The Amazing Spider-Man: Web of Fire (32X)

 

 This was the final official 32X release, and coming out in 1996, I think there are two assumptions that can be safely made about it. The first is that it coming out was something of an adherence to the lost cause fallacy: possibly the publisher specifically had a license to make Marvel games only for the 32X, and they were going to do it whether it made sense or not. The second assumption is that it probably sold incredibly poorly, which is backed up by its modern day rarity and insane resale value.

 

Is it good, though? Not really. It's not terrible, either, though. Like most Spider-Man games of the time, it's a 2D platformer, you climb and swing acorss the stages, and the boss fights are against existing Marvel villains. Unlike some similar Spidey games, it does have a few stages that are designed in such a way as to allow you to freely web-swing over large swathes of the stage at your leisure. In fact, these stages are so long, that it'd probably take an absurdly long time to get across them on foot. Unfortunately, there's also a few stages that fall into the usual Spidey-traps, like being a long corridor with a surprisingly low ceiling, or being a bunch of enclosed boxes with small entrances and exits.

 

The plot concerns a plot by Hydra, who have set up a big laser net over New York (the eponymous Web of Fire), and are holding the city to ransom, plus they've kidnapped Daredevil and put him in a birdcage for some reason. After you rescue Daredevil, you can summon him to throw sticks at your enemies! So each stage ends with you fighting a villain in Hydra's employ, and destroying a laser generator, until you get to the Hydra airship/submarine/base stages. The bosses are probably the most interesting part of the game, to be honest, as the roster's made up of some absurdly little-known jobbers. People like The Eel, Thermite, Tangle, and others. 

 

Web of Fire is a game you mgiht want to look into out of curiosity: its rarity, status as the final 32X game, and weird villain roster are all points of interest (and what drew me into playing it). But if none of those things interest you, there's nothing else in the game that will, either. I played it way past the point of enjoyment to get screenshots, but there's no reason for anyone else to do that. And definitely no reason for anyone to pay £500+ for a real copy!

Fearless Pinocchio (Arcade)

 It had been a while since I last updated MAME, but a couple of months ago, Fearless Pinocchio caught my eye, and got me to finally undertake that minor chore. A previously unknown 2D fighting game by IGS with cute, stylised graphics suddenly appearing on the landscape would naturally get my attention. It's kind of a bittersweet game to learn of, though, as it's not actually a fighting game, but a machine for dispensing the tickets that are so important to all the depressing seaside arcades that have replaced fun games with low-quality prizes.

 

Still, it's at least pretending to be a fighting game, and there are some things worthy of mention. It's single player-only, and there's only one playable character, the eponymous Pinocchio. He's on a quest to rescue Geppeto, who has been kidnapped by Captain Hook, for some reason. Hook's the last boss, and to get to him, you've first got to fight two of his henchbeings, randomly selected from a pool of five. There's a genie, a witch, a grim reaper, the Queen of Hearts' card army, and the Big Bad Wolf. All the characters are well-drawn and animated, and full of personality.

 

The stages are also full of cool little details, even if there's only four of them shard amongst the six opponents. The woods have a little mushroom/candy house where Little Red Riding Hood and the three little pigs apparently live together, the graveyard has the witch's hut (I guess she and Death are neighbours?), plus a beanstalk with a depressed-looking giant watching the fight. Wonderland's the weakest stage, looking a lot like it's cobbled together from clipart, and Hook's ship has his pirate underlings, and far in the back, a Peter Pan who looks dangerously close to Disney's version standing around and doing nothing to help.

 

You fight using a joystick and one attack button, and while you do have specials and supers, they just seem to be activated by holding a direction and pressing the button a lot. I do really like the super where Pinocchio does the samurai movie thing where he dashes past his opponent while drawing a weapon, with the opponent taking damage after a second or two's delay, but his weapon is a big wooden mallet rather than a sword. The fights have only one round, and no matter what the situation is, if time runes out, you lose. I guess, true to its nature as "not a proper game", it just exists to have the shortest possible time between coin inputs.

