Aa Harimanada (Mega Drive)

You might remember all the way back in 2014, I reviewed the Game Ger version of this, or rather, the Game Gear game that's based on the same source material as this one. Because the two are very different: while the Game Gear game took a somewhat spartan , sports game-like approach, the Mega Drive version has a much flashier fighting game-inspired take on the concept of Sumo. There's even special moves and a health bar!

The most obvious difference though, is that while the Game Gear game's characters all used the same sprite with different colour palletes, this version has all the characters looking different. They're not totally unique, though: every character has a unique head, but it's put onto one of a few different body types, with a variety of skin tones. It's also nice that there are different body types, when you'd think most sumotori would have pretty much the same physique.

Well, they are all pretty mastodonic compared to regular people, but if we take the player character (single player mode has you playing through the story of the manga's protagonist Isao Harimanada) as being an "average" sized sumotori, with most opponents being the same size, then there's also some opponents who are noticably a lot smaller than him, as well as a few who are a lot bigger, standing like mountains of muscle. Body size doesn't seem to be any indicator of how difficult an opponent's going to be, though, which is mainly thanks to the ring out mechanic.

Though you can win by repeatedly slapping and headbutting your opponent into unconsciousness (and also picking them up onto your shoulders and putting them into a Torture Rack hold, in a feat of incredible strength!), most fights will be decided by ring out, sometimes only a couple of seconds after they start. The fighters lock upwhen thy get close enough to each other, and from there, there's a power struggle to get your opponent's back to the edge of the ring, or to throw him overhead to do some damage. Once you get to the edge, depending (I think) on how much health each sumotori has left, either one of them will be thrown out right away, or a new power struggle begins, this time based entirely on who can hit buttons the fastest. So an easy way to win fights is to walk straight into your opponent, keep pressing forward and B to get them over to the edge, then rub all three buttons with the knuckles of your fingers as fast as you can. Of course, I take no responsibility for any damage you might do to your controller or fingers in trying this technique.

I reservedly recommend Aa Harimanada. It's a fun game, and I'm sure it'd be a great laugh to play with friends in between bouts on "proper" fighting games, but even by the standards of a 1993 fighting game, there's not much to entertain a single player, due to there only being one playable character and all. Furthermore, I definitely don't recommend trying to buy a legitimate copy in this day and age, as the prices it fetches online are ludicrous.

Dark Awake -The King Has No Name- (PS3)

So, this is a fighting game that was originally released on Taito's Type X arcade hardware as "Chaos Breaker" in 2004, with this, the only home port, coming six years later. It's a fantasy-themed 2D fighting game base around team battles, kind of like a combination of Golden Axe: The Duel with the King of Fighters series, but with a few interesting little gimmicks to call its own. As far as I can tell, the home version is pretty much a straight port of the original, with the only addition being online play (which I'm fairly certain is no longer available).

There's eighteen characters, divided into six teams, all of except one of which is racially homogenous. So there's a team each of humans, elves, dwarves, sea demons, and undead, as well as a team that's made up of a goblin, an orc, and a troll. Though the designs do lean heavily on typical fantasy tropes, there's still some cool ideas in the designs. One of the dwarves, for example, comes with an entire artillery cannon, and there's members of the monster and undead teams riding mounts of their own. And even the more cliched characters are cool enough to be appealling, too. Though it's a straight KOF-style team battle arrangement with no tagging, you can call the still-concious members of your team in for assist attacks, and this plays into the game's main unique gimmick.

When you pick your team, you see, you get four slots to fill. The first three are for your characters, and the fourth is for an item. There's a ton of items to choose from, and they do various things like healing your health or super meters, increasing attack or defence for a few seconds, summoning a monster to attack your opponent, and so on. This ties into the assist system in a couple of ways:assists are called by pressing a combination of two attack buttons, and your item is listed among your team memebers and used in the same way. Where things get more interesting (in a single player game, at least) is when, after defeating a team, you get a few more items to pick from, and you can choose to use them to either replace the item you picked at the start, or if you're feeling brave, to replace up to two of your characters, giving you a disadvantage in terms of the number rounds you can lose, but also giving you a bigger choice of usable items.

