Final Fight

I can appreciate Final Fight was the inspiration for Streets of Rage but there is no comparison. Everything is so sluggish, the stunlock is infuriating, and there is little enemy/level variety. I'll give it another chance on SNES, sometime.

A lot tends to be made of influence, more than perhaps should be. Recognizing historical significance is one thing, and it is better to remember the past than to forget or be ignorant of it, but often, we overestimate the importance of the history in today's context. This is no more or less true of games than other media, but given how quickly games evolve, perhaps it is more felt. We would rather remember old games fondly than see them as museum pieces. The beat 'em up was, at one time, one of the most popular genres in the arcade and for couch play, and though it was not the first example of the genre, Final Fight is often looked at as a progenitor. It set the stage for basically every 16-bit brawler to follow it.

To be clear, there is a lot that Final Fight does right. Not surprisingly, given that it was developed by Capcom, the audiovisual presentation is outstanding. The characters all have large, detailed sprites, and one can get a rough idea of who they are, just from looking at them. Haggar is a burly wrestler, Cody is a brawling street fighter, and Guy is a more refined martial artist, and each of them have suitable animations to match these archetypes. Likewise, the enemies all have distinct appearances as well, ranging from clones of professional wrestler André the Giant to Hispanic knife specialists to a samurai and onward. There are a few more generic mooks as well, and overall the variety of enemies is great. The backgrounds are also very well drawn with a variety of convincing locations, the highlights being the subway and the club. The music is likewise entertaining with funky numbers that add to the urban jungle aesthetic created by the visuals, and the basic sounds of the fighting are just superb with every punch landing with a satisfying thud, and the enemies making plenty of convincing grunts and groans. These areas of the game have aged very well, with only the limited color palette betraying the game's age, and one could argue that this was a stylistic choice that holds up.

While the presentation of the game still works, the action is a bit more hit and miss. What we have here is rudimentary to put it bluntly, even for its time. Beat 'em ups are, by their nature, simplistic, and for its time, Final Fight's combat was par for the course, if not slightly ahead, but today, it feels limited. The basic combat is your punch, combo, grapple, jump-kick stuff. There are a few slight variations, including an alternate aerial attack for each character, but the play feels largely standard. One positive is that each of the the characters has his own fighting style. Haggar feels the most distinct. His attacks pack the most punch but he also takes a loss in terms of speed. Additionally, he has an exclusive jumping grapple, the flying piledriver, which is the strongest attack in the game. Cody and Guy are almost interchangeable, other than their physical appearance.. Guy is the fastest of the characters but also the weakest, whereas Cody is a bit stronger and slightly slower. When you get a game over, you can change characters, so that does help to keep the action from getting stale, but I've always found myself gravitating to Haggar's extra power.

Even if you don't mind that the relative lack of innovation in the combat, its stupid difficulty does a lot to make Final Fight less appealing as a game. Given its arcade origin, ramping up the difficulty made good business sense, as it no doubt was a quarter muncher back in the day, but divorced from the arcades, it feels a bit unfair. If you're playing solo, you can expect to be using a lot of continues, as the game nearly requires two players to manage the amount of enemies on screen. Also, the large character sprites may be attractive, but they make it much more difficult to evade your attackers, especially when you are outnumbered or surrounded. The console version for the Super Nintendo is even worse in this regard. It only has a one player mode and a limited number of continues, rendering the game almost impossible to complete. From my experience, death in either version was essentially inevitable as you just couldn't avoid being hit in many cases, so the game was more of a test of endurance than of actual skill.

Despite the cheap difficulty, Final Fight is still an enjoyable title on the whole. However, it is far from a personal favorite of mine. The fact that it was one of the first games of its kind has given it a lot longer legs than it might otherwise have had, and there are other titles of its own era like Streets of Rage that are much better, not to mention Final Fight's own sequels for the SNES. Nevertheless, you can easily argue that those games would not have existed without the success of this one, and it still has value as a beat 'em up distilled down to its most basic form. Furthermore, it is an impressive title compared with the likes of Renegade and Vigilante, so it's easy to see why it became such a hit. Chances are that most people who would be interested in the game have played it by now, but if you have not, you ought to give it a try just to see its place in the history of the genre.