Gekifu Bakegyamon Ayakashi Fighting (DS)

 This is a game I've been meaning to write about for a long time, and finally, I'm getting around to it (the roadblock being that I misplaced my original DS and have now finally got ahold of a gizmo that can satisfactorily emulate the DS and take screenshots while doing so. Unfortunately, the 3DS can only do one of those things at the same time.) It's a licensed fighting game (based, unusually, on a manga that didn't get an anime adaptation), though while the fashion of the time was to make such things in the style of Smash Bros., this at least appears to be more of a traditional 3D fighting game, though it quickly becomes clear that it's quite a bit more experimental than that.

 

If you start playing with story mode, then the controls will probably be the first weird thing you encounter. There's only one attack button, that can be repeatedly pressed for a short beat em up-like combo. There's also a jump button, a special move button, and a button to crouch and pick up cards off the ground. And you block with the right shoulder button. Those cards, then: you start a match with four of them, and can hold up to eight. They're kept on the touchscreen, and you touch them to activate them, each one representing a different spell. Some are big powerful elemental attacks, others temporarily increase your stats, or decrease those of your opponent.

 

That's not all, as as soon as you win or lose a round, you'll encounter the next weird thing: every fight is a King of Fighters-style elimination battle between teams of three. Furthermore, the manga upon which the game is based is apparently a kind of horror-themed pokemon-type deal, so all the characters are monsters, mainly youkai-type guys. (Maybe they're all youkai? It's a little outside my realm of expertise. But there's tengu and kappa, at least). And of course, each team is acting as the proxy for some kid. Oddly, in free battle mode, you pick a kid, and then you can form a team out of all the monsters you've so far unlocked, while in story mode, each kid has a predetermined trio of monsters. Which makes me wonder what the point of picking a kid in free battle is. Just flavour, or does each kid have specialities of their own?

 

So, it's different, but is it actually good? Kind of. It won't be your new favourite handheld fighting game or anything, and I actually did get a little bored of it after a few attempts at getting through story mode on a single credit, as well as a bunch of trying out different monsters in free battle. (Since story mode only lets you play as the protagonist, and his set team, until you unlock more characters). But it's definitely unique, and the novelty of playing as monsters and casting spells during the fights does have its appeal. Apparently the manga did get an official English translation, so fans of that might want to pick up a copy, and if you've never read it (like me), you might still want to give it a look, just for how weird and interesting it is. It is definitely more weird and interesting than it is actually good, though.

Hokuto no Ken 6 Gekitou Denshouken - Haou heno Michi (SNES)

 Though I think nowadays, when people think of Hokuto no Ken games on 8- and 16-bit consoles, they're more likely to think of the ones on Master System and Mega Drive, there was a series of them on Nintendo's consoles, too. And while the Nintendo games carried a sequel number across seven games (so yes, this is apparently a part of the same series of games as the Famicom beat em up Hokuto no Ken 2 that I reviewed long ago), they don't seem to have much else in common. Of course they started with beat em ups, then there were a few RPGs, and the final two, six and seven, were fighting games. 

 

Hokuto no Ken 6 represents an interesting and very narrow point in time in the genre's evolution, too. It's clear just by looking at it that the developers were familiar with Street Fighter II and its massive success (as I think everyone involved in videogames would have been at the time), and they were able to copy the general screen layout, and the large character sprites. But the mechanics and the feel of Street Fighter II were far beyond their capabilities at that time. The regular punches and kicks feel very stiff and clunky, and it's near-impossible to string multiple attacks together into anything feeling like a combo. Furthermore, instead of having motion-based special moves, the players have two meters beneath their health meter, and all specials are performed via the shoulder buttons, in conjunction with these meters.

 

The first meter, AP, works almost like the momentum meter in Idainaru Dragonball Densetsu: it goes up when you land hits, and it goes down when you take hits. When it's full, you can press the left shoulder button to perform a move so special, it's name will also appear onscreen if it lands. You'll recognise these as each character's signiature move from the comic/TV show. The other meter, TP, is less interesting: you hold the right shoulder button to fill it, and when it fills up, you can release to shoot a projectile attack. And that's pretty much the entirety of the game's special moves. (There are apparently even more powerful signatures if you manage to fill up the AP meter twice before using it, but I haven't been able to do that.)