So, is the game any good? Yes! It feels good to play, all the attacks look and sound good, it's just all-round a pretty good game. It was never going to have an easy time, being a post-2000 2D fighting game with no ties to existing series, and it definitely can't have been helped by the fact that it looks a lot better in motion than it does in still screenshots, either. In motion, it looks great, with big sprites and expressive animation, but in stills, the sprites tend to look a lot more blocky and ugly. If you have the means to play a Japan-only download-only PS3 game (or, for that matter, a Taito Type X game), it's definitely worth your time.

Elemental Battle Academy (PC)

Elemental Battle Academy is a kind of combination of a multi-person fighting game (with up to eight combatants in a match), and a third person shooter. But the combat's largely base around melee. You know what I mean though, right? Anyway, it's about a bunch of magical girls fighting each other in big arenas, with a camera just behind the one you're controlling, that's the main thing I'm trying to get across here.

I have to say this about the game: it's incredibly well-made. It's only a doujin title, but it could easily pass for a mid-budget console game. Not only that, but it all works like it should, too: no glitches, graphical or otherwise, and it all feels very stable the whole time you're playing. If these compliments seem a bit suspicious that's because the above qualities make it difficult to be too hard on the game, and unfortunately I am going to have to do that. The big problem is: it's just not very fun to play.

For a start, all the characters have way too much health, so taking them down (or being taken down yourself) takes far too long, especially when the default settings have matches going until someone's scored five knockouts. Similarly, the arenas are enormous, and even with the maximum quotient of eight characters in them, they feel vast and empty, and this is made even worse when you play story mode, which largely consists of one-on-one battles in these vast,cavernous stages.

Worst of all though, are the controls, which seem to have been designed for people with an unusual abundance of digits. For example, your character is equipped with a melee weapon and a projectile weapon. You move her with the left stick, and turn around/aim with the right stick. Whichever weapon you want to use, attack is mapped to the square button (or the X button if you're using an XBox controller, but the problem here is that it's a face button). This is fairly manageable for melee attacks, where you just need to be pointed in the general direction of your target, then you press the button to attack. To shoot at them, however, requires you to hold down R2 to ready your weapon, aim it with the right analogue stick, then fire with the attack button. If you're really ambitious, you might also be using the left analogue stik to avoid incoming attacks.

There's also outfits and accessories and joke weapons to unlock for all the characters, but if the game itself is no fun, then that's no t much consolation, is it? All in all, Elemental Battle Academy is a finely-constructed exercise in tedium. I guess it really does offer the AAA experience on a doujin budget then, eh?

Windy x Windam (DS)

I remember when this game was originally released in 2008, I was pretty excited for it! I've always been interested attempts at fitting arcade genres like fighting games, beat em ups and shooting games onto handhelds, and this wasn't just a handheld fighting game, but it was made specifically for the ds, so it wasn't a downgraded version of a "proper" fighting game, like the massively disappointing Guilty Gear: Dust Strikers. Nor was it a licensed game, which I considered a plus, as though Treasure's Bleach DS fighting games were a lot of fun, the world and characters didn't appeal to me at all. (One extra little note: why weren't there any Capcom or SNK fighting games on DS? The GBC and GBA played host to some miraculously great versions of the Street Fighter ALpha and King of Fighters games. A missed opportunity.)

Then it actually came out and I played it a little, but it just couldn't hold my interest, and I quickly forgot about it in favour of playing Last Blade 2 and Mark of the Wolves via the surprisingly good homebrew Neo Geo emulator the DS had. Playing it again a decade later, it's got a lot of charm, but I can definitely see why it didn't have staying power, and why pretty much everyone almost instantly forgot about it: that charm has to do a lot of heavy lifting to get you to look past the big flaws in how the game actually plays, and it's just not up to the task.

