Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 377: Final Fight

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

Jeremy "Punchy" Parish, Diamond "Final" Feit, and Kurt "K.O." Kalata are your three selectable player-character options in this roaming belt-scroll brawl through the history of Final Fight, a burly side story to our ongoing Street Fighter retrospectives. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, it's Final Fight with the Final Fight. No, wait, that's not right. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish, and this week we are continuing the journey through Street Fighter by not talking about a Street Fighter game. That's right. It's final fight. The game that would be Street Fighter, if only they had kept the branding, but they didn't. And then it turned out to be Street Fighter anyway through various routes and measures. Anyway, We'll talk about all that, because this is Retronauts, and it is a video game history podcast where we talk about old games and explain the enigmatic comments we make at the beginning of each episode.

And here with me to journey through enigmas. Well, let's start in Japan with the person they named the series four. Hello, everybody. My name is Diamond Fight. And I had dinner out of a garbage truck tonight, but it'll be fine, right? This chicken, look good. I hear those are juicy and delicious I don't know what the juices are

but yes and much closer to where I am Kurt Kolata of Harkor Gaming 101 and both of you have shown up on various and sundry of the Street Fighter retrospective episodes we've been working on this year because it is

it hurts to say this but yes the 30th anniversary of Street Fighter 2 So at this point, I believe we have recorded Street Fighter 1 and Street Fighter 2 the World Warrior. But there's still a Street Fighter 2 discussion to be had about all the various spinoffs and remakes and all that sort of stuff. What do you even call Super Street Fighter 2? It's not a sequel. It's not a remake. It's an iteration.

It's enhancement plus alpha expansion pack. Yes. Okay, the arcade expansion packs. But, you know, before we dive into those in Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter 3 and EX and whatever, I do think it is important to kind of double back a little bit and talk about a game that is a series that's intimately related to Street Fighter to the point where at one point it was going to have the Street Fighter name until they realized this doesn't make any sense. And that is the Final Fight series, which debuted in arcades in 1989. And, yeah, like I said, they were originally going to, well, they, they, they bandied around the idea of calling it Street Fighter 89, not necessarily because they were like, yes, this is, this is Street Fighter, because it has no connections to Street Fighter, the original Street Fighter that I am aware of. It doesn't even really have an aesthetic similarity.

I think they just thought, you know, like the Street Fighter brand has some cachet. Well, it is a game about fighting people in the street. streets. So I think it wasn't a stretch for them. That's true. But I mean, you know, Street Fighter was already a certain thing. But this was, this was the era of games like Zelda 2 and Super Mario 2 and all these other twos, these sequels that didn't really play all that much or look all that much like their predecessors. And, you know, Capcom was a really big supporter of the NES. I mean, they even gave us Bionicamando on an NES, which was really. sort of a sequel to the arcade game as opposed to the arcade port that everyone sort of expected it to be. So they weren't, you know, they weren't shy about this whole like, hey, let's throw around names and, you know, change things up pretty wildly. But yeah, as far as I am aware, the idea of calling it Street Fighter 89 disappeared pretty early. And the only evidence I've

ever seen of that, you know, tentative plan is a flyer that presented this as Street Fighter 89. And it's a very memorable image illustration by, is that an Ackyman drawing? I think it is. It's like a watercolor-ish painting or maybe marker drawing. But it's got, I'm trying to remember off the top of my head, it's got the trio of playable characters kind of surrounded by punks. And, yeah, just a really great image really makes a great impression.

But when this showed up in arcades, it was instead of Street Fighter 989, just final fight. So, you know, they were done with the street fighting. This was the end. This was it. There were not going to be any more. There was no more fighting after this game. That turned out to be a lie. But, you know, it was kind of the marketing scheme.

It was the final fight of the 80s. Aha. You know, it came out in December, 1989. So for that one brief month, we had no more fighting. And then 1990 came around. I was like, you know what? What if we all started fighting again? In the streets.

