| paleface [sys=PS1; cat=Fighting; reg=JPN] |
| | | The blatant Street Fighter and Samurai Shodown character rip-offs in this game would make for a slightly amusing diversion if only the thing ran at greater than ~10 fps.
Given the framerate, pulling off any of each character's 2-4 special moves is nearly impossible so you're best off just sticking with weak/strong punch/kick (which unfortunately you can't remap to shoulder buttons for a decent arcade stick layout). These are all you'll need against the CPU, anyway. For instance, "Gamp," perhaps one of the most tragic fighting game sprites I have ever seen (like all the sprites in this game he looks as though he's been clumsily scaled up from a much lower resolution, but he somehow manages to look even worse and I suppose the blue skin tone isn't helping), can't quite figure out how to foil a strong kick to his face, so you can just do that over and over. A few characters are a bit too twitchy for this strategy but fortunately in these cases you can just turtle and ankle-kick them into oblivion.
The backgrounds actually look halfway decent, the slightly subdued trance music is okay, the pain sounds are amusing, and the game makes itself import-friendly with an option to switch to all English text. Unfortunately, none of these perks actually make the game enjoyable. It has a "Watching" mode, surprisingly, and leaving it playing itself in endless slow random fights is probably the best way to experience it, if you absolutely must. |
|
|
| | | Was apparently an arcade version: "Master's Fury" in Korea, "The Masters Fighter" in Japan.
~~~~
The internet (specifically I think it was TV Tropes) tells me that some people say The Masters Fighter, a fighting game released on PS1 in Japan, is the worst fighting game ever. Who are these supposed people? : P
Okay, it may be the worst *looking* fighting game ever--there's definitely a case to be made there. It looks like a horrible hard drive problem corrupted the character sprites and they were just like well this is all we got, guess we have to ship it anyway. : P
A perhaps a more likely explanation is that Korean developers UNICO--who oddly enough had put out a perfectly normal-looking arcade fighting game three years earlier--weren't able to draw their own sprites, so they just copied them from other games (T660 - see @ 31:01 - has a profile quite reminiscent of KOF's Korean character Choi, for instance), then garbled the interior pixels so they wouldn't be immediately recognizable as stolen artwork.
Another explanation could be that UNICO just had trouble getting a handle on the PS1 hardware, and had to super-compress the character sprite graphics in order to get the game to run. It still runs really badly--I dunno what the framerate is, but maybe like 15 fps?--but I guess it does operate, technically.
Now, when I first loaded up the game after many years here, I was horrified at how it looked, and thought I would hate it. But then I chose the main character, tae kwon do practitioner Takuya, and started playing, and... Well okay, special moves like his fire balls and flying kicks are *really* hard to do correctly, for some reason. That isn't good. And the game doesn't seem to have an actual combo system. BUT... You can hit guys a lot. Sometimes it actually feels like a combo. And doing that, maybe because it's so hard, actually feels super-satisfying.
Sure, the AI is really dumb, and there's no actual difficulty curve, but...I don't quite know how, but somehow the game grew on me. Maybe because I *could* beat it on the first play-through. : P But I found myself having fun, darn it all!
Some of the backgrounds aren't completely horrible. The character art in menus and stuff, drawn in a manga style, is actually really good (when not garbled by a complete lack of de-fringing or something)! And the music certainly has its moments: dig the funky end to the credits music, for instance (29:01).
I like The Masters Fighter a lot more than a whole lot of other fighting games. : o
Recorded with: PS2 to Framemeister to Elgato HD60. |
|
|
| |