Bullfight - Ring no Haja (PC Engine)

 

 Or maybe it's Ring no Hasha, depending on who you ask. Either way, it's a boxing game, of the lesser-spotted side-view variety (as opposed to the more common behind the shoulder/first person view popularised by Punch Out). But it's not just a boxing game, as it attempts to spice things up by also being a single plane beat em up!Unfortunately, neither game is very good. The boxing is actually okay, for the first fight, then the second fight pits you against an opponent with the fists of god, requiring you to get in at least three or four times as many hits in as they do to get them down. You pick one of eight boxers, then one of eight managers (though it seems some managers won't work with certain boxers?), then go into fighting your way up the ranks.

 

Whoever you pick, you block with one button and puch with the other. Pressing a direction with the punch button gives access to a few different kinds of punch, and the first two times you get knocked down, you hammer the punch button as fast as you can to get back up. The third time you're knocked down, you'll lose no mater what. (The same applies to your opponent, too.)

 

Then there's the beat em up mode. You slowly walk across a short stage, beating people up (the most effective way to do so is to crouch and keep kicking them, since none of them can crouch), and sometimes jumping for the bags of gold that float by overhead. There's also occasionally mysterious flying knives that atack from offscreen that are nigh-impossible to avoid, so watch out for that. The money from the floating bags, and from defeating enemies is used in the shop to buy various things: a boxing license that lets you fight the stage's boss, a first aid box that acts as a continue, and various training items that sometimes increase your stats a little, and sometimes do nothing.

 

Get to the end of the stage without the boxing license and you're sent back to the start. If you have the boxing license, you go on to fight that stage's boss, which happens in the form of an actual boxing match as seen in the game's main mode. Also like the main mode, the second boss' stamina stat is so high that your punches have almost no effect on him, and after many attempts, I was never able to knock him down more than once. I did try and grind to get stronger, by repeating the second stage over and over to buy training items, but as I mentioned, they only sometimes increase your stats, and I just didn't have the patience to keep doing it.

 

So, Bullfight is mechanically and conceptually an okay boxing game, but the way those ideas are implemented are not so great. And the beat em up mode doesn't feel good to play at all, with its stiff movement, weak-feeling attacks, and flying knives. Also, that thing where the boxing match is already booked, but to participate in it, the boxer has to fight his way through the mean streets and buy a single-use boxing license with his own money from some seedy-looking shop in a bad neighoburhood. This used to be one of the cheapest PC Engine games you could get, but that was a few years ago now, and there aren't really any cheap PC Engine games anymore. If you could still pick it up for less than £5, it might have been worth a look as a weird curiosity, but now that it typically goes for more than ten, I really wouldn't bother.