Final Fight CD
Jul 1, 2023 11:13:51 GMT -5
Post by anayo on Jul 1, 2023 11:13:51 GMT -5
I had trouble getting into Final Fight CD at first. I assure you it’s not because I’m like my normie friends who refuse to play retro games because they’re not HD enough. It’s just that sometimes I’ll find a vintage game belonging to a genre I like, but I find it hard to enjoy because of how profoundly its successor outdoes it. Virtua Cop II comes to mind. Virtua Cop I is great, but Virtua Cop II is so bombastic, well-paced, and fun that I have a hard time going back to Virtua Cop I.
Streets of Rage II ruined 16-bit street brawlers for me. I love it so much that I have trouble enjoying other games of its type, even though I have fond memories playing games like Ninja Turtles or Die Hard Arcade at the mall.
It didn’t settle well with me that there are moves you can perform in Streets of Rage 2 that don’t do anything in Final Fight. I missed being able to double-tap forward and punch to do a grand upper. In Streets of Rage II, when you grapple an enemy, you can press left or right to flip over them, changing your orientation. Not in Final Fight. Once you grab somebody, you’re stuck on that side.
Sometimes in Streets of Rage II the screen will scroll from up to down instead of just from left to right. This never happens in Final Fight. It makes the world feel smaller and the game engine less capable. I also felt that Final Fight’s character sprites looked a bit derpy. As a non-artist I can't diagnose exactly what I'm seeing, but it has something to do with their poses and bodily proportions.
I feel like Sega in the 90’s Nintendo and Sony were exploring new kinds of gaming experiences best suited to the home, but not Sega. Sega’s main idea seemed to be to copy their success in the arcades by doing mostly the same thing in your house. I’m not even talking about back when it made sense for gamers to go crazy over Mortal Kombat II losing arcade exclusivity and getting a home port. Even console-only titles like Sonic the Hedgehog or NiGHTS into Dreams have suspiciously arcade-like underpinnings. Present day-me really likes this quality about 90’s Sega, since arcades made a big impression on me as a kid, only for them to die out by the time I graduated high school. Now I miss them.
But in my first moments with Final Fight CD, I felt like it flaunted the worst qualities of the arcade. Specifically I was thinking, “This is a quarter-eater.” It was like Final Fight had been designed with arcade owners’ profits in mind, not me, which I found especially annoying because Final Fight CD is a home product. I seemed to do mostly okay until the game would decide, “That’s enough. Now it’s time to take one of your lives.” Then an enemy would sucker punch me, carving a huge gash out of my health bar. Bosses would even soar across the map in a full court shot, body slamming me with no warning. How was I supposed to react to that? Very early on I gave up playing with the default number of lives. I maxed those out in the options menu and never looked back.
The moment I learned to like Final Fight was when I reached a bonus stage. My fighter was at a gas station facing a parked car with the instructions “BREAK CAR!” flashing in the middle of the screen. Picking up a convenient metal pipe, I beat the car into scrap metal. After I left the scene, a goon appeared, moaning “OH, MY CAR!” in the derpiest voice imaginable, falling to his knees as animated tears sprinkled from his eyes.
Where does Capcom get this from? Is it the company culture? Is there a specific employee who’s been around since 1989 and keeps putting this stuff in their games? This delightful absurdity made me flashback to other, more recent Capcom games, like the ridiculous dance scene from Devil May Cry V, or the part from Resident Evil 4 where Leon quips, “Where’s everyone going? Bingo?” This tone just screams “Capcom”, and I love it. I had already seen the “BREAK CAR!” bonus stage in Street Fighter II, but somehow seeing its origins in Final Fight brought over 30 years worth of Capcom into focus for me. They’ve always been this way, and it’s wonderful.
I love how my fighter can eat cheese burgers out of trash cans to restore life. It’s stupid and puts a smile on my face. The opening cinematic is hilarious, too. I almost couldn’t believe that it was in the game for real. The actors were hamming it up so much that it came across like a silly video people would make today to poke fun at action movies from 30 years ago. It was hilarious how they introduced Hagar like, “mayor, also former body builder and street fighter” - a pretense for him to later take justice into his own hands by beating up crooks on the streets. Something about elected officials personally fighting the bad guys seems very 90’s to me. It reminds me of Harrison Ford as the terrorist-fighting president in Air Force One, or the fighter pilot U.S. president from Independence Day.