 

It's really a shame there's no "legitimate" version of this game. A lot of work clearly went into designing and animated the characters, and six playable characters plus a boss wouldn't be too bad for a first entry in a series, especially if they added a background for each one, and especially if the characters looked as good as they do in the game that exists. I guess the best we can hope for is that someone rips all the sprites and puts something together in MUGEN or something. As always with this kind of shady gambling game, I think it's worth playing a few credits in MAME just to see it, though I don't think it's worth putting any money in if you encounter it in the wild. Or maybe it is? I don't know if this is some kind of emulation error or something, but every time I played, no matter how well or how poorly I did, I always got a screen telling me I'd won ten tickets. If a real machine is the same, it might be a cheap/quick way to grind for that cheap plastic tat upon which you've got your eye.

Magicus (PC)

 I bought this game a few years ago, because the PC version also comes with a download of the Android version, and at the time, my phone was still just about capable of playing games, and I was interrested to see what stuff of interest might exist in the world of pre-paid phone games (a subject I'll get back to later). It's an RPG in which the battles take the form of match-three puzzles, but there's surprisingly a lot more to it than that.

 

When you enter a battle, the enemies will be at the top half of the screen, and the bottom half wil be filled with gems. Clicking any gem makes it disappear and also deals a little damage to the enemies. Getting three or more in a row makes all of the lined up gems disappear and deals more damage. After playing a while, you'll also get spells, which have various effects like damaging the enemy, healing you, or changing what's happening in your little gempit. Each spell has an associated colour, and to charge a use of the spell, you have to click or line up a certain number of gems in that colour. Around the same time as you get spells, you'll also get special gems. These are different-looking gems, each only appearing as a certain colour, and they all have special spell-like effects when cleared as part of a line.

 

Aside from battling, the main gimmick of the game is its one-dimensional dungeon design. You traverse the overworldby just clicking the name of a location you want to go to, but in dungeings, you can go backwards and forwards. Every step you take has a chance of causing a random encounter. This could be a battle, a trap, a travelling merchant, a fishing hole, or one of a bunch of other things. So, the main point of difficulty is resource and stat management. And there are a lot of both of these things. You've got items, experience points, coins, leaves, fish, lottery tickets and more. This might sound overwhelming, but they're all introduced very gradually so you aren't overwhelmed.

 

Some of you might also be thinking that this sounds a lot like a free-to-play game with dark patterns and so on, and I do agree: while playing it, I was heavily reminded of the time I've spent in the past playing Immortal Taoists. There is, however, one important difference that I've already mentioned: this is a game that you buy, and which contains no microtransactions. The problem with free-to-play games that are structured like that isn't just the cost of the microtransactions themselves, but the fact that the developers are financially incentivised to design the games in such a way as to make the microtransactions more attractive: make it possible, but tedious to make progress, give players daily login bonuses so they're hooked on comig back to the game, and so on. It's known as "Dark Patterns" in game design.

 

Using Immortal Taoists as the example, because it's the game of this type with which I'm the most familiar, the setting draws new players in, and the carrot of endless character progression is what keeps them coming back and either watching ads or paying money. It is endless, too. The "Live Service" nature of the games means they can always raise the grapes every time player get close to grabbing them (the player is Tantalus in this analogy, and the game developer is Tartarus). Magicus offers all the positive stuff those free-to-play games, but without the negatives: dying in a dungeon is a very minor setback, you're only shown new equipment when you're at least a significant part of the way to being able to obtain it, and above all: you're given a singular long-term goal at the start of the game (obtain seven magic orbs to save the land from monsters), that has a clear and definite endpoint. I kind of wish there were more games like this! There are interesting elements in free-to-play games, but they're poisoned by the psychologically harmful structure of those games.

 

There's other positive things I can mention about the game, too: its cute low polygon count graphics, your lovable companions and the slowburn bond that grows between them, the fact that though it's a first person game where your character is never shown, it's still canonical that your character is a woman, reflected in the equipment you can obtain and more interestingly (though only occasionally), in the attitudes various characters have in addressing you. Anyway, I definitely recommend Magicus, it's a unique, interesting, charming, and fun little game, and you can get it from DLSite for an absolute pittance.