Little did they know that the 80s wouldn't actually end until smells like teen spirit came out. So we still had a few more years left in us. So before we begin talking about final fight, I would like to ask, what are your respective histories with this particular game? Are you someone who played it back in the arcades, as I assume a wee tot? Or did you discover it later? Did you decide you like it even though you played the Super NES version first?

I'm curious to hear. Well, I absolutely played it in the arcades. I probably played this more than I ever played the original Street Fighter for sure. And while I certainly didn't know about the 89 connection, because, you know, as an American, and I didn't see that image until much, much later. There is a throwaway line in sort of the attract mode, story mode, that says that Mike Hagar is a former street fighter. And I knew Street Fighter existed as a game. So I was like, oh, is this guy from Street Fighter?

And I just, but of course, without having a Street Fighter cabinet on hand, I had no way to look this up or verify it. But I just kind of assumed, oh, this must be a guy from Street Fighter, you know, but that's not the case at all. it was guy but guy wouldn't be guy from street fighter until street fighter alpha three so uh it's all it's all wibly wobbly uh kurt what about you yeah but this oh sorry did you have more okay please just just just wanted to say that it was an arcade game it was uh it was available locally in my town like i didn't have to go very far to find it so it was it was a game i played pretty regularly and you know if i had the funds i would just you know i could in theory beat it in about a half hour or so if I had, you know, if I had the time and I had the money in my pocket, but like it's definitely a game that I played all the way through many,

many times over. So like I, I knew it pretty well as an arcade game. And then, yeah, and then I know that the home ports existed, but then I saw them and they all seemed sort of compromise one way or the other. And by the time they came out, they were kind of, it was already kind of, you know, Street Fighter 2 existed and Street Fighter 2 kind of took over. But it always, you know, lingered to the back of my mind, like, this was a really great arcade game. And so, you know, many years later when emulation became a thing, and then, of course, actual arcade ports became a thing. It was definitely a game that I always wanted to revisit whenever I possibly could. But for that brief window before Street Fighter 2 kind of blew it away, it was absolutely one of the coolest

video games that I played, and I played it a lot. All right. And Kurt? the local pizza hut that was one of the three games that they had in the lobby between I think that Magic Sword and Magician Lord So I would say I played it Doubling down on the Capcom there Yeah it was a really nice little

corner And I remember just really impressed by the graphics Because the characters were really huge And since I didn't have a Super Nintendo I didn't really play the home port at all I just kind of knew it as a As a kind of a Sega fan boy I was like look the Super Nintendo Final Fights

It's crap. They cut out so much stuff. But other than being like a bullet point in the console war, I played Final Fight 2 a couple years later because in middle school I had a friend that hold absolutely raucous parties for middle school. But I spent most of that up in his room playing Final Fight 2 in the Super Nintendo. Yeah. So as for myself, you know, starting in like 1989, 1990 through 93, that was that was high school

for me, because I'm old. And so I had a couple of friends, and we would hang out at arcades because back then, arcades were a thing that you did. You went and hung out at them. We would go to arcades, you know, at least once a month together, sometimes more often than that. And it would be, you know, the various arcades. Like we had a put putt, we had several arcades at the mall.

We had a couple of big pizza place type, you know, like adult bar slash pizza combo places with huge arcades. So we could kind of roam around town and play video games. And everywhere we went, Final Fight was there. It was just, you know, it was a fact of life. It was like you had Pac-Man for a long time. And then a decade later, you had Final Fight everywhere. So we spent a lot of time playing this game.

And, you know, I had already played Double Dragon on NES in 1988 when that came out. It was there, you know, day one or as quickly as I could be, as quickly as I could save up the money. So the idea of like walking and punching dudes, that was like, you know, cool. Wow, I could punch guys. But Final Fight was, it was better because you had really big guys to punch. And you could eat, you know, turkey out of the garbage. And you could play with the other player, which, you know, you couldn't do on Double Dragon. And I didn't actually see the Double Dragon arcade game until after Final Fight.