I'll talk about the positives before I get onto the negatives, though. Like the world and characters are pretty nice. I guess it's set in the same world as the DS roguelite Izuna the Unemployed Ninja, since two characters from that game are unlockable in it, along with a stage set in their village, plus the chharacters are part of the story like everyone else, and the village is on the map just like the other locations. The fact that the attacks have little-to-no recovery time is pretty nice, too. It means you can make weak combos just by attacking really quickly, and almost feels like a poor man's Asuka 120%, albeit with none of the impact that that game's attacks have, and also lacking the cool clash/parry mechanic from that series.

That's pretty much it for the positives, unfortunately. And some of these negatives are pretty hefty, too. Like how sometimes, jumping just doesn't work. That's pretty much unforgivable, right? Any game with unreliable controls has to do a lot of work to make up for that, but for a fighting game? It's an insurmountable barrier. It's clear that this was a problem the developers had noticed too, as they add a seperate jump button, along with the traditional pressing up on the d-pad. Unfortunately, while I'm sure with some dedication, a player might eventually get used to it, with heavy attacks on the X button and jump on the B button, it feels very awkward. Another, lesser flaw is that all the characters seem to have a ton of health, making fights seem slow and undramatic. Though that one's more an issue of preference than a game-breaking catastrophe like the controls.

Obviously, I can't recommend Windy x Windam, especially now that a used copy seems to cost more than a brand new copy did back when it was released. Pretty much every major handheld since the original Game Boy has a bunch of way better fighting games than this, including the DS itself. So get one of those instead.

Gamera - Daikaijuu Kuuchuu Kessen (Game Boy)

Videogames based on Kaiju and Tokusatsu properties can be a mixed bag, though I'm probably not alone in thinking that the 2014 Godzilla game on PS4 is probably the best. And while its true that a lot of these games have got a worse rap than they deserve due to critics not really understanding their appeal (the common opinion of the Dreamcast's Godzilla Generations, for example), I might have found the worst of them all, by some considerable margin.

How Gamera - Daikaijuu Kuuchuu Kessen works is kind of like a turn-based fighting game, with no menus. Every turn, you're asked to input a command, then both monsters' maneuvers play out, and that carries on until one of them runs out of health. The closest thing to which I can compare it is probably the weird FMV fighting game Battle Heat on PC-FX. Except it's on the Game Boy, so you don't even have the visual spectacle of lavish full-screen animation to liven things up. Though if you're playing on a Super Game Boy, there are some nice borders to look at, I guess.

There are really two problems with this game, and they're both massive ones. The first is the inconsistency: it seems like pressing the same button combination on different turns doesn't always result in the same action, and furthermore, performing the same action won't always produce the same results, even if the enemy does the same thing, too. So the game boils down to you watching little animations of Gamera and his current opponent doing seemingly random things at each other until one of them suddenly gets hurt. This repeats over and over until one of them runs out of health, and to make things worse, you have to win two rounds against each monster.

And that leads nicely into the second problem: this game is unbelievably slow! Honestly, it took me a few attempts to get past the first fight, simply because it was sapping me of the will to live, and when I did finally get past it, it took over twenty minutes! And that's without losing any rounds! Then you get to the next stage and are faced with the prospect of this carrying on. Apparently this game has a total of five stages, but I can't imagine anyone having the patience to play through them all. I definitely don't recommend trying to.

Dragonball Z (Plug and Play)

So, back in the mid-00s, there were a lot of these licensed plug and play joystick things, usually shaped like a character from a show they were based on, and more interestingly, containing one or more completely new 2D games! Though there's recently been talk of a lot of plug and plays actually being famiclones, with brand new, officially licensed Famicom games still being written because of them, as far as I can tell, these Jakks Pacific ones aren't famiclones. The games are too colourful, the sprites are too big, and so on.