Banshee (Amiga)

 It's a shooting game, and it's on the Amiga, so I'm sure many of you can predict that this won't be a positive review. I do have some nice things to say about Banshee, though, so look forward to that, at least. I'll start the slating here by stating that this game was only released on the 32-bit Amiga models, the 1200 and CD32. Why, though? There doesn't seem to be anything technologically strenuous going on here, and the 16-bit Mega Drive and SNES, and even the 8-bit PC Engine all have shooting games that are faster and more frantic.

 

That's not to say that Banshee is a bad-looking game, though. In fact, all of its positive qualities are in the visual department. But they're also all the result of some really great pixel artistry, not any special effects or graphical trickery. The game takes place in an exagerrated early twentieth century kind of setting, and all of the backgrounds and sprites are full of detail and life. One thing worthy of highlighting is the way that soldiers die. You're mostly fighting vehicles of varius kinds, but there are tiny little infantrymen running aorund and shooting at you, too. Sometimes when you shoot them, they'll fall over into a pool of their own blood, sometimes they'll crumble into a pile of bones. Sometimes, if you're quick enough on the draw to blow up the transport bringing them to the battle field, they'll flee from the wreckage, with their clothes ablaze.

 

For reasons I'll get into later, I only managed to get as far as the second stage, but it's set in the capital city of the enemy nation, and it's even more full of details. You see women pushing prams, soldiers on roofs who fall to their doom when you shoot them, or riding round the streets on motorbikes, with a gunner in a sidecar shooting at you. I could keep going on about all the cool little things I saw in the relatively small portion of the game I played, but I guess I have to get onto the reasons why all of these things represent a tragic waste of effort and talent.

 

The first problem you'll encounter is that your weapons feel incredibly weedy. Power-ups are rare, and seemingly ganded out at random, meaning a lot of the time, you'll only get useless junk (you can shoot the items to change them into other items, but each one only has between one and three possibilities, and a lot of the time, none of them will make you any more powerful. Another thing that seems to be random is how much of your power you get to keep upon death. Sometimes you'll stay at the same power level, sometimes it'll be slightly diminished, and sometimes it's straight back to the default peashooter. The second problem is one that dawns on you after you kill your first boss: the stages are insanely long. That first boss you kill, if it ended the first stage, would have represented the end of a stage with a perfectly fine and normal length. It actually represents you having gotten a third of the way through the stage, with two more boss fights to (eventually) reach and survive.

 

Another weird thing is that there's no music in the game! Not even in the CD version! I feel like shooting games as a genre are known for having great soundtracks, so one that doesn't have one at all seems very strange, and it feels a little cheap, too, to be honest. It really feels like the pixel artists for this game were let down by everyone else working on it. Looking at Lemon Amiga, this was very well received by magazines at the time, with no review scores lower than 80%. Now, the Amiga specialist magazines I can kind of see, they were clinging to a zombie system and some of the writers might not have played any console or arcade shooting games. But even Gamesmaster, a multi-format magazine, gave it a glowing review and a score of 83%! Doing their readers a disservice, all of them. I won't, though: don't play this game, it's not fun.

Mobile Fighter G Gundam (SNES)

 Round about the turn of the century, when access to SNES emulation became more widely available, there were a few previously Japan-only games to which a lot of people (especially young teenagers) flocked, due to their being tie-ins with anime that were becoming popular in English-speaking countries at about the same time, thanks to the multi-year delay that that process had back then. Sailor Moon: Another Story, Dragonball Z: Hyper Dimension, and most relevant to this review, New Mobile Report Gundam Wing: Endless Duel were three such games.

