Mighty Warriors (Arcade)

I'm sure you all know of the massive fighting game boom that followed in the wake of Street Fighter II and, to a lesser extent Mortal Kombat in the early 1990s, and how along with some classics, there were also some awful, point-missing garbage cash-ins, like Bloodstorm and Data East's unreleased Tattoo Assassins. Might Warriors appears to be one of those cash-ins, though this is just guesswork, as there's very little information about the game's development, or even its release date. The publisher, Elettronica Video-Games, is an Italian company that seems to only make gambling machines now (assuming the company that exists today under that name is the same one).

Anyway, the plot is pretty similar to SEGA's Eternal Champions: a bunch of dead (and exclusively male) warriors from throughout history are given the chance to live again by proving their might. These warriors include the usual Greek, Roman and (very white-looking) Egyptian, as well as a Celt, a non-specific African, a Chinese guy, a viking, some kind of big monk, and, most surprising, a massive Babylonian. Amusingly, it seems the artists had a hard time trying to animate tartan for the Celt's outfit, so they have him in chef-style checkerboard trousers.

They all have their own stages, too, and the stages even have at least two weather/time of day variants each, which is a surprise for a game like this. The reason I'm not mentioning the names of any of the characters, is because they seem to have different names depending on whether the left or right-side player is controlling them. For example, the viking can be Gurdaf on the left, or Gandalf on the right, while the Chinese guy is Hang-Sing or Chang-Kien. I guess this is their way around explaining how two of the same character can be fighting each other?

The game is no classic, as you've probably already assumed, but it does have some more interesting little quirks. Like how before each fight, you pick your character's "mutation". This isn't a special power or trait like you might expect, but one of the other characters that you can suddenly change into at will. Obviously, there's no explanation for this, nor is there any real advantage to doing this in a fight. Furthermore, each character starts every round with a weapon, which disappears if they get to 50% health or lower and get knocked to the ground. There's also little aesthetic touches, like how the continue screen counts down in Roman numerals, and how there's a little animated face between the health bars that says all the "ROUND ONE! FIGHT!" stuff. Little touches like these make me think that though the execution isn't great, and the game was almost definitely knocked out as a quick, cheap cash-in, at least someone involved in its creation must have been passionate about what they were doing.

Yeah, Mighty Warriors isn't a game I can recommend at all, but it's a quirky little thing that stands out from the other cash-ins by having a few little sparks of creativity and personality. And also by not resorting to the try-hard me-too shock tactics of games like Time Killers and Bloodstorm.