Title: Final Fight Guy
Release Date: 03/20/92 (JP)/ June 1994 (NA)
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
This is the second game in our little journey that is a reprint of a previous entry (the first being Final Fantasy IV with its original mode/Western Easy Mode). This entrant is a retread of the classic Capcom beat-em-up Final Fight, which already was released a month into the Super Famicom's life cycle. In the previous review, I stated that the original SNES Final Fight was a limited port of the arcade classic; still fun to play, but the technical limitations of the console led to some compromises that hurt the overall experience of the game. The big draw of the arcade edition was the amount of sprites on screen at one time: you could have three players participate, a horde of thugs on screen, as well as a bunch of destructible objects. The SNES version was only one-player, only could hand two enemies on screen at a time, took out the industrial complex level, and the destructible objects were very limited. The result was a much more slow-paced slog through each level, with sections where enemies "take turns" venturing onto the screen to challenge your player. The enemies in most encounters are "waiting in the wings" for their turn. This left the game susceptible to a lot of cheese and negated a lot of the challenge, especially if you were using a turbo controller and could easily stun-lock each enemy to death. All this together makes for a lackluster, if not boring, gameplay experience. Will Final Fight Guy be the Turbo Hyper Fighting revision that SNES fans have been waiting for? We shall see!
Background/Story
The story of the game is exactly the same. Mike Haggar is the mayor of Metro City, a crime-ridden city that is under siege from the Mad Gear gang, led by the nefarious Mr. X. Haggar, a former pro-wrestler clearly modeled off of Jesse "The Body" Ventura, decides to take matters into his own hands once his daughter is kidnapped. He enlists the help of his daughter's fiance, Cody, and Cody's ninja pal Guy to help take out the Mad Gear gang neighborhood by neighborhood. Haggar functions as the slow but powerful grappler, Cody as the balance between speed and power, and Guy as the fast but weaker character.
Now the SNES version only had Haggar and Cody as playable characters, and this version seems to want to remedy this by allowing you to play as Guy for the first time on the SNES. Sounds great right? Well to allow this, they remove Cody as a playable character. They even add an addendum to the intro and outro cutscene to explain this to the audience: Cody is in Japan for some reason or another, and isn't able to be there to help rescue his darling girlfriend. It also sets up this weird love triangle, as Guy is noted to be a "romantic rival" to Cody, and at the end wistfully walks away as Cody and Jessica (that's the girlfriend's name btw) are reunited.
Other than this the game is EXACTLY THE SAME. They didn't take the opportunity to revise the game at all/fix any of the glaring issues. This instead seemed to be a way to appease Japanese fans. Final Fight was an incredibly popular game in Japanese arcades. Guy, as well, was a very popular character amongst Hi-Score hunters due to his speed. Many Japanese gamers bristled at the fact that Guy was excluded from the home ports, and it had been a common demand for this port to be made. This also explains why this game took so long to be localized to North America, and also why it received a limited "rental only" release at Blockbuster first.
Final Verdict
If you want you get into the nitty-gritty of this title, please read the earlier entry on Final Fight (it is one of my favorite blog posts too). This game is such a carbon copy of the previous entry that it really only needs the update about the character.
As always, Final Fight is a good game, even in its limited form. Is this version of the game worth getting? Not really. For collectors, the game cart is one of the most expensive and rare carts you can find. On average, it sells for about $250 for a loose cart on ebay. I wouldn't pay $250 for a new playable character in an old beat-em-up, and neither should you.
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