Hokuto no Ken - Shin Seikimatsu Kyuuseishu Densetsu (Mega Drive)

 This game recently got a translation patch, which is pretty good timing, as I've recently started reading the post-timeskip part of Fist of the North Star (via the classy hardcovers Viz are currently putting out), and the game provides a surprisingly close adaptation of that storyline. Of course, it wasn't always thus: back in 1989, SEGA's western branches saw fit to "localise" the game into Last Battle, removing all the gore, and giving the characters names that would be more relatable to western kids, such as Aarzak. A wise move: I was born in 1986 and there were three Aarzaks in my class at primary school. (But seriously, the Fist of the North Star TV series was already popular in mainland Europe, and Viz had recently started translating the manga for the US market, so this was, as usual, a terrible decision.)

 

I was also a terrible decision for a reason besides marketing synergy, though: the unfortunate truth is that this is a game that heavily favours style over substance, and without the gore and the tie-in, it doesn't really have much left. It's mostly a pretty basic single plane beat em up, with most stages seeing Ken walk from one end of a location to the other, punching guys so hard that their heads explode. There is a power meter that fills up a little bit for every exploded head, and once it's full, Ken's jacket shreds to bits, and all his attacks become significantly more powerful. Without the power-up, boss fights are a tense battle of attrition, where you have to learn your foe's attack pattern and evade it. With the power-up, you'll kill them in a few hits, which is a kind of satisfaction in itself, to be honest. The power-up lasts until you finish the current chapter, of which I think there are four, which the entire game being about an hour long if you know what you're doing.

 

There's other kinds of stages, too, though! There's boss fights, as already mentioned. These will be against prominent foes Ken fights in the manga, like giant Hulk Hogan, the weird little cigar troll, and golden Dolph Lundgren. When you kill a boss, they'll have a special little death animation, and some of them have to be killed with a normal standing punch. There's also what I think of as the "maze" stages. These take place inside buildings with very few enemies, but lots of things being fired at you from offscreen, like arrows, axes, and boulders. You've got to navigate around these big buildings, falling through holes in the floor and climbing through holes in the ceiling until you find whoever you're supposed to meet in there. They're a lot more time consuming than the other stages, and a lot less exciting. All of the stages are placed on a big map, and to get through each chapter, you've got to go from location to location, but the order you're expected to the stages in isn't always obvious. You'll pick it up after a few plays, but like the maze stages, this feels like another way of padding out the scant runtime.

 

I think I've already made it clear how good this game is, but in summary: not very. It's a mediocre game slightly elevated with some amusing gore and the novelty of seeing a story you already know in a simplified videogame form. If that appeals to you, give it a try, but otherwise don't bother. And double-don't-bother with the western version Last Battle, since as mentioned, it doesn't even have the good stuff in it.