This one was shaped like Shenron, and contained three games, all of which vary in both quality and thematic appropriateness. We'll get the worst and least fitting out of the way first, with "Kamehameha Assault". This is Dragonball Z-themed Pong. You pick one of five characters (Goku, Vegeta, Piccolo, Cell, and Buu), then you hit a green energy orb back and forth while also shooting energy blasts at each other. Each of the two characters has some of the Dragonballs behind them, and every time one of them gets hit by the green orb, it goes over to the other character's side. When one character has all seven, they win. It really is just fancy pong where you can also shoot each other a bit. It's definitely not fast or exciting enough to be considered a Windjammers-alike.

Next up is the most thematically appropriate of the three games, and while it is better than Kamehameha Assault, it's not by a great amount. Its name is Buto-Retsuden (fighting fighting legend? Am I reading that right?), and it's a fighting game. The roster is the same five characters as before, and it looks and feels like a poor imitation of the Super Butoden games. Except there's no special move inputs, beyond, say, forward+attack. Also, all the attacks, even the supers, do a pathetically tiny amount of damage and the fights feel like they last for hours. As a result, I never even managed to finish a credit of this, win or lose. By the halfway point of the second fight's first round, I was losing the will to live every time, and just quit.

Finally, we've got the best game of the three, and while it doesn't fit the theme particularly well, it's pinball, and basing pinball tables on things no matter what they are is a grand old tradition dating back to colonial times, at least. Also, the ball launch mechanism is Goku charging and firing a Kamehameha, which is a nice little touch. It clearly takes a lot of inspiration from Devil Crush, with the basic structure being a three-screen-tall main table, with entrances to seven bossfight bonus tables hidden around the place, and enemies marching up and down the place waiting to be smashed by the ball. Of course, every time you beat one of the bosses, the ball turns into a dragonball for you to take to goku up at the top of the table. Get them all to summon Porunga (since this table is set on Namek, during the Freeza arc) for lives and points and such.

Pinball isn't a spectacular game, but it's not awful, either, and it's a lot better than the other two games on here. Whether or not it's worth the price of admission depends on how much that price is. The going rate on ebay at the time of writing seems to be £10-20, which is far, far too much. If you see one of these for a pittance in a charity shop, though, the pinball game will give you half an hour's fun before you put the stick on a shelf, where it will at least make a fairly nice ornament forevermore.

Supreme Warrior Ying Heung (Mega CD)

I've long theorised that the thing that killed the Mega CD was western publishers and their obsession with FMV, since the PC Engine CD, which had almost no support in the west, and had no FMV games, was a pretty big success (in Japan, at least), just by having lots of good games. Until now, though, I hadn't actually played any of the western "interactive movie" style FMV games, only the likes of Road Avenger and Strahl: the "laserdisc arcade" school of FMV games that were made up of long strings of QTEs and cool-looking 80s animation. Those games are pretty fun, if very limited.

Supreme Warrior Ying Heung is the first interactive movie I've played, and using the word "played" is an act of generosity it doesn't deserve. The story sees an evil warlord attacking a small town in sixteenth century China, demanding half of a magic mask from the local martial arts master. If he gets the mask, he'll be all-powerful and go on to rule the world. Unfortunately, the master is too old to fight the warlord, and his best student is injured. So it falls to you, a collection of disembodied limbs attatched to a movie camera to save the day.

There's some good things about this game, that I should mention before I continue with its burial, so here they are: the production values are surprisingly good, in a mid-90s American TV show kind of way, and the video quality is a lot better than most live action Mega CD games. That's about it, though. The big problem is that the developers have tried to make something a bit more sophisticated than the typical QTE festival, and it just doesn't work. This is a problem shared by one of the aforementioned laserdisc arcade games, Cobra Command (aka Thunderstorm FX), which added a fiddly, semi-functional crosshair shooting element to proceedings. Supreme Warrior manages to be go even further with the complexity, and while Cobra Command was pretty difficult to play, this game is practically impossible.

