Tuesday 5 January 2021

Super Chinese Fighter (SNES)


 If that title seems a little odd, don't worry: this is a fighitng game spin off from the Super Chinese series, which i think normally alternates between action games and RPGs. Or maybe action RPGs. I haven't actually played any of them. An extra bit of trivia is that characters from this series also appear as guest characters in the last couple of Hiryuu no Ken games (a series I once said I'd go back to someday, and maybe someday I will).

 


Anyway, like another game I recently covered, Ninku 2, Super Chinese Fighter places more of an emphasis on its single-player story mode than on its two player versus mode that most of its post-Street Fighter II peers focussed on. Of course, the big difference between this game and Ninku 2 is that Ninku 2 was on a low-powered handheld upon which multiplayer was expensive and inconveient, while Super Chinese Fighter was on a system where access to multiplayer was practically the default, with even some turn-based RPGs having some kind of multiplayer mode. (I am rememebering that right, right? A couple of the SNES Final Fantasies had a weird mode where you could let extra players take control of a character each during battles, didn't they?)

 


But anyway, what that means is that the developers specifically wanted to make this kind of single player fighting story game, and amazingly, the publishers allowed them to do so, even though it was a bit of an anachronism in the post-SF2 world. Rather than taking inspiration from other videogames, Super Chinese Fighter seems to take its inspiration more from TV anime, especially the original pre-Z Dragonball, and the imitators that followed in its wake. It takes place in a whimsical sci-fi martial arts world, with planets named after various Asian foodstuffs. Sounds familiar, right?

 


The plot is also pretty standard fare, that sees you travelling to those foodstuff-named planets in search of a bunch of missing martial arts scrolls, before going off to the final boss' base to fight his henchmen and then the boss himself. It's all pretty light-hearted, and the characters are all somewhat jovial goofs,  so again, if you've seen a lot of late 80s/early 90s kiddy adventure anime, it'll all feel very familiar. The only problem with all this is that the plot is told in the form of many, slow-scrolling,non-skippable dialogue boxes. A playthrough of single-player mode will take you about two hours at most, and it feels like at least half of this time is taken up by the dialogue scenes.

 


So anyway, the fighting. It's okay, but not great. Of the four face buttons on the SNES controller, you have strong and weak attacks, a button to hold so you can increase your power level, and a button for using the one-use item you equipped pre-battle, which could be a trap you place in the arena, health restoration, a bomb that explodes in a few seconds, and so on. There's special moves that are done in the manner you might expect, using d-pad commands and the attack button, though one thing I don't like is that in the single-player mode, you unlock more moves as you win fights and find the aforementioned scrolls. But that's something I hate in action games generally, as I'm sure long-time readers have probably noticed. It does kind of make up for this by giving you a cheat to input on the title screen that unlocks every character with their full movesets in the other modes, but that still feels like a solution to a problem that didn't really need to be there.

 


It's hard to summarise Super Chinese Fighter. It's a game that's not particularly good or bad, and it doesn't really have any great mechanical hook to make it an interesting curiosity, either. I guess the one thing I can say is that if you have a bit of nostalgia for the era and genre of anime to which it pays so much homage, then it's a game you might want to seek out. After this game, the series mostly seems to have petered out: there were no more entries into the main series, but there were two more fighting spin-offs, on the Game Boy an Game Boy Color, which sound interesting, just by being pre-2000 handheld fighting games.

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