 

Sailor Moon was an okay RPG, and Hyper Dimension had the distinction of being better than the only other Dragonball game me and my friends had played at that point, the awful Dragonball GT: Final Bout on Playstation, but Endless Duel was a legitimately excellent game. Like, probably the best fighting game on the SNES, and definitely the best-looking SNES fighter. G Gundam had not yet had any kind of release in the UK yet, and I think wasn't very well-known in the US either, so no-one really paid its game any mind. It's also a fighting game, though, and in retrospect, it should have been excellent: the show was, after all, essentially Street Fighter II but with giant robots.

 

It won't be much of a surprise to careful readers of the preceding paragraph, but G Gundam just doesn't match up to the following year's game in any way. The easiest way to put it is that it feels like Endless Duel was developed to be as good a game as possible, and it also happens to be a licensed game, while G Gundam fits right alongside a lot of the other bog standard SNES anime tie-ins. It even has the presentational quirks a lot of similar SNES games have, like loud, low quality voice clips taken from the show, background screens where the show's logo scrolls by diagonally, and so on.

 

I will say, though, that it is a perfectly okay fighting game. Every character plays differently, they all have special moves with proper input commands, and there's also a desperation move for each of them. There's even a few features you wouldn't necessarily expect from a 1994 fighting game: seperate story and arcade modes, and a team battle mode, for example. Plus: the stages have different colour palettes showing the progression of time from round to round! SNK had introduced that feature a few years prior in Fatal Fury, but it was still very rare at the time.

 

I actually do really like the way the game looks, too. It's a shame that it's doomed to be compared to the vastly superior Endless Duel, because just as it plays perfectly fine, G Gundam also looks fairly decent, too. The sprites aren't very big, but they are nice to look at, and detailed in a way that reminds of a particularly great-looking Game Gear game. Which does sound like damning with faint praise, I admit. The aforementioned backgrounds are also very well-drawn, all depicted places in which fights took place in the actual show, too.

 

I've spent most of this review comparing G Gundam to other games, which might not seem fair, but I'll be honest here: it is a very standard, okay, average fighting game. If it weren't for the license, it would have been even more forgotten than it actually is, and if it weren't for the massive shadow cast by the other Gundam SNES fighting game, there'd be very little to say about it. Play it if you're a fan of the show and/or you're curious about it, but don't expect to unearth a lost classic or anything.

Shadow Brain (NES)

 I think it's a pretty prevalent stereotype of 8-bit console RPGs that they're ugly, difficult, and just generally hostile to the player. It's not a completely unfounded stereotype, and I know there are people reading this who play those games specifically looking for those qualities. I'm not one of those players, but I do occasionally dip my toes into the genre, to seek out diamonds in the rough, and because I think the developers of games like these often came from the world of indie development on microcomputers, and there's a similar kind of creator-led energy to a lot of them to that seen in OAVs of the same era.

 

I found Shadow Brain in one such toe-dipping session, and I instantly took a liking to the way it bucks the trends in the genre at that time, both thematically and mechanically.  Thematically, it immediately stands out: it takes place in some kind of futuristic cyberpunk dystopia. There are only towns, no dungeons, but the streets of the towns are all plagued by roving criminals, rogue cyborgs, and mutated animals. The grimy look of both enemy and NPC characters juxtaposed with the incredibly sterile look of the faux-3D blobber maps really gives off the impression that this is a world that's still being maintained in terms of things being kept working, but also a world in which the actual inhabitants have been abandoned and left to fend for themselves. The closest thing I encountered to any kind of law enforcement are the gates between towns that require security ID to get through.

 

Mechanically, the first thing that proved promising is that while you're a solo adventurer who never gets any party members, you aren't punished harshly for dying. You're simply whisked away to the nearest ressurectionist, who provides the service you'd expect him to, and takes half of your current money as payment. Other than that, there's a lot of interesting little quirks. In battle, you have three attack options: punch, sword, and gun, and you can equip weapons to all three. There's no reason not to only buy and use the weapon that has the highest attack, but it's still a sign that the devs had a lot of ideas they wanted to include. Front Mission 3 fans might also be interested to learn that Shadow Brain also includes an in-game internet!

