Fatal Fury (Mega Drive)

 

I recently got copies of the Mega Drive ports of Fatal Fury and Street Fighter II on the same day, and playing them back to back in this manner really got me to wondering why Fatal Fury wasn't a bigger hit on the system, if only as a poor man's SFII. And I mean that in a literal way, and in no way a disparaging one. At the time, Capcom's fighter was the most expensive game on both the SNES and the Mega Drive, and the MD port had the added cost of needing to also buy a six button controller.

 

Fatal Fury, by contrast, was a normally-priced game, and the Mega Drive port was designed to only need three buttons (since it came out before the SFII port, and the six button pad that launched alongside it). Furthermore, on a superficial level, Fatal Fury, on the Mega Drive, at least, should have been more attractive to the casual observer. The sprites are much bigger, and the game is a lot more colourful in general. There's a little scene of the game's villain Geese Howard reacting to every victory you achieve in single player mode, and the characters and world feel a lot more real and fleshed out than the cartoony national stereotypes of Street Fighter II.

 

Of course, a lot of this stuff was by design: most of you probably know this, but the original Fatal Fury is kind of an alternate sequel to the first Street Fighter. According to legend, Street Fighter's lead designer (Takashi Nishiyama) was dissatisfied with various decisions made in the development of Street Fighter II, and wanted to make a fighting game that expanded on the original's "protagonist fighting different enemies" concept, rather than SFII's "ensemble cast fighting each other" concept. An emphasis on storytelling to egg a single player on towards seeing the ending, rather than on egging on multiple players to challenge each other, I guess. It seems kind of similar to how Nishiyama's first game for Capcom, Tatakai no Banka, expanded on concepts from his last game for Irem, Spartan X.

 

Playing Fatal Fury now, I think I would have taken to it as a kid in a way I didn't take to Street Fighter II (I wouldn't get into the Street Fighter series in general until a few years later when I became obsessed with the Playstation ports of Alpha 3 and Pocket Fighter). I loved beat em ups, and its emphasis on storytelling, characters, and creating a believable world makes FF feel like it's cut from the same cloth as the Streets of Rage series. Plus the simpler controls of having a button each assigned to punch, kick, and throw would have appealed to me, too. I guess unfortunately, it just didn't stand a chance of making itself known when put up against the massive cultural phenomenon of Street Fighter II and the lowbrow horror camp of Mortal Kombat.