I think this touches on why I love arcade games like this. They’re all more or less appropriating 80’s and 90’s action movies. But then they're digested those through a Japanese perspective and feed back to Americans again. They take place in this larger-than-life world which is just a little “off”, since it's my culture through the lens of a foreign culture. But that somehow enhances the idealized escapism their sources of inspiration were aiming for.
Before long, I started noticing how Streets of Rage II took its identity from Final Fight, not the other way around. Like how a disembodied human hand hovers in the corner of the screen, urging you to “GO” to the next area. Or how some Streets of Rage enemies suspiciously resemble the ones from Final Fight, especially SoR II’s “Y Signal” guy with his mohawk and gaudy yellow trench coat. Streets of Rage II even copied one of Final Fight’s more annoying parts, namely how it’s possible to propel bad guys off the screen where you can’t reach them, leaving you no option but to wait for them to reenter the play area.
I started picking apart Final Fight’s weaknesses and developing strategies to win. First, I had to memorize most of the game, which was common for a video game from 1993. I especially had to memorize the locations of health pickups. They were semi-randomized, but at least a few trashcans reliably contained a cheeseburger 100% of the time. I also had to memorize when the game would sucker punch me.
Pickup weapons like the sword or metal pipe were way more powerful than Streets of Rage II’s. I could even stun-lock whole crowds of enemies by timing my attacks correctly. It felt like a huge setback when I get hit and drop them, losing them forever. Final Fight’s “super move” (the one that costs some life bar but cancels out all enemy attacks) was also more critical than Streets of Rage II’s. Final Fight would checkmate me into unwinnable situations far more often than SoR II, with no way out except for the super move. I had to develop a sense for when the game was backing me into a corner and act accordingly. I also noticed Final Fight’s super move drained far less health than the one in SoR II, so I could use it more frequently with lighter consequences.
By corralling the enemies around me like a sheepdog, anticipating health pickups and cheap shots, decoding boss attack patterns, and cheesing the hell out of everyone with stun-lock moves, I found I could claw forward just a little bit farther each time I played Final Fight. I had to max out my lives in the options screen, and when I finally beat the head kingpin, I only had two of those lives remaining. But I did it, and it felt great.
I like Final Fight’s soundtrack. It belongs in an action movie, and it’s not a bad use of the Sega CD’s audio streaming capabilities, either. Although while playing I did wonder why the game still has recolored enemy sprites, especially if the CD format is supposed to have 700 MB of space. This annoyed me somewhat, since as a kid I would never hear FM synth in a Genesis game and think, “I wish this was CD audio.” But I would see recolored sprites and think, “Hey, that’s the same enemy as before. Did they think I wouldn’t notice that they painted him a different color?”
It bothers me that the Sega CD has technology in it that could specifically address shortcomings like this. There is room on the CD-ROM for more enemy sprites. They just decided not to use the extra space for that. Final Fight’s studio recorded music and fully voiced movie sequences are delightful, but Sega CD games rarely get these right, which deepens my philosophical questions about why the Sega CD needed to exist in the first place. Final Fight CD doesn’t feel like a good Sega CD game. It’s more like a good game that happens to be on Sega CD.
Maybe one reason Nintendo still makes hardware and Sega doesn’t is that Nintendo was better at asking how a given technology would make games more fun. They didn't pursue high tech just for the sake of high tech. I acknowledge that Nintendo didn’t always get this right. Like the e-reader, where Nintendo thought it was a good idea to print digital data onto the margins of trading cards and incorporating those into games somehow. Or their fixation with putting a screen in the middle of a game controller, which started with that Gameboy Advance to Gamecube adapter cable then crashed and burned with the Wii U.
But when Nintendo got on the right track with this, it was world-changing. I’m certain someone at Nintendo had to ask, “How can we improve video game controllers in a way no one has done before?”, “What can accelerometers and IR sensors do for gaming?”, or “What if a gaming console WAS a handheld?” Whereas Sega’s thought process seems to be more like, “What if arcade, but at home?”, “What if Sega Genesis, but with a CD-ROM drive?”, or “What if Genesis owners want an upgrade, but not really, so we sort of let them halfway upgrade?”
I can go on all day about the Sega CD's problems, and how those problems might be symptomatic of Sega's deeper underlying issues. But there's no denying that Final Fight CD is a classic game. If you’re fond of arcade street brawlers, make sure to check it out.