 

The character line up is a little strange, too. There's Kenshiro and Rei, like you might expect, along with a bunch of villains from late in the series like Raoh, Souther, and so on. But what makes it weird is that there's a stage clearly meant to be Shin's throne room in Southern Cross, but instead of being occupied by Shin, it's the home stage for Heart! I guess he's kind of an iconic character, but he's also a comedy jobber who dies very early in the series! It's a shame I can't read the dialogue text that appears at the start of each story mode fight, as I'd love to know what happens in Heart's conversations with those god-like man-tyrants who make up most of the cast.

 

I actually did enjoy Hokuto no Ken 6. I can't recommend it, because it just doesn't really feel good to play. But somehow, I did get some joy from having these character awkwardly flail at each other. It's definitely helped by having such nicely drawn, detailed sprites, as well as other little details like Raoh being unable to crouch (because of course, the king of fists would never bend a knee). But it's very simplistic, very stiff, and it's on a console that has a ton of better fighting games (including several others that are based on anime and manga. Though Hokuto no Ken 7 isn't very good either, unfortunately). The best I can say is that it's a game that can be found very cheaply, and if you've got friends who can appreciate a good bad game, and who also love Hokuto no Ken, you might get a decent hour or so out of it.

Moero! Justice Gakuen (Dreamcast)

I know this game isn't particularly obscure, but this is a special case. This is specifically the Japanese version of the game also known as Project Justice, and a big difference between the two versions is that Moero! Justice Gakuen had a whole mode that was removed from Project Justice. That mode is Nekketsu Nikki (Hot-Blooded Diary), a character creation mode, combined with a board game with a tiny bit of dating simulation in there for flavour. A translation patch for it recently got released, and since, along with the life sim modes that were cut out of its Playstation forebears, this has been one of my most-wanted translations for as long as I've known that fan translations existed, I thought it worthy of a review.

 

With that in mind, I won't be speaking much on the actual fighting game here. Most of you have played it, and know that it's excellent already. It was a big obsession for me as a teenager, and because I couldn't find any copies in the shops in my town, I'm pretty sure it was the first game I ever ordered online (at a friend's house after school, as I had neither a PC nor my own bank account at that time). Instead, let's first talk about how character creation works. You name your character, choose their gender and their school, as well as their haircut, eyes, nose, and mouth. It's slightly disappointing that there's no customisation at all beyond that: it would have been cool to be able to make a character who's made a few minor changes to their uniform, or even to give them a different body type or hair colour than the default. But never mind, I think it's still possible to make characters into whom you can breathe a little life. (I have to admit that it was pretty clever of Capcom to use the conceit of all the characters being uniformed students to make a character creation mode possible, while justifying not having to model hundreds of different clothing items.)

 

You also choose their best school subject and three words from a selection. These choices affect your character's starting stats, and if you're boring, you can look at gamefaqs to find ancient guides written around the time of the game's release to find out the most optimal choices here. But, keeping with the spirit of the game, you should really think of the character you're making, and choose based on the personality they have in your imagination. What you notably don't get the freedom to choose are any of your character's special moves, or even their fighting stance and normal attacks. They'll be decided during the board game, which is themed around a school festival. 

 

The board game takes place over forty turns (it goes by quicker than it sounds like it would, as long as you only giver yourself one CPU opponent), and takes place on a big path of squares, laid out like a school festival. Most of the squares will slightly increase one of your stats when you land on it, some represent class credits (which I'll explain later), others give you cards, some are there to dish out special moves, and there's a rare few that reduce your stats. You spin a spinner each turn to see how far you move, though you can choose which direction you move in. Also, there are actual characters from the game wandering around, and if you land on the same space as one, you get to have a little interaction. Keep doing this with the same character, and you can befriend or even romance them (The whole series, in these console-exclusive modes, assumes that everyone is bisexual. Which is nice.). Though, chasing them arond the board would get in the way of trying to win the game or make your character stronger, so it's something to which you'd have to really dedicate a run and a junk character. An interesting thing about the special moves: though most of them are the moves of characters in the game, there's also a few moves that are only in this mode, plus the entire moveset of Street Fighter's Sakura Kasugano (who was a guest character in the first Rival Schools, but not this one). 