The actual game part of Supreme Warrior has you fighting the warlord's three henchmen, then, if you somehow manage to beat them, the man himself. The fights are completely live action and first person, with the henchmen punching and kicking in the direction of the camera, while you're expected to punch, kick, and block in accordance with the little prompts that appear at the edges of the screen. The problem is that the prompts sometimes don't appear, and sometimes hitting the right direction and button doesn't do anything. I made a few attempts at fighting each henchman, and I never landed more than two hits on any of them. It just doesn't work on any level: it's no fun to play, the basic mechanics don't work, and your hands and feet flying in from the edge of the screen look stupid every time.

I wish I could say it was a shame that this game turned out how it did, and that the concept had so much potential, but I can't see how else they would have done it. I guess they could have made it a simple QTE game like the arcade games that had been originally released almost a decade earlier, or they could have used the movie segments as mere cutscenes to a more traditional action game, maybe with Mortal Kombat-style digitised sprites. But neither of those solutions really offers the kind of interactive movie innovation towards which Digital Pictures strove. Since no-one else has managed to make a good game from the concept in the decades since, maybe it's just not possible?

Street Fighter Alpha (Arcade)

It's the first of April, and as tradition dictates, I'm doing my one post a year (on this blog at least) about a mainstream videogame. My history with Street Fighter Alpha is a little odd: though the second and third games in the series were huge obsessions for me in me pre- and early teens, I never actually played the first SFA game until 2018, when it was included on the Street Fighter 30th anniversary compilation.

It didn't really have many surprises for me: like the first game in the other big CPS2 trilogy, Darkstalkers, it feels a lot like a proof-of-concept for its sequels. The roster's pretty slim, there's the seeds of certain ideas that would become more fleshed out later on, and so on. In fact, this is partially why I never played it before: its status as a "practice attempt" is so ingrained that even its story is completely overwritten by that of Street Fighter Alpha 2, and since the characters and lore have always been a big part of fighting games' appeal to me, I just never bothered after learning about that from the gigantic, now-legendary "Street Fighter Story FAQ" textfile that used to be floating around the internet.

It is a game with its own charms, though. There's some unnamable quality to the way it looks and sounds that fills me with nostalgia, and though the fact that there's even fewer stages than there are characters, the attempt to flesh out the selection by giving each one of them a couple of "time of day" colour palettes is a nice little bit of ingenuity. It also started the Alpha series' tradition of having ports to hardware that shouldn't be able to handle it. The second game had its SNES port, the third had the Game Boy Advance, but Street Fighter Alpha has two such ports: one to the Game Boy Color (which actually came out a fair while later than the SFA2 SNES port), and another to the CPS Changer. If you don't already know, the CPS Changer was Capcom's short-lived attempt at making a competitor to SNK's  Neo Geo AES, being a home console version of their CPS1 arcade hardware.

As already mentioned, the arcade version of Alpha was on CPS2 hardware, and the Changer port was the last game released on that system, done as a kind of swansong. It's almost arcade perfect, though. There's apparently fewer frames of animation in the Changer version, and I think there might be fewer colours and a bit more dithering if you look really closely, but mostly, it's not noticable at all. Anyway, those are my thoughts on Street Fighter Alpha. I'm sure most of you have already played it, but if not, it wouldn't hurt, would it?

Toshinden (Wii)

This game's existence is a bit of a mystery: the Toshinden series isn't exactly fondly remembered, and the only reason it was every really popular at all is because it was one of the first 3D fighting games to come along. So why then, a whole decade after the last Toshinden, did Tomy decide to not only release a game using that name, but release a game with no other connection to the series. It doesn't play like the others, it has none of the characters, and it's not set in the same world. It doesn't even have the same developers as the original series! (Those were developed by Lunatic Obscurity stalwarts Tamsoft, this is by Dream Factory, of Tobal and Ehrgeiz fame, and could very well be their worst game!)

