Knights of Valour: The Seven Spirits (Arcade)

 I don't know what exactly made me try this game, as I've long thought that IGS' beat em ups are mostly very similar: expanding wildly upon the concepts of inventories and levelling up put forth in Capcom's Dungeons and Dragons and King of Dragons games. The main thing that interested me in Knights of Valour 3 was the fact that it used memory cards to save progress in a way that's more common in rhythm or racing arcade games. Still, whatever instinct drew me to Seven Spirits turned out to be a good one.

 

First, I want to talk about the presentation: it uses a combination of 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds, which is something you see more in home games than arcades (the only other arcade examples I can think of off the top of my head are Strider 2 and Dolphin Blue). It's a style that almost always looks great, though, and this is no exception. The characters are all well-drawn and well-animated, and the bosses playable characters all have really cool designs, too. There's something about the character designs and the colour palettes that really feels reminiscent of Chinese martial arts comics, which is something else in this game's favour, since that's an aesthetic well that's not drawn from enough by videogames in my opinion.

 

The game's structure is also worthy of praise. Each character has their own starting stage, and after that, you're usually given a choice of which stage you want to enter next. And it's not a case of choosing the order in which you want to tackle the stages, but rather there are three possible stage twos, three possible stage threes, and so on. So it adds up to this game having a ton of stages, and it's only possible to see them all over the course of several playthroughs.

 

As for how it plays, it doesn't have the RPG-inspired stylings of its stablemates (which might be why it's got a subtitle instead of a sequel number? I dunno), being more of a straightforward beat em up. You've got three buttons: weak and strong combo attacks, and jump. Pressing two adjacent buttons at once activates one of your two super attacks, which are limited by your stock of pearls. You've also got a meter that gradually fills up as you take damage, and once it's full, you can press weak attack and jump together to go into a powered-up mode that lets you use as many supers as you like for a short time.

 

I've really enjoyed the few hours I've spent playing this game, and I look forward to a fair few more of them, as I want to see all the different locales it has, and fight more of the cool bosses. It really is a shame it's never had a release on a home console, especially since it could easily have been hosted on the Dreamcast, a system with a massive hole in its library where beat em ups should have been. Still, you can play it now via emulation, and I recommend that you do so.

Demolish Fist (Arcade)

At some point in the mid-late 1990s, beat em ups as a genre entered something of a drought, from which the genre's never really recovered. While shooting games and 2D platformers have plenty of great representatives from both mainstream and independent developers, new beat em ups are few and far between, and a lot of the time, they're ruined by the kinds of stupid game-killing design choices I've complained about in many, many posts on this blog before: levelling up/skill shops, negative difficulty curves, and a new one I only discovered recently: there's a game available on PS4 and PC called Mother Russia Bleeds, and the lives/continue system is so broken as to make it impossible to get a game over (as far as I could tell), rendering the game completely pointless.

But anyway, that drought. It was still very much in effect in 2003, when Demolish Fist was released, and even among the few beat em ups released about that time, this one stands out by being more traditional. Though it's entirely in 3D and you can move and face in all eight directions, the camera sticks rigidly in one position (not counting cutscenes, obviously), making the game play like a regular, old-fashioned belt scroller. And it does a great job of it, too! You walk along, beat up crowds of bad guys, pick up weapons and power-ups and a good time is had by all.

Of course, every beat em up needs to have a gimmick to make it stand out, even if it has no contemporary competitors, and Demolish Fist actually has a few! Firstly, there's a block button. It's not a massive thing, but it's still something that a lot of beat em ups don't have. Secondly, the game takes an approach to weaponry akin to Two Crude Dudes or Dynamite Deka, having tons of stuff available to pick up and swing and/or throw: cattleprods, baseball bats with nails hammered into the end, swords, electrified gloves, fuel tanks, vending machines, motorcycles, cars and so on. The final, and most unique gimmick is the vertigo system. You get a power bar that fills up from attacking enemies, like in many other games. When it fills up, you can press all three buttons to enter vertigo mode, during which you're not only invincible, but you can also attack as fast as you're able to hammer the attack button. This lasts for ten seconds or until every enemy present has been defeated, and it never gets old or stops being satisfying.

I also want to talk about this game's setting and aesthetic, which I like as much as the game itself. It's a kind of look that was used in a lot of anime and Japanese videogames around the turn of the century that I'm going to call "sunset dystopia", a world where there hasn't been any kind of cataclysmic event, but it's just kind of lurching slowly towards an eventual apocalypse through societal entropy that's just on the horizon. I guess other examples of the look would be Daraku Tenshi, King of Fighters 99, and Crimson Tears.

So yeah, Demolish Fist is an excellent game. If you're able to play it (and most fairly modern computers should be able to emulate the Atomiswave at a decent speed by now. My pre-owned laptop can manage it, even!), then you definitely should.

Dolphin Blue (Arcade)

Dolphin Blue sounds like a meaningless title, but both words are very relevant to the game. Dolphin, because you spend the game being accompanied by a dolphin buddy, and blue because a lot of the game is set in or on water.
Because of all that water, there are three kinds of segments in DB. There are parts on land (or more often, on the decks of huge battleships), where you fight on foot. These parts are very reminiscent of the Metal Slug games. Before I'd played the game, I'd only seen a few screenshots, and assumed the whole game was like this. The second kind are the parts that take place on the waves, with you riding on your dolphin buddy's back, and the third kind are underwater, seeing you swimming around accompanied by your dolphin buddy. It's in these parts where he comes in most useful, as he'll go around collecting points items that are hard for you to reach, and can be commanded to attacked the enemy by curling into a ball and bouncing aroud the screen, smashing not only the enemies, but their mines, bombs and missiles too.


It's really a shame that this game has never been converted to any home consoles (unless you count those fanmade consolised Atomiswave systems as such), which is the case for a lot of Atomiswave and Naomi systems. I guess if the Dreamcast had been supported longer, it would have made a fine home for them all. Oh well.
Obviously, I like this game a lot. It's fast and fun to play, it looks really nice, etc. One little touch that I love (and was probably not really intentional on the part of the designers) is that the default gun that you have when your power-up weapons run out can fire as fast as you can press the button. So some of the more tense situations are enhanced greatly, just by the physicality added by hammering the fire button as hard as you can (something I also felt regarding the finishers in Bayonetta, especially the ones which had the player spinning the analogue sticks with as much vigour as they could muster(but I don't think many people agreed with me on that)).