 

Regarding the class credits, those are the way you win the game, and if you do a good enough job, they'll be a big contributor towards your character's stats and their access to burning vigor moves. You get a randomly generated bingo card at the start of the game, with the spaces being these class credits. So, you've got to go around the board landing on them to fill your card. Getting a full row either increases all of your stats by one level, or gives your character a BV move. Furthermore, you get points for getting them, and at all times, one of them is a special space that gives an extra fifty points for landing on it (at which time another class credit space becomes the special one). After the fortieth turn, there's a CPU-controlled fighting tournament for all of the characters that were in the board game, which dishes out more points depending on where characters placed. And after that's done, the character with the most points is declared the winner, and gets to choose either another BV move (or their first if they didn't get any before this point), or a boost to all of their stats.

 

Then, you can save the character and play as them in all the actual fighting modes the game has! It's really a massive shame Capcom couldn't be bothered to translate this mode back at the time of the game's release, because I know as much as I played the English version as it was, with this mode, it would have gotten hundreds of hours of play. I know my friends at the time would have enjoyed creating characters and playing the board game, maybe even going so far as to each have our own custom trios to fight against each other in versus mode! We missed out on so much back then, didn't we? That's before you even get into the massive amounts of lore for this series that was printed in Gamest Mooks and never translated. But now we do have this mode, and it's excellent. And a (very) little bit of the extra lore got translated in the artbook Udon put out last year. Obviously, I very highly recommend playing it, and I hope that the existence of this translation is a good omen that we'll get the lifesim mode from at least one of the Playstation games translated in the near future. 

Taiketsu! Ultra Hero (GBA)

 Can you believe it's been over two years since I wrote about a tokusatsu tie-in game here? And even that's if you're liberal enough to count Power Rangers as tokusatsu. Don't worry, though: there's going to be more than one post on this subject this year, I'm pretty sure. This one is an Ultraman fighting game! There's been many of them, some notoriously awful, some sneakily having little cult followings. This one is closer to the first group, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's awful.

 

It's got a pretty big roster of characters, with a bunch of Ultramen selectable in "VS Mode", which is actually what you'd normally think of as arcade mode, and tournament mode, where you only fight against other Ultramen. There's also a Free Battle mode, in which you can select any of the monsters that you fight against in VS mode, including a screen-sized representation from one of the great old ones of the Cthulhu mythos, Ghatanothoa (or rather, "Ghatanothor", as the Ultra series officially spells it), who apparently appears as the final enemy in 1996-97's Ultraman Tiga (which I unfortunately haven't seen). More importantly, yes: you can play as Dino Tank in this game.

 

There's some things that are very strange about this game. Firstly, there's the balance. All of the monsters are massively more powerful than all of the Ultramen, in every mode. They do more damage with their attacks, they receive significantly less damage from attacks, and most of all, they can use their special infinitely. Ultramen have a power meter at the bottom of the screen, representing their Color Timer. It slowly goes down constantly, with special moves taking chunks out of it. There's even some "all or nothing" specials that can immediately win a fight if they hit, or lose it if they miss! So, this imbalance is clearly a deliberate choice to add tension, and stay close to the lore of the TV shows. It makes for a worse game, but a better adaptation. What a conundrum!

 

Another weird thing, that can't be so tidily excused, is the way special moves are performed. Instead of having move inputs like a normal fighting game, instead you hold a shoulder button and press a face button to perform specials. So every character has a maximum of four specials, and it's not really possible to make combos with any of them. While the face buttons are each assigned punch and kick, the shoulder buttons don't do anything when pressed on their own, so I wasn't even able to figure out this weird system on my own! Instead, I saw that there must be specials in the game when I saw CPU opponents performing them, and went looking online. Luckily, there is a guide on gameFAQs (written in 2004, a mere six months after the game's release!). It doesn't work well, it's not fun to do, and it's not very intuitive. 

 

There's good things about the game, too. Like how it looks: all the sprites are really well-drawn and animated. And while it's technically a bad game, there's still a little bit of entertainment to be had from having monster vs monster fights in free mode. And then learning that it's still hilariously poorly balanced, since any monster that has a projectile with full screen range can just spam it with impunity. If you fire up the ROM, I'm sure you'll be amused for like, half an hour or so. That's fine, right? I haven't been able to find a copy for sale, so I don't know what the prices are like for it, but whatever it costs when it does emerge: it's not worth it.

Kunio no Nekketsu School Fighters (Mega Drive)

 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.

