Raging Fighter (Game Boy)

 I was going to review a different Game Boy fighting game this week, Fist of the North Star: Ten Big Brawls for the King of the Universe, but I thought covering three anime tie-ins in a row might have been a bit much. Luckily, Raging Fighter (Released in Japan as Outburst) actually provides an interesting contrast to that game in a few ways, and the two can serve as examples of how and how not to make a good fighting game on the Game Boy. Well, almost. Fist of the North Star isn't that great. But it is better than Raging Fighter, and it's specifically a better Game Boy game than Raging Fighter.

 

I won't talk about the other game too much, since I probably will give it its own post some day, but the big, most noticable difference between the two is found in the character sprites: FotNS has small character sprites, but they're full of character and detail, all very distinct from each other, and their animations are simple but quick. By contrast, Raging Fighter might have been the first to fall into the trap that Game Boy ports of Street Fighter II and the Mortal Kombat games would also fall into: its character sprites are large and detailed, and they look great in still screenshots, but their animations are stiff and they slowly flicker their way around the screen in a way that varely feels better than a cheap, low quality LCD game.

 

There are some good things about Raging Fighter, of course. Like I said and like you can see, it does look pretty good in screenshots, with its big sprites and detailed backgrounds. Also, and this might seem like damning with faint praise, but it has special moves and health bars that work like you'd expect them to. You'd be surprised at how some developers in the early post-SFII years would get one or both of those wrong. Finally, it might have secretly invented a staple feature of fighting games, a year before it's popularly-acknowledged advent.

 

There's two single player modes on offer, the first being tournament, which sees you pick a character and gradually work your way up a very MK-esque tower containing every other character in the game, topped off with a fight against yourself. The other mode is story, which sees you playing as the three good guy characters (or the Five Major Star Generals, as the end credits collectively calls them), and you fight in an elmination team battle against the three bad guy characters (or the Four Shadow Star Generals), with character health carrying over between rounds. As far as I know, this kind of match is generally considered to have first appeared in King of Fighters 94, which came out a year and a half after Raging Fighter!

 

Going back to the topic of fighting games on Game Boy, and how to do them, it would coincidentally be the port of King of Fighters 95 that provided the blueprint for it a couple of years later, showing that if developers did their best to get the feel of the game down, even if it means heavily simplifying the graphics, that it was possible to get fun fighting games running on even this hardware that was so vastly overpowered by all of its contemporaries. I don't recommend playing Raging Fighter, even taking into account its historical significance. If you really want a good figting game on the original monochrome Game Boy, Takara published a ton of them later in the system's life, and a lot of them can be found on actual cartridges for a pittance. So get those instead.