Retro Friday #12: Fighter's History

Pat yourself on the back, you've made it to another Friday, so it's time for another episode of Retro Friday before the upcoming weekend!

This week continues where Kaiser Knuckle left off, at least in spirit. Though, unlike our previous highlight target, Fighter's History is a lot more controversial of a title, thanks to how just overt of a Street Fighter 2 clone it was. I know it's a fairly beloved game in some communities, and I personally even had fun playing it with friends in a mini-tournament, but come on, we all know what they were trying to do.

That's not to say that they did nothing to set themselves apart from their inspiration, but let's talk about that in a bit more detail later. Let's start from the top.

While I don't wish to repeat myself too much, in our spotlight for Kaiser Knuckle I wanted to be fair to it and point out that while it's easy to dismiss it and games like it as "Street Fighter clones," you have to look at it from the developer perspective.

A new game bursts onto the scene, performs incredibly well, and suddenly there's a market for more. So what do you do as a publisher or developer? Would you look at Street Fighter and say, "we should make something completely different"? Probably not. The formula is right in front of you and it works, just do something similar and don't screw it up.

Not to mention, some traces of Street Fighter are still found in games that couldn't be further removed from it in terms of gameplay. The motion inputs used in 1992 are still the staple these days, and the variation of the iconic Shoryuken, Hadouken, and Tatsu are found on countless characters. Almost like rock, paper, and scissor to build your game around.

All this is to say that if some of those SF2 elements are still at the foundation of a fighting game, how much difference could we really expect from the earliest entries into the genre.

Capcom themselves weren't too pleased, though, as you might imagine. Despite countless copycats, Fighter's History garnered their particular interest for being just a bit too close, allegedly. Even if nobody would argue about the obvious similarities, I'm still glad that the court threw this case out. You need a lot more than being similar to warrant the claim of copyright infringement.

That said, when you get your hands on this game, it's a constant series of moments where you go "oh yeah, that's Guile/Chun-Li/Ryu". The movement, functions, and the general feel are all there to an almost ridiculous extent. I'd love to say that it's deeper than that, but it really does feel like playing a very familiar game where absolutely everything is just slightly off.

The sequel is much better, in my opinion, and was closer to a truly standout fighting game, which is why you still see Karnov's Revenge get some play on fightcade and even some small tournaments.

As far as distinctive features go, Fighter's History is only really known for weak spots and "destructible" clothing. If you want to deal more damage, every character had their own unique weak point that you could typically assume from their design. Smack then enough and part of their clothing falls off in a fashion similar to Vega's claw while also inflicting a stun.

As minor as this is. It's still rather special for its time. Art of Fighting allowed you to rip clothing a year prior, but it was more of an extra flare for finishing off your opponent with a special move. Unless I'm mistaken, it wouldn't be until 1995 with Fighting Vipers that we'd get a game where location damage would matter for gameplay.

With the gameplay being unremarkable compared to its peers, Fighter's History only had the presentation to rely on, but it's not exactly great there either. I have fond memories of the Clown from Karnov's Revenge, and the titular villain himself started to look more like a Hokuto no Ken character, but the original game struggled to offer anything remarkable.

The sprites were far too basic, character designs too plain, and stages, while competent, didn't do anything to improve the overall package. I will leave you with my favorite track from the game, as per usual, and it will probably serve as a good indication that the music was far from awe-inspiring as well.

Many titles from this era generally emulated whatever sort of pop sound could be heard in the movies, anime, and TV shows, so you have a lot of really generic pop-rock style tunes that I'd probably not hear at all if I could.

Either way, thank you very much for hopping in to check out this Retro Friday. I don't know if I will be able to keep going for much longer, so I'll try to focus on maybe more interesting and beloved titles starting with next week, just so that if this series does go out, it ends up on a high note. Have a great weekend, everybody!