I've really been enjoying the current rennaissance that the Mega Drive is going through. The past few years have seen new games getting released for the thirty-seven-year-old console, with even industry veterans like Yuzo Koshiro being involved in new games, the officially-sanctioned port of the original Darius released on the Mega Drive Mini, and even indie games like Xiaomei and the Flame Dragon Fist Master getting full cartridge releases with boxes and manuals (meaning that this indie game on an ancient console comes as a more complete package than almost all games on modern systems).
It's unfortunate, then, that Kunio no Nekketsu School Fighters is a fangame, made purely out of love for fighting games and for the Kunio-kun series in particular (and the love for both those things is very evident). Unfortunate because it's one of the best fighting games on the Mega Drive, and almost definitely the most fully-featured. It's got all kinds of stuff, that was uncommon, if not unheard of in the time when fighting games were being commercially released on Mega Drive: there's alpha counters, forwards and backwards dashing, dodge rolls, super moves, taunting, and so on.
It looks great, too, with all the characters being really well animated, stages that show the passage of time between stages, and lots of cool little stylistic flairs like little manga sound effects appearing when attacks land, and so on. There's even unique pre-fight interactions for certain pairs of characters! All of this would be pointless if it weren't fun to play, which luckily isn't a problem. The fights are fast, the controls work perfectly, the characters all feel different to play, it never feels unbalanced or unfair. Really, the only negative I can think of to say about how it plays is that while everything it does is incredibly well executed, none of it is particularly original. It might have had more of its own identity if it had introduced at least one new or unusual mechanic.
Even that criticism is taking into account the fact that the game came out in 2025, and that we can all play hundreds of fighting games across many different host systems. Specifically as a Mega Drive fighting game, it definitely stands out from the crowd by having all of those aforementioned features coupled with the flawless execution, and if it had been released thirty years earlier, it would have absolutely blown minds. Obviously, it couldn't have come out thirty years ago, though, for many reasons related to both technological proliferation and socio-economic factors. I'm not certain on this, but I don't think there would have been many avenues for an independent developer in Brazil to make a commercial-quality fighting game for the Mega Drive in 1995, let alone for that game to be released to the world.
Which is why it's such a shame that this is a fangame! I'd love to be able to buy a real copy to play on my real (well, Chinese clone) Mega Drive, and which would make some money for the devs. Hopefully, they'll make more Mega Drive games in the future, and those ones belong solely to them, to sell as they will. Obviously, I very much recommend this game, especially since it's free/pay-what-you-want. I've enjoyed it a great deal, and I look forward to whatever the devs bring out in the future.