 

In the same way that Front Mission 3's internet reflected the real internet of 1999, featuring simple, charmingly gaudy webpages, Shadow Brain's internet reflects how things were in 1991. You can only access it via terminals that are dotted here and there around the towns, and when you do, there's a "live chat", where your character can converse with a few recurring characters, a BBS, where people post questions and information about what's going on, and an online shop where you can buy and sell things. It's very rudimentary, but it's still a fun little addition, and it really adds to the feels that this is a sci-fi game, and not just a fantasy game with a shiny metal skin. 

 

Another thing that you might be surprised to hear about is that you can go to the arcade and play minigames! In a 1991 Famicom game! There's futuristic Pong and futuristic clay pigeon shooting, and you can play them as much as you like to win money, plus there's a couple of points in the plot where you have to play special "if you die in the game, you die for real" versions to advance the plot. 

 

Anyway, though Shadow Brain is a lot more player-friendly than a lot of RPGs from that time, I'd say it's probably still a bit of an acquired taste, and while dying isn't a problem, there are still moments when it's not really clear what you have to do to progress. Still, I enjoyed the few hours I played of it (I got as far as the fourth town). I also really loved the way the game looks: the enemy and NPC sprites all look amazing, the world itself is really atmospheric, and even the UI elements feels as if they've been designed as a part of the game's world. This is a high quality work, and was clearly made with a lot of love. There's an English translation patch out there, and if this review has at all piqued your interest, you should definitely give it a try.

Sylphia (PC Engine)

 With this being a vertical shooter by Compile, you might be tempted to think that it's just a fantasy-skinned Aleste game (Though to be honest, that wouldn't really be a negative). But while there's some slight similarities to the Aleste series (there's a few different weapons to try out, and you gradually power up your shots by collecting multiple little P items), it's got enough stuff of its own to be considered its own unique entity.

 

It starts with a really nice pixel anmation intro, showing a female soldier in anceient greek times protecting some civilians from an invading demon army until she's mortally wounded. With her last breath, she crawls into a temple, where she's rewarded for her bravery by a glowing orb that turns her into a battle fairy, and sends her off to destroy the demon hoards. Of course, that fairy is you. After the great-looking intro, the rest of the game doesn't diappoint visually, either: the game itself is full of cool backgrounds, lots of varied monsters that are both well-animated and well-drawn, and the out-of-game presentation is really interesting. Between stages, there's these unique sepia-toned pieces of pixel art that show what the next stage's theme will be, and even the game over screen is cool! It has Sylphia floating above an open, ark of the covenant-style casket, and when you choose not to continue, she descends into it and the lid closes!

 

The game itself, luckily, is also pretty good. There are four different elemental weapons you can pick from (by collecting items, you can't just switch at any time), with wind being the best, fire second, and earth and water being totally useless. As well as the items for changing element, and the aforementioned P items for powering up your shot, another item that appears a lot is something that looks like a little winged CD. Collecting this fills up a meter, and when the meter's full, you get an extra bomb attack. As well as this, the game's pretty generous with the extra lives, giving you one for every seventy thousand points, and if you play well, you'll be getting more than one per stage on average. 

 

It only took me a few tries to get all the way to the final boss! The problem is, though, that after getting a game over, it's a little demoralising to try again straight away. The reason is one you might have predicted if you're familiar with Compile's other PC Engine shooting games: Sylphia is really long, like well over an hour. It flies by while you're playing, but after playing that long and dting, it's hard to get up the energy to start again right away. Still, if you want an easy 1CC, I can't imagine this taking most people more than a week at a rate of one or two attempts a day.

 

Something I'd also like to highlight is the excellent theming, with regard to the stages and enemies. There are no generic enemies in this game, or at least none that are generic enough to appear in every stage. This is because every stage has a theme, and all the enemies fit that theme and are unique to that stage. For example, the second stage has you going through an area full of statues of various stages, and all the enemies are mechanically-animated statues of various kinds: flying cherub heads, fire-breathing colossi, and more. An especially cool little touch in this stage is that when you beat the mid-boss, you see a tiny little pilot escape into the cave its guarding, and at the back of that cave, you see the pilot climb aboard the stage boss: a gigantic mechanical statue, only the top half of which is visible.