Solitary Fighter (Arcade)

 Solitary Fighter is the sequel to a much better-known game, Violence Fight. Though its more of an expanded rerelease, since it has exactly the same plot, and it mostly plays in the same way, with the main (but not only) difference being the addition of a few more playable characters. This is probably a contributing factor into why it's so forgotten, but the biggest factor is definitely the circumstances of its release: it has the misfortune of being a pre-Street Fighter II-style fighting game released in 1991, the same year as Street Fighter II. So no matter what, it would have looked like a weird, awkward throwback.

 

But here in 2025, it's that weird awkwardness that makes it interesting: it's a fighting game, but not following the formula that SFI codified. So, it's set in 1950s America, and all of the characters are fighting for cash prizes in warehouses and other such places. Most of the stages are in a beat em up-style forced perspective arrangement, whereby you can walk in eight directions, as well as jumping. Though some stages only let you walk on a single plane (I wonder if this was an attempt at making the game look at least partially like SFII, since apparently, major changes were made to a 1992 Taito game, Dino Rex, for the same reason).

 

You have three buttons: punch, kick, and jump. Pressing punch and kick together makes your character crouch, and pressing either of the attack buttons together with jump does a special  move of wildly varying usefulness. One of the characters, a balding fat idiot dressed in stars and stripes has headbutts instead of kicks. While you're fighting in the beat em up-style stages, sometimes armed audience members will invade the fight, but the thing is, they're just interested in violence, they don't seem to care where it goes. They'll start out attacking one fighter, then change their mind and attack the other, until they take enough hits themselves that they decide it's no longer worth the effort and give up.

 

Maybe the weirdest element of the game is the health bar. It goes down in inconsistent, seemingly random amounts in response to characters taking attacks, and also it'll often start going back up again immediately afterwards. And getting a character's health bar to zero isn't enough to knock them out, you've got to hit them again after that (and if it goes back up, you'll have to deplete it again). Plus, it seems like you can't win with a throw? It makes for a game that feels very imprecise and unpredictable in a way that removes any satisfaction from victory.

 

Solitary Fighter isn't a completely terrible game. I do really like the setting and how the game looks in general, and I am always on the lookout for games that offer takes on fighting that feel different to typical fighting games. But none of this is enough to make it good. I think the absolute best you might hope for is having one or (at most) two fights with a friend, as a little comic relief between better games.

Fighting Road (NES)

 Something that really interests me in regards to game design is iteration and evolution: adding new ideas to existing concepts, as well as early experimental steps towards what would later become popular genres. Fighting Road represents an attempt to add more complicated storytelling to an early Yie Ar Kung Fu-style fighting game. It feels like such an ecolutionary step towards the style for which SNK would later become known that I even went to check that Takashi Nishiyama wasn't involved in its creation (as far as I can tell, he wasn't).

 

The story told in Fighting Road would fit right into a 1970s kung fu movie: the protagonist goes looking for his brother, fighting various other martial artists along the way, as well as learning that his brother has joined an evil gang. It's told via some great-looking cutscenes that make use of blocks of text and still pixel art. Technological limitations do kind of dampen the excitement in that in the first six stages, you fight three different opponents, as well as recoloured versions of those same opponents meant to represent different characters. To be fair, the characters are big and well-animated for a NES game in 1988, so they probably did take up a lot of space on the cartridge, meaning that a completely new opponent for every stage would have been an expensive prospect, and may even have forced compromises in regards to the cutscene art, which seems like it was probably a big selling point for the game.

 

To make matters worse, as well as repeated opponents, each stage consists of two fights against that stage's foe, which a cutscene in the middle. Clearly, a problem with the game was that the designers had a very specific concept for it, and they were desperately trying to juggle their intentions regarding storytelling, keeping the cost of production down, and ensuring that the game wasn't so short and easy that players finishd it the same day they bought it. But thirty-seven years later, shorn of that context, what you've got in Fighting Road is a conceptually interesting game that's turned out to be more than a little bit boring in practice. 

 

Another problem is that it doesn't really feel good to play. I mentioned before that the animation was surprisingly good, but it's unfortunately too good. There's too many frames for every action you might take, meaning that there's a bit too much of a delay between you pressing the button and your character executing the action. You've also got a pretty big repetiore of moves at your disposal, and most of them are easy enough to figure out, but you've got a power meter that theoretically allows you to fire a projectile attack once it starts flashing. However, even after looking up the command for this attack online, I've not been able to successfully pull it off even once.

