because, during this review, it might almost sound like I regard them as being comparable. And how could I not? There are so many cruelly deceptive similarities in the thing, so many deviously underhanded targets of opportunity. Look on this review, even as a dead, illegal game, as the best compliment that Fighter’s History will ever recieve. After all, it did a lot of things right.
First and most obvious is that, far from wanting to merely borrow elements from that doing rather well at the moment thank you game ‘Street Fighter II’, Fighter’s History wanted to actually BE Street Fighter II. Bad. I’m talking Khan wanting to kill Kirk bad, or that guy from Silence of the Lambs wanting a vagina bad. It’s not a casual want or desire for social/critical/financial aspiration. FH has a hard-on for SFII, more than any other game. It doesn’t steal from KOF. It doesn’t steal from AOF or SS or WH or any of that shit. It knew the best, and nothing else would do.
The trouble of course is that, for its time, SFII was perfect. And you can’t improve on perfection. You can only take a step back, or at least, take a step to the side and hope it’s as good. Same thing. Lots of SFII’s competitors at least had the financial sense to go their own way, and mop up the market of those who would ultimately eschew SFII in favour of something that was different (FAGGOTS). But that was them. Fighters History was gonna walk the exact route SFII did or die trying. Which coincidentally is exactly what happened.
Capcom sued Data East over FH, leading to DE having to actually pull cabs from arcades (the SNES game was allowed to remain on sale). Videogame plagiarism court cases are notoriously difficult to win, more so then, but even a fucking court judge had no problem in seeing that the two games were inherently linked in concept.
And that’s the amazing thing. There are no Dragon Punches, no Hurricane Kicks, no stretchy-limby people, no electricity, no setting-on fire. The aesthetic similarites are not so obvious. No more than any early ’90s fighter. It’s the feel of the thing- The inputs, the buttons, the timing, the physics (despite some crazy jump arcs), the combos, the screen/character size, the depth, the FUN, that recalls Capcom’s game.
There are nine characters in FH, with two more unlockable via codes. Most character types are represented with regard to speed/power/priority balance. The button layout resembles SFII’s exactly, with three strengths of punch and kick respectively. As mentioned, the combo system is strikingly similar, and every string you think might just work… does.
The system’s similarity is what allows you to dive right in and play, instantly, and have fun. Only with a brand new set of characters which, odd move aside, owe little to their original inspiration, offering fresh appeal. And so you begin to see where Capcom was coming from. They do all the hard work of creating revolutionary, crack-addictive gameplay out of thin air and these Bad Dudes chumps waltz in and clone their own slice? Fruck you!
Yet, despite all this, nobody in it actually plays like a World Warrior because, like I’ve said, there are few comparable moves, let alone characters. The closest match would possibly be Matlock to Guile, but they are unmistakably different. Marstorius has an SPD equivalent, but his other moves make him no more like Zangief than Hugo. A few have fireballs. That’s pretty much it.
Does FH have anything to call its own? Actually, yes. Each fighter has a specific strike point that, if bashed repeatedly, will yield a dizzy and x2 damage after that. This may sound grotequely cheap but it works surprisingly well. It is basically a *win* area, but you guard it with your life, and can even turn fights around after you’ve been ‘broken’.
What else is good?
Mizoguchi is your ‘Japanese character who looks like the main one but isn’t and doesn’t control like you think they would lol Akira/Ibuki’, whose famous verbal mangling (actually, phoeneticians will marvel if you can decipher any one FH soundbite) and preposterously satisfying 3-hit elbow rush move make him a favourite. Oh and he kind of says “You’re shit” when he wins. He would later be awesome enough to get his own game.
Samchay is the muay thai combo god of FH. There’s no move he has that fails to flow into another like silk.
British bobbies are quite content to put duties aside while excitedly blowing their whistle as ’80s Fist of the North Star-style mohican punks beat someone senseless in broad daylight. Oh, and this happens in the game, too.
Everybody loves Ray. His music could be the Official Fighting Games Theme Tune. Most endlessly ‘misheard-quote’-quoted fighter ever.
Clown’s ending has him asking alarmed strangers if they want to ‘clown around’. I find this awesome beyond description.
It is a shame. On the one hand, I want to see a game that has the gall to not only take on but steal wholesale from *The Legend* fail, utterly. Capcom’s game does everything so, so much better as far as ideas, style, execution, visuals, programming, user-friendliness etc. which makes it easier to enjoy FH. My praise of the game is part pity, which I think is fair.
On the other hand, I simply want to enjoy a game that plays great. And I have enjoyed FH a great deal. The most intense, strategic, testicle-quiveringly exciting fight I ever had on any fighting game ever was on FH (Samchay vs Samchay). This sounds ridiculous, but it is true. The game had some depth. Probably more so than Turtles Tournament Fighters or World Heroes or any of the other B-list upstarts. It’s laughably impossible to acknowledge any complexity in this two-special move monstrosity in the days of Tekkens 3s and 3rd Strikes, but for a game that pretty much disappeared off the face of the earth, it just about had it where it counts. Even if SFII rightly hosed fiery death-piss on it like the sorry wannabe bitch it is.
Also, quoting “Baked Potato” is screamingly hilarious and bitingly clever, so don’t forget to do it.