So, if it doesn't play like the other Toshinden games, how does it play? Well, it's an odd one. You can use the analogue stick to run around the arena in all directions, and you only have two normal attack buttons: weak and strong. Rather than special move motions, you have a special and a super, each mapped to a button of their own. I'm not normally a fan of these kinds of super-simplified fighting game controls, though can sometimes work, as in the Senko no Ronde games, or to a lesser extent, the Playstation 90s anime homage festival that is Evil Zone/Eretzvaju. In this case, though, the best thing you can say about the controls is that they're not the worst thing about the game.

The actual worst thing about the game is a decision so stupid and antithetical to the nature of fighting games that I can barely believe they did it: all of the playable characters start out with weak, puny movesets, and you're expected to grind in single player to earn points to buy their moves and combos. To make matters worse,  despite this being a game that never had online play, there are only two single player modes: story mode, where you can't pick your character, and surival mode, where you endlessly fight randomly-selected opponents on randomly-selected stages until you lose. It's barely a step above Bomberman Act Zero on X Box 360!

Now, this game isn't completely worthless: I will admit that it looks great, with the character models and textures being particularly appealling. But obviously, that's not enough to make up for how much of an absolute chore it is to play, so obviously, I'm not going to recommend that you bother with it. It's a shame, too, I was really hoping this would be a nice little unsung hero of the Wii's library.

PatchMon (PC)

So, this is a game made in the fighting game engine MUGEN, more commonly known for those big giant mashups of every fighting game character ever, and of course, for SaltyBet. Contrary to stereotypes though, PatchMon is game using sem-original materials! I say semioriginal, as while it doesn't use prites from other games, it is a fangame based on a 1970s series of trading cards called Pachimon which featured a bunch of original kaiju going about their monsterly business.

The big gimmick of this game, as you can see from the screenshots, is that the graphics for the characters and most of the backgrounds are taken directly from the cards themselves. It makes for a unique and authentic look, but it also massively limits what the characters do: most of them don't have jumps or blocks, and one character in particular, a giant coelacanth/whale/shark thing, can't even move, and attacks by summoning waves and ships to travel across the screen on its behalf.

The rest of the cast doesn't have much more articulation, either, and the controls amount to moving left and right, performing two normal attacks and one (or sometimes two!) super attacks. One thing that has to be said though, is that the incredibly limited animation does have a lot of charm, and looks kind of like what you'd get if Monty Python's Terry Gilliam had put his animation methods towards making a cartoon about giant monsters.

The arcade mode takes a Street Fighter II approach, with you fighting all the playable characters, followed by four unplayable (as far as I'm aware) boss characters, and as well as that, there's survival and a crazy simultaneous two-versus-two mode. It would be a lie to say that PatchMon is a good game: it looks ridiculous, it's totally unbalanced, and it's stiff and weird to play. But it would also be a lie to say that it isn't a fun one, and you can definitely get an hour or two's enjoyment out of it before it outstays its welcome.

Shanghai Kid (Arcade)

Also known as Hokuha Syourin Hiryu no Ken, Shanghai Kid is the first in the long-running Hiryu no Ken series of fighting games and beat em ups. The last entries in the series were on the Playstation and N64, so I guess it just wasn't able to survive the move to 3D, though I'll save that talk for another time, as I do intend to cover a few other games in this series at some point in the future, but for now: back to Shanghai Kid. It looks like an early fighting game, though it's really more of an attempt at a more complex (for the time) martial arts simulator-type game.

The structure is the same as most fighting games even to this day: you fight a series of gradually more difficult opponents. The difference is in how the fighting takes place, and how you control your character, as the developers came up with a system that allows for quite a bit of sophistication using only two buttons and an eight-way joystick, long before special move motions or combos had been invented. The two buttons are predictably assigned to punch and kick, but the interesting stuff comes in the form of the joystick. Though you can walk left and right, jump, and crouch, those aren't the things you'll mainly be using the joystick for. Instead, the game uses a system of high, middle, and low attacks, as well as corresponding blocks.

