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Final Fight One (Import review)

Format: GameBoy Advance
Published by: Capcom
Based on: The Slugger

Genre: Beat-Em-Up
Media: cartridge
Date: May 25, 2001

Let's groping large sweaty men!!

Capcom is the closest thing a game developer can be to manic-depressive. On one hand, they consistently create innovative and well-polished games that raise the bar for quality and garner widespread acclaim; yet at the same time they constantly rehash their great ideas until those once-brilliant sparks of creativity fade to a dull shadow of their former selves. Their recent handheld output is perfect proof of this: at the high end of the spectrum you have them co-creating two of the best portable adventures ever in the form of Zelda: Oracles, as well as retooling an ancient series to be something new and perfectly-suited to the format in the form of Megaman Battle Network. But at the other extreme of integrity you have them crapping out direct ports of old games without a single thought to modern design sensibility and with barely a nod to the requirements of a handheld system, a chain of successive cash-ins with little regard for the benefit of consumers.

Care to guess which end of the spectrum Final Fight One occupies? Here's a hint: "one" is Japanese for "Show me the money."

That's right: Final Fight One is the absolute epitome of the distressing and depressing practice of hacking old console titles for a quick buck. There's certainly nothing wrong with developers making the most of their brand names, but at least some of them have the decency to give customers something new in the process. Take Konami, for instance; their early GameBoy Advance titles have included a brilliant new edition of Castlevania in the style of Symphony of the Night, the best Mario Kart clone since the original, and a new chapter in the Gradius saga due a few months down the road. Capcom, on the other hand, likes to play little mind games with its fans, giving them something new and wonderful at times and other times charging them full price to play an unimproved take on a game that would cost them $6 for a used Super NES version.

Final Fight One isn't simply a disappointment, it's an insult. I am sincerely annoyed at this game, and had I spent money on it rather than acquiring it in a trade for some other crappy games would probably do something rash. You know, like start an Internet petition or the like.

Basically, here's what Final Fight One consists of: the original code of the first SNES Final Fight game, cropped to fit the GBA screen, and with Guy added back into the mix of playable characters. That's it. None of the art has been redrawn - not even the cinematics at the beginning of the game. Well, there are a few mid-level dialogue boxes thrown in, but they clash with the graphical style of the rest of the game. Which is a double disappointment after seeing the great SNK-style art that adorns the cover as well as the nicely redrawn sprites of Guy and Cody and Sodom and Rolento et al. seen in the SF Alpha games; none of these refined elements made it back into this title. There's nothing here to differentiate it from the SNES original except for the fact that you can take it on the road. But even that's not so great - this is another of those annoying carts that offers a link mode only if you have a second cartridge for the second player.

Yes, Capcom actually expects you to pay twice for this game in order to be able to play the 2P mode of Final Fight (the way the game was really meant to be played). Considering that the GBA was touted as a revolution in gaming for so long thanks in large part to the magical ability it would have which would to allow two-player games to run from a single cartridge, not too many developers seem to be making the most of that feature. RAM limitations be damned; there's no excuse for this kind of crap. I don't have to buy two copies of Soul Calibur to play a 2P game on Dreamcast. I don't have to buy four copies of Mario Party to play with three friends on my N64. So there's no justifable reason for me to have to purchase two copies of any game for GBA - particularly a weak port of a game that millions of us bought a decade ago in the first place.

Perhaps this wouldn't be so terrible if Final Fight were a great game that had aged as well as Chrono Trigger or Super Mario IV. But it's not. The walk-and-brawl format of games was done much better by quite a few other games (Streets of Rage II, Magic Sword and Konami's X-Men, to name a few) and in any case represents nothing but a temporary waypoint in the evolutionary road to modern fighting games. Final Fight was fun when I dropped in quarter after quarter with my friends on a lazy Saturday afternoon at Putt-Putt, but Street Fighter II changed everything a few years later, and honestly there's zero depth to the gameplay: walk, jump-kick, die. Learn the patterns, walk, jump-kick, don't die. Suffer ignominious defeat at the hands of a cheap boss, become frustrated, quit. It would help perhaps a little bit if Capcom would finally get the hang of how to adapt an arcade game to a home version: first they offer penalty-free continues for Strider 2, now they offer too few continues for Final Fight One. Yes, it's possible to beat the game within the continues given, but mastering the gameplay sufficiently to do so entails some mind-numbing repetition on the order of maxing out your levels in the original Dragon Warrior. There's not enough substance here to justify the investment of time required to achieve mastery.

In fact, there's really nothing here whatsoever for a modern gamer. Better versions of this game can be had for much less if you don't mind playing a Super NES. Better games can also be had, such as the upcoming Super Street Fighter II X. The only reason I'm not giving this the lowest possible rating is because I do owe the Final Fight series for a small amount of nostalgia generated during my junior high years. And being a Gen-X type who goes in for video game websites featuring cheap, easy laughs, I have to respect the sheer quantity of unintentional homoerotic overtones this game offers for public delectation. But is a childish giggle at overly-muscled men grasping one another about the waist really worth $35 when I can read Portal of Evil for free? Of course not. So save your money for something more enjoyable, like a piņata full of human body parts or a phone booth full of hungry mosquitoes. You'll thank me in the end.

Hall of shame

Unfortunately, Final Fight One is hardly Capcom's first offense with this whole "cheap handheld cash-in" scheme. In fact, they're repeat offenders and deserve much more than a rap on the knuckles for such crimes as:

Ghost 'N' Goblins: See review.

1942: A straight port of the NES version of an arcade game which the GameBoy Color could easily have replicated. Funny thing about shooters... they're much more fun when you can see the entire playfield at once.

Street Fighter Alpha: Apparently this was Capcom's tacit act of throwing in the towel to SNK, as SFA for GBC didn't deserve to lick the boots of the worst Neo Geo Pocket Color fighting game.

Breath of Fire: Capcom's ho-hum RPG series gets a new lease on life. Supposedly this version will make small concessions to modern gameplay sensibilities, making it less offensive than, say, Final Fight One. But will it make up for the injustice of Square translating BoF instead of Final Fantasy V back in the day? Not bloody likely.

Megaman I-IV; XTreme 1 & 2: That's not one, not two, but six Megaman games which consist of nothing but scraps of the original games, compressed and compiled into handheld versions. The scary part is that some of these have actually become more expensive on the secondary market than they were new.