 

Every stage has cool moments like that in it to keep you engaged, too. The third stage takes place over a sea, with both archer-manned ships and marine monsters trying to kill you, and it's incredibly satisfying to sweep across the screen with your bomb attack (which takes the form of a big laser), destroying a whole fleet of ships, seeing them all break in half and sink. Then in the second half of the stage you go under the water, and Sylphia's flying animation is replaces with a swimming one! One strange point that's worth mentioning when it comes to the presentation is the music. Specifically, the music used for the boss fights at the end of the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages. In this 1993 greek mythology-themed shooting game, you're suffenly fighting huge monsters to the sound of some Jock Jams dance track, complete with that little "woo!" sample. Bizarre!

 

I feel like I haven't spoken much about the game's actual mechanics, but at the same time, I think that like a lot of pre-1994 shooting games, it's mostly pretty simple. Furthermore, I have said a lot about how the game presents itself, and I think it does that so well, and it's such a large part of this game's appeal that it's the right decision to have taken. Anyway, Sylphia is a game that's has enough concessions for beginners to the genre, while being satisfying enough for existing fans, plus there's always lots of cool details and things to see. I definitely recommend playing it if you haven't already. With the Aleste series getting a small revival in recent times, I hope someone at some point decides to bring back Compile's other shooters (including this one) too, as it'd be nice to see them reach a wide audience, and I definitely don't recommend or even condone anyone paying the ludicrous prices legitimate copies of this game fetch.

Blades of Vengeance (Mega Drive)

 I wrote a few years ago about Sword of Sodan, a western-developed barbarian game that's infamous as being one of the worst on the Mega Drive. Blades of Vengeance is also a western-developed Barbarian game, but it's thankfully a lot better, and in pretty much every way! Though to be fair, it was also made specifically for the Mega Drive, and also came out a few years after Sword of Sodan.

 

You play as one of three characters, Huntress, Warrior, and Sorcerer. Huntress and Warrior are very eighties fantasy-looking people with perfectly chiselled bodies and long, luxurious hair. Sorcerer is a balding, dirty-looking elderly man with a beard. He gets the last laugh, though, as later in the game, you can buy an "armour" item that completely upgrades your character, giving them a new look and weapon. Warrior gets the worst of this, replacing his cool axe with an awkward-looking flail. Huntress covers herself up a bit and gets an incredibly useful crossbow in place of her sword. Sorcerer gets a voluminous white robe worn over a short red dress and fishnet stockings, plus a more powerful staff for his spells. 

 

The game starts out taking place in hellish mountain/volcano landscapes, later changing tack towards labyrinthine castles and dungeons. It also feels like this change in location marks a change in the design style of the stages, too: the wilderness stages are mostly straightforward platform stages with a few secret rooms hidden around, while the later "man-made" stages focus more on switches, keys, doors, and ladders, looking and feeling a lot more like the Bitmap Bros. game Gods. As well as the stage design, something else worth mentioning is the inventory system. The only items you'll get a lot of use from are the healing potion and the keys, but there's another subtle design choice in the inventory that seperates the early game from the late game.

 

Early in the game, enemies and chests will drop a moderate amount of coins for use in the between-stage shops, but as you get later in the game, money becomes a significantly more scarce resource. But there's a rare item you might find here and there (and which is available in the shop, too): the Midas ring. Using this kills all onscreen enemies instantly, and turns them into money. I don't think this change is something a lot of players might notice on their first play, and I think it adds a little extra strategy to the gathering of a resource, so different players will end up with different amounts at the end of each stage, dependent on more than the time they spent finding hidden rooms with more chests in them.

