Two unfair criticisms that are often aimed a beat em ups as a genre are that they're unfair quarter munchers, and that they're repetitive to the point of mindlessness. This might sound a little too harsh to some of you, but I think the blame for both of these can be laid at the feet of Konami's licensed beat em ups of the late eighties and early nineties: Turtles in Time, The Simpsons, X-Men, etc. I know a lot of people have a lot of nostalgia for those games, and I do too, but they definitely live up to those stereotypes more than the average beat em up (especially the western versions, which were made more difficult to squeeze those few extra coins out of players), and the popularity and ubiquitousness in the past means they're the games that a lot of people think of first when it comes to the genre. It's really a shame that the best entries Konami made in the genre came out just as it was waning in popularity: Violent Storm was one of them, and Metamorphic Force was the other.
I think most people already know about Violent Storm, with it's bizarre soundtrack and wide array of bone-crunching throws, but Metamorphic Force seems to have slipped under a lot of people's radar for some reason. The simplest way to describe it would be as a combination of SEGA's Altered Beast and Konami's X-Men beat em up. You pick one of four guys, each of whom has been granted the ability to transform into a different werebeast by the Earth goddess, and you walk across various fantasy landscapes beating up monsters until they explode into glowing goo. Each playable character has their own beast form, as opposed to each stage having a beast form ala Altered Beast, and they mostly just make you bigger, stranger, faster, and a slightly expanded movelist. Interestingly, a lot of the enemies you face are also werebeasts: lizardmen, elephantmen, hedgehogmen, and so on.
The X-Men similarities are a little more vague and difficult to describe than the obvious conceptual similarities to Altered Beast. Basically, it just really feels like the X-Men game, but with a bit more polish, and a bit more balance. It's especially evident in the boss fights: I'm sure a lot of you remember the fight against The Blob in X-Men, where the player characters can basically just pummel his to death in a few seconds? The bossfights in this, in the early part of the game, at least, are a lot like that. Still manages to be satisfying, though, the way you can beat your foes, throw them around, and even continue beating them while they're lying on the ground (especially when you play as Ban, the martial artist Minotaur, who literally dances on his enemies' prone bodies with his hooves!), Transformation occurs through collecting a goddess statue, and there's no time limit to it: you stay transformed until it's beaten out of you. Collect another goddess statue while already transformed, and you'll do a fullscreen dashing attack, a lot like Nightcrawler's super in X-Men.
The game's presentation is excellent all round. You can see in the screnshots how colourful it is, how big the sprites are, and how interesting the world and the monsters in it are, but the soundtrack is also high quality. Feeling in some parts like the music you'd hear in the background of a really great fantasy cartoon, and in others the same kind of bombastic chiptune metal heard in the likes of Thunderforce IV on the Mega Drive. There was, according to legend, a soundtrack CD was released under the title Konami Amusement Sounds '93: Autumn Edition, but I can't find a single picture of it, a copy of it for sale, or any reference to it existing other than ones apparently copied from Wikipedia (which I think was itself copied from the old MAME history.dat). I'm sure it does exist, somewhere, but it must have been printed in very small quantities.
Metamorphic Force is a game I definitely recommend playing. If you do, though, the old rule of Konami beat em ups does still apply: play the Japanese version of the ROM and you'll have a much better time. It's never had any kind of home port, but I'm hoping that Hamster Corp. put it out as part of the Arcade Archive series at some point. They've released other nineties Konami games, so it could happen, maybe! If it ever does, it'll be a day one purchase for me.
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