The way this works is almost turn-based in its execution. There are red circles that will appear on you or your opponent, at the head, feet, or torso level. When a circle appears on you, you just press the joystick up, down, or sideways to block the incoming attack. When it appears on the opponent, you do the same, but you press punch or kick at the same time, to attack your opponent's temporary blind spot. Obviously, as the game goes on, and the difficulty of opponents increases, so does the speed at which circles appear, disappear, or change places. Another complication is that a few fights in, you start facing special opponents (including one that happens to look exactly like Tiger Mask! There are probably otther unofficial appearances from old manga characters too, that I haven't recognised) who have unique attacks, for which you'll need to figure out the most effective evasive maneuvers.

I really like Shanghai Kid, it's an interesting game, and the Hiryu no Ken series is interesting to me in general, so like I said earlier, expect to see some of the sequels covered here at some point in the future. Until then, obviously I recommend giving this game a try!

Kamen Rider Kuuga (Playstation)

2000's Kamen Rider Kuuga, in case anyone doesn't know, was the first Kamen Rider TV series since 1988's Kamen Rider Black RX. And I guess it must have been a success, since Different Kamen Rider shows have been running alongside the Super Sentai shows ever since. Since the show's aimed at little kids, it makes sense to have the licensed videogame on the Playstation instead of the newly-released PS2, too, since it means they can make a quick, cheap little game for the kids to buy with their pocket money. (The 2001 and 2002 Kamen Rider shows, Agito and Ryuki also had their games on PS1, presumably for the same reasons.)

Anyway, as befitting a series that's mainly about one-on-one combat between a hero and a series of episodic monsters, it's a fighting game. There's a single player story mode, that's about fifteen minutes long, and sees you playing as Kamen Rider Ryuki in various different forms fighting monsters. There's different kinds of fights in this mode too, like ones where you only have to get the monster down to 50% health, or ones where you have to survive the attacks of an invincible monster for thirty seconds. The game will also encourage you (in the form of a text prompt) to finish some fights with certain attacks. It's okay, but like I said, there's only fifteen minutes of it and it's done. Finishing it once does unlock survival mode, which is a lot more interesting, though.

Survival mode lets you play as the various Kuuga forms seen in story mode, but also, as all of the monsters you fight in that mode! (After you've unlocked them, but I'll get onto that later.) Other than that, it's just a typical survival mode: you fight an unending stream of randomly-selected foes until you get beat. The game's controls are very simple, which I assume is another concession towards a younger target audience: there's no special move inputs, instead the four face buttons are mapped to punch, kick, throw, and special. Some characters have more than one special, which are excuted by just pressing different directions along with the special button.

Now, onto unocking stuff. Every time you finish playing story or survival mode, you get points, depending on how many fights you won. Each point can be spent to buy one random card in the digital card collection. There's 81 cards to get, and once you get a card, it isn't removed from the pool of possible cards you draw, so the more you have, the harder it is to fill the gaps in your collection. Anyway, among the cards, there are smaller subsets of three cards, which unlock playable characters when you get them all. I think I managed to get all of these cards after finishing story mode once and playing maybe two or three games of survival mode. The rest of the cards are just for completionists and people who like looking at low resolution photos of turn-of-the-century tokusatsu actors and monster suits (and who doesn't?).

So Kamen Rider Kuuga is a decent enough game, I guess. Nothingg spectacular, but it's entertaining enough, and if you know people who you can get to play old licensed games with you, it's probably pretty fun in versus mode, too. On that note, I wonder why it was never seen on the import/piracy scene at the time, considering how import-friendly it is. But on the other hand, English-speaking tokusatsu fandom was still so tiny as to be practically non-existent at the time, and the game isn't really good enough to be worth playing over any arcade-ported figting games without the allure of the license. (Still a lot better than some of the awful fighting games we played back then just because of the license, like Dragonball Final Bout and so on). Yeah, it's alright. Give it a try.