Club Retro 2021: March - 3D Fighters

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah yeah. This my JAM. That's your pick, right? Glad you rescued this theme.

I am going to make an effort to participate more this month, though I'll mostly be revisiting games rather than trying completely new games, cause I've tried almost everything there is that I can emulate in the genre. My first rec: I'm hoping everyone gives Tobal 2 a shot. I like the first game too, but some would say it was too basic; this can't be said about the second game, which introduces a bunch of new mechanics and moves, and has much more elaborate graphics (though the framerate does dip a bit sometimes). I think it's the best 3D fighter on the PSX; the only real rivals I acknowledge would be Tekken 3 (the first Tekken I really like) and Soul Edge. IMO Tobal 2 has the edge, and that's before you get into the full-fledged roguelike RPG it includes.

The Hardcore Gaming 101 article has a lot more on the basic mechanics and appeal of the game. Also, I wrote it. 

Which reminds me: back when I first started writing for that site, I had plans to write about a short-lived series of Japan-exclusive 3D fighters called Goiken Muyou. The games were created by a top Virtua Fighter player in Japan (which had, according to some sources, the first major competitive scene for any fighting game, before even Street Fighter 2) with input from other top players, and four of them were playable as hidden characters in the first game. At the time, I felt I wasn't knowledgeable enough about fighting games to adequately explain the mechanics. I also hoped to be able to set up an interview with the creator somehow; while he'd be easy enough to contact as he's active on the Internet, I don't speak Japanese, and I wouldn't go so far as to pay an interpreter out of pocket. I think I was hoping to persuade somebody to translate for free, but obviously that didn't happen. As I recall, they're a pair of competent VF clones (one on Saturn, one of Playstation) with a few then-unique mechanics clearly tailored to competitive players' complaints - for example, you can't finish the opponent with a weak attack (ie, a basic punch, say), and you can't backdash twice immediately in a row or you trip and fall down (so no running away, basically). Also, the first game's high school setting predated Capcom's Rival Schools by a couple months. Anyway, I'd like to play some of those again, though the first game was always rougher to emulate (you had to use a specific older version of SSF or it would crash - hopefully it's better now).

Yeah, Megamix was the King of Fighters of the 3D genre. Virtua Fighter + Fighting Vipers, plus a bunch of unlockable characters from AM2's history - Janet from Virtua Cop, Rent-A-Hero, the actual car from Daytona USA, some guys from Sonic the Fighter (now here's a 3D fighter that doesn't get talked about much - it's actually not bad) etc. My favorite was Siba, a prototype character conceived for Virtua Fighter 1 that had ended up being replaced by Akira. The 3D fighter with my favorite characters was Last Bronx, but unfortunately, that was AM3 instead of AM2, so they weren't part of it.

Nah, Ehrgeiz plays very different from Tobal. It's more of an early arena fighter - it was the forerunner to Power Stone and so on - while Tobal is in the mold of regular 3D fighters like VF or Tekken. I don't think Ehrgeiz works very well as a fighting game. The Quest mode is a full-fledged action dungeon RPG that basically has nothing to do with the main game - I think it was added just because Squaresoft published it, along with the FF7 characters (Ehrgeiz did come out in the arcades first). It doesn't even use the same battle system. It's actually pretty good, though.

Tobal's Quest Mode is a roguelike, but it does use the same battle system as the main game. In the second game, the Quest has more different dungeons, a town, a little storyline, and it lets you capture monsters and import them back in the fighter. You can also import your leveled-up character back in the main game; a very high-level character can send a regular opponent out of the right with a single powerful hit. It feels, fittingly, like Dragon Ball. 

Maybe what The Bouncer needed to get respect is a roguelike attached.