I don't know why, but it just wasn't that prevalent where I lived. So, you know, going back to Double Dragon was kind of disappointed. for me in the arcades, but Final Fight was one that definitely sucked in a lot of our quarters and tokens. And, you know, I rented it when it came out on Super NES and said, wow, this is really bad. I don't like this. But, you know, still had fond memories of the arcade game, even though it is kind of superficial. And I actually own two arcade one-up cabinets. One of them is an Atari multi-thing that has like 12 games on it. And the other is Final Fight slash. Strider slash 1944 ghost and goblins. And I bought it mainly for Strider. But, you know,

Final Fight is also good to throw on for a few minutes, you know, play with the nephews, walk around punch guys. They can enjoy the saucy mixes of the cabinet bezel art. It's, you know, too adult for them, but it's okay. It's all part in parcel of growing up. At some point, you have to see the saucy minxes. Anyway, yeah, so that's, that's final fights history. Thanks everyone for listening. Oh, wait, actually, we do need to talk about the prehistory of Final Fight that led up to Final Fight, because obviously no video game is created in a vacuum. And we have actually talked about all of these things in recent episodes.

So just as a quick recap, you can kind of start the cycle of invention that led to Final Fight in 1984. I mean, you know, you can always find some influence that goes further back. But really, 1984 is where you can really just stick a pin in it because that is when IREM and designer Takashi Nishiyama gave us Kung Fu master, also known as Spartan X, also known as Kung Fu, which was kind of the first belt scroller. And I think we've talked about that some, but in pretty decent detail back in the Street Fighter one episode. So check that out if you are curious to hear more about the world of Kung Fu Master, aka Spartan X, aka Kung Fu. Yes. The following year, Yoshihisa Kishimoto of Technos Japan gave us Renegade, which we talked about in a recent episode where Bob hosted talking about the Kunio-Koon series games. And that was a pretty big breakthrough.

The, you know, Kung Fu Master was basically just a side-scrolling game where you walked left to right guys or also bees and snakes or moths, I guess, would approach you from left or right. So you really didn't have a lot of choice in movement, but you could, you know, have very granular control over how you attacked enemies within the fixed 2D plane. Renegade took away the sort of granular controls and instead replaced it with the ability to move sort of horizontally up and down the screen. It gave you this kind of fake 3D impression. It's not real 3D, but it does give you the sense that you are, instead of being restricted to a 2D plane,

you're kind of able to move in and out of the depth of the screen. You have another axis to work with. Yes, another axis of motion. But not of attacks. You can't attack vertically, only horizontally. It's a world where, what is, like, is there some canonical explanation for why that's the case? Or is it just, it's a video game and you just kind of roll with it? It's like you're a 2D guy, but you exist one X frame at a time.

So you can only line up with one person on your frame. I don't know. It's been an flatlander. Yeah. All right. So you had a renegade. And then two years later, Nishiyama jumped ship to from IREM to Capcom and gave a street fighter, which was basically Kung Fu Master. But instead of walking through, you know, lines of knife throwers and dwarves and snakes and moths, instead you were, I guess those were dragon Sussex. Anyway, you were instead just facing off against another person. That introduced, you know, special attacks and took away the need to really move last. to get around. Instead, you were moving laterally to move into position against foes, like to kind of get within striking range, but also to avoid their, their attacks. So it was very much about strategy and positioning, as opposed to traversal.

In 1987, at the same time, Kishimoto and again, Technos Japan, gave us double dragon, which was basically Renegade 2, and had much more elaborate controls and brought everything more toward that fighting game style. And so then in 1989, we have Final Fight, which really is a synthesis of Street Fighter 2 and, you know, Renegade slash Double Dragon, which is interesting because no one who actually worked on those games was involved with Final Fight. It was basically a brand new crew who had just come off the game Forgotten Worlds, which was a, you know, a 2D shooter very much in the style of sidearm.

or Section Z, or Section Zet, if you prefer. And somehow they managed to create a very, very convincing synthesis of Double Dragon and Street Fighter. And thus we have Final Fight. So, Final Fight, as it says in the notes, is a Rockham-Socom multiplayer extravaganza. Like both Street Fighter and Double Dragon, it is a two-player game. You can play it solo, but it's more fun with another person. and it's about the cooperative brawling as opposed to the competitive fighting that wouldn't really take off until 1991 with Street Fighter 2, which we've already talked about.