 

There's a lot of other little things to like about the game, too. It all looks great, but one thing the I liked especially is that a lot of the early one-hit enemies are a lot shorter than the player characters. It looks weird at first, but then you realise that they're the exact right height to make it look like Huntress and Warrior's attack animations are smashing their heads in when they get killed! And the fact that all three characters have two complete sets of sprites and animations for when they power up is great, too, and something not seen too often in games from the early nineties.

 

It's a little odd that I've never seen anyone talking about Blades of Vengeance in real life or online (other than a post I vaguely remember seeing on Livejournal around twenty years ago). It's an EA game, and back then, everyone seemed to have at least a few of those distinct tall cartridges with the weird yellow tab on the side. Furthermore, it's actually pretty good, too, and the Mega Drive's library and its high points have surely been combed over enough times to have brought it to light by now. Anyway, it's not an incredible all-time classic or anything, but it is definitely a game that's worth your time if you haven't played it before.

Inuyasha: A Feudal Fairy Tale (Playstation)

 Just like TV Animation X: Unmei no Tatakai, this game (also known as Inuyasha: Sengoku Otogi Kassen) is a fighting game based on an anime with a large female fanbase that was released very late in the Playstation's life. Also like TV Animation X, it takes full advantage of its late release by having really impressive graphics, though this time it's a 2D game. But while that game was built upon an existing series, being essentially the secret third Psychic Force game, this one is totally its own thing, with mixed results.

 

The second thing you'll notice about the game is how great it looks: the character sprites are all really well drawn and animated, and their animations are all full of personality, too. The stages are also really well-drawn, and even more impressively, they all have different lighting. I mention this because the character sprites actually react to the lighting in each stage. And it's not just that they'll be dark in the dark stages or what ever, but there's stages where different parts of the stage have different levels of light coming from different sources, and the sprites are lit appropriately depending on what part of the screen they're in. It's something you don't often see in 2D fighting games, and in 2003, I think the only similar examples would have been the Capcom Vs. SNK games, which were on much more powerful hardware than the Playstation.

 

Another feature you really wouldn't have expected to see in a Playstation fighting game are tag battles! Even Capcom had to make massive sacrifices to get them working in their games, and they were able to work miracles on 32-bit consoles. But of course, Capcom's games were arcade ports with massive sprites, while Inuyasha is a Playstation original, so everything about it was custom-tailored to the hardware. Furthermore, there is a couple of seconds of loading whenever a tag happens. But I do think they did a fairly decent job of hiding these pauses, and you can have any combination of four characters fighting each other on any of the game's stages.

 

It's not all good, though, unfortunately. There are a couple of things I really don't like about this game. I mentioned earlier that the graphics would be the second thing you'll notice about the game. That's because the first thing you'll notice is that you start with only two playable characters! You've got to unlock the rest by playing through story mode, where you travel around a map encountering characters to fight, and mini-games to play. While doing this, you have a quota of jewel shards to collect. You get these by knocking them out of your opponents, and each character has one specific move that knocks shards out of an opponent. Imagine if you bought this game and wanted to play versus mode as soon as you got home! This'd really knock some of your enthusiasm out of you, wouldn't it? 

 

Another disapponting thing is that the special move inputs are very simple. Normal attacks are performed with the circle button, and specials are done by pressing a direction and the square button together. I get why this was done, the target audience of the game was more likely to be fans of the anime, rather than fans of fighting games, and simplified inputs have even been tried a few times in original fighting games in an effort to try and attract new players. The problem is that in my opinion, it never really works well. Move inputs in normal fighting games are designed so that performing moves can be a part of how a character plays, and how it feels to control them. These simplified input games though, lack that kind of satisfying, fluid flow, and they never feel especially good to play.

 

Despite all of that, I think that for fans of the show, I think there is some value to be found in a great-looking game where you can have the characters fight each other, and most importantly: you can play as Sesshomaru, the best character. It's a shame that all the work that went into making it look so good ended up being attached to a game that's so mechanically flawed. I got a Japanese copy of it dirt cheap a few years ago, and prices don't seem to have risen a great deal in the time since, but make sure you don't accidentally uy a copy of the JP-only RPG, also on Playstation.