 

I really wish I liked Fighting Road more than I do. It's an interesting game that's a few years ahead of its time, but unfortunately those few years do make a difference, and the technology and the concepts in game design just weren't there yet to support the kind of game that it wants to be. I'd say it's worth a look out of curiosity, but not really much more than that.

Verdict Guilty (PS4)

 For some reason, when I first saw this game, I assumed it was developed in Brazil, but it's actually Scottish! Also, it's set in future South Korea? Plus it's all very very purple. It takes from the classic western school of iterative game design as seen in Mortal Kombat and Kid Chameleon: it takes an existing game and says "but wouldn't it be cool if it had this and this and this?". Of course, the inspiration here is Street Fighter II, just like it was for Mortal Kombat all those many years ago.

 

Verdict Guilty has a lot of ideas in it, but the main one around which the game is built seems to be "what if the Guile handcuffs glitch was an actual mechanic that more characters could do?", and in fitting with that, the game's got a cops/agents versus criminals theme to it. It's also got an unusual five button control scheme because of this: two punch and kick buttons each, plus the fifth handcuff/throw button. You've got to be close to your opponent to use it, and depending on your character, successfully pulling it off might handcuff your opponent (making them unable to attack, not even kicks or other attacks that don't use the arms), or it might do something different, like strapping a time bomb to them.

 

There's more mechanical weirdness to enjoy, though. Each character seems to have a special that's executed by holding one of their attack buttons for a second and releasing. You can do the holding while being hit, while performing other moves, even before a round starts! Normal attacks all come out insanely quickly, and they do a lot of damage, too, so rounds tend to be short. The game attempts to stop spamming certain moves by having them use ammo, and doing the move when ammo's depleted wastes a little time reloading instead of doing the move. Looking the game up online, it seems that there's a glitch in the PC version that prevents player two from using certain specials if they're using a controller. Amazing.

 

Thematically and aesthetically, it's also a mixed bag. There's some weird stuff like a character being a secret agent with stretchy arms and electricity powers (no-one else in the game seems to have any powers at all). Another character is a seenteen year old boy with his job listed as "terrorist" and his likes listed as "bombs". Something I really like is that there's technically no mirror matches: if both players are the same character, player two will instead be a headswap with a different name! Similar stuff is done in Battle K-Road and Toshinden 3, but it's still unusual enough to be a cool oddity when it turns up. As mentioned (and as you can see in the screenshots), the game's very purple, and couple with the urban setting resulting in lots of nice cityscape backrounds, I really like the way it looks in general. Though having said that, the characters are a little ugly. The worst thing I can say in this section, though, is that only one of the eight characters (or two of sixteen if you want to be pedantic about it) is a woman, one of her specials is called "panty shot", and it involves her doing the splits upside down in midair. Tiresome, embarassing nonsense.

 

Verdict Guilty isn't a great game that you'll be having lots of exciting, tense battles in with your friends, but it is silly enough to be a bit of fun, and the insane strength of normal attacks might make it a game to play with those poor unfortunate freaks who never learned how to play fighting games. Definitely do what I did and wait for it to go on sale and pick it up for a pittance, though.

Samurai Deeper Kyo (Playstation)

 

 Like TV Animation X and Inu-Yasha, this is yet another fighting game released late in the Playstation's life, and based on a then-current anime. Unlike those other two, I've never seen the anime Samurai Deeper Kyo, and I know pretty much nothing about it, except that there's videogame tie-ins on Playstation and Game Boy Advance. If you wanted to be glib and more than a little unfair, you could call this one "a poor man's Last Blade 2". Unfair both because most games pale in comparison to Last Blade 2, and because Samurai Deeper Kyo's not a bad game at all.

 

Another thing it has in common with the Inu-Yasha game is that the controls and special move inputs are a lot simpler than those seen in "proper" fighting games. In fact, there are two control methods, one with single button specials and a truncated movelist in general, plus one that's a little more complex ( but not by much). There's also an assist system, which under default settings, triggers automatically every time your assist meter fills up, which makes things mildly chaotic in a fun way. Also, I don't know the plot explanation for this, but in story mode, a lot of the time, each opponent you beat will be your assist character for the next fight. Is this just the old shonen "defeat equals friendship" trope manifest in videogame form?

 

Other than the basics of the game itself, there's some other points of interest I'd like to address. First, one of the playable characters is a blonde girl with a handgun, who, through her end poses and other flavour animations, seems like she's meant to at least partially be a joke character. But, she's also the only one who brought a gun to a swordfight, and as you'd expect, she's a very effective fighter, with a moveset almost totally made up of projectile attacks. Another character has a spider theme, and can send spiders to attack her opponents, as well as summoning webs. She can even use webs to entangle her opponent's assist meter, though I only did this once and never figured out how to replicate it.

 

Something else that really stands out is the backgrounds. All of them really well-drawn pixel art backdrops, with cherry blossom trees, moonlit nights, soft rain, sunsets, and more. Unfortunately, this is an area that really does draw comparisons to the Last Blade games, since they're so thematically similar. Of course, in such a comparison, Samurai Deeper Kyo falls short: its backgrounds are very sparsely animated, when they're animated at all, and oddly, there's no people or animals in any of them. It gives that a strange, empty feeling. It's only a very minor complaint, but it is something that really stood out to me as I played.

 

Samurai Deeper Kyo isn't anything particularly life-changing or roundbreaking, but it's a decent enough game, and in my experience, you can never have too many decent enough fighting games. It's also one of those games that I feel like would've been a hit among my friends, if we'd have known about and had access to it at the time of its release, even if we didn't ever get to see the anime itself. It's definitely worth your time.

Martial Masters (Arcade)

 Even down to the most basic level of their PGM hardware being a lot like the Neo Geo, it was always clear that IGS were very heavily influenced by SNK, and in keeping with that, Martial Masters seems at first glance to be an ttempt at making a Taiwanese equivalent to Last Blade 2. I say at first glance, because when you start playing, the period setting (seventeenth century China in this case), slightly brown-heavy colour palette, and smooth animation really bring Last Blade 2 to mind. But when you look a little deeper, you'll discover that this is a game that has its own identity.

 

Before going further, I'm going to contradict that a little by saying that the setting and characters do borrow very heavily from martial arts movies, especially Once Upon a Time in China. However, this actually does serve to make it stand out among fighting games, since there are far fewer games than you'd expect that focus specifically on kung fu, and every character in Martial Masters represents a different style. 

 

This does seem to have posed a challenge for the game's animators, as some of the characters appear to have been animated using rotoscoping. Maybe it was too hard to capture certain styles in 2D without doing that? Whatever the reason, it does result in some very unique-looking fighters, and even though the characters play in similar ways to ones in other fighting games, with traditional special move motions and so on, the different look provided by the overall kung fu theme makes the game stand out in the genre for the way it feels to play.

 

Martial Masters isn't a game without a few features of its own, though, some of which, while maybe not innovated here, were at least uncommon at the time of its release. You can store up to nine pwoer meters, though it's rare to go higher than three, since they're not just used for supers! You can' perform a Guilty Gear-esque burst action by pressing HP+HK while blocking, which is useful, but not as useful as it might have been if you could do it while taking full hits, too. Especially since if you instinctively press HP+HK when you're not blocking, your character will do a taunt. There's a few other uses for meter, too, like launchers, a Vampire Savior-esque power up, and a kind of throw that doesn't deal damage, but does stun the opponent.

 

I briefly touched upon how the game looks earlier, but it does look very good. Mostly. Some of the portraits on the character select screen look bizarre, and as mentioned, the rotoscoped characters stand out a lot in a way that's not necessarily positive. But none of that's bad enough to really spoil the game, and the backgroudns and most of the characters look excellent. To bring up the general kung fu theme once again, it does make all of the attacks, specials, and supers really stand out in a way that is positive. 

 

Martial Masters might not be able to stand up to its contemporaries in that subgenre of "turn of the century fighting games with big sprites and unusually smooth animation" like Street Fighter III, Mark of the Wolves, or Last Blade 2, but that doesn't mean it's not worth your time. It's a fun game with a unique setting and feel, and it feels good to play. If you want to play it legally, a PGM cartridge would cost you a few hundred pounds, but apparently there was a somewhat recent collection of IGS games on Switch which is presumably a lot cheaper, and includes Martial Masters and a bunch more games (including previous review subject Demon Front).