But, you know, it is an attempt to kind of bring the big, beefy characters and very detailed backgrounds and animations of Street Fighter to that sort of three-quarters persective sort of tableau of, you know, like a diorama style almost of, of, you know, like a diorama style almost. of double dragon. And, you know, it uses a lot of the same mechanics as double dragon, which is that you do have some limited special attacks. In this case, they will drain a little bit of your life if you use them so you can't rely on them. And it's really built around the fact that it's not a fair game. You will constantly be surrounded by enemies who can really cheese you, break through your guard, who will hold you and let other enemies hit you. And so it really is meant to be

played with two players so you can kind of have each other's back and protect one another. I would say even though it is, it is a harsh game and certainly designed to get you to put in more coins when you're in trouble, I always found this game to be much more reasonable than Double Dragon. Like, I never came close to beating Double Dragon in the arcades or even on NDS, but this is a game that I, you know, once I figured out the rhythm of it, and especially if I had a friend to helped me out. Like, this was, beating this was just a matter of time.

But Double Dragon, never. Not even close. I think it's a little bit easier to play than Double Dragon just because the arcade version only has two buttons, right? Like, uh, punch and jump. That is correct. I'm looking over at my, my final fight cabinet. It's confirming.

Very useful reference material. But that's compared to like double dragon, which had the punch and the kick. And then you, uh, you had a third button to jump, which I was found to be a little awkward. And the move set of the characters is a little smaller the Double Dragon, but it's just much easier to play. It's much snappier. Yeah, and, you know, Double Dragon, as cool and inventive and fun to play as that game was, I have to assume when I first came out, I'm speaking from Conjecture here. It is, in the arcade version, it's very unbalanced, it's super unfair, and at the same time, you can pretty much just sleepwalk your way through it by using, certain special attack combos.

The elbow smash, I think, is the one where you basically, like, anytime an enemy approaches you, you turn your back to them and kind of nudge yourself like a pixel or two down. And then as they get within a certain distance of you, you use a special combo or like button combo, and it causes your character to smack them in the face with your elbow. And that's basically like an instant win button. You just stand there waiting for guys to come up and walk within your character. your elbow range. And there you go. You instantly win. But it's interesting that both of you

have mentioned pumping quarters and tokens into the machine because this game was consciously designed around that. Diamond shared some really great resources, including an official interview about the game with Akiman and Akira Nishitani, the co-designers of the game that was on Capcom site. And Akiman said, like, this game, this game, was really heavily inspired by American arcade play habits, because in Japan, there was just a different philosophy to approaching video games. You know, you get the superplays, you get the one-quarter challenge or the no-death challenges, and you can, you know, buy, back in the day, you could buy VHS tapes of people just performing amazing feats of video gaming. Like, these would be published by companies.

I've seen cave shooters or salamander from Konami. They would just, you know, Grodius, they would just have cassettes of people, like tape cassettes, of people playing perfect games of these arcade titles. And so that there was a real sense of purpose and pride in being able to extract the most from your 100-ean coin. Whereas in America, that wasn't really the case. Like, definitely there are people who live for the challenge of arcade games and will say, well, I've only got, you know, one coin or two coins to play as far as I can. But I think, you know, a few factors kind of play in there to sort of create a different vibe for the American mindset to arcades. One of which is that a 100 yen coin, which powers a video game, an arcade game in Japan, that is a dollar, basically. And, you know, at the height of the bubble economy, which is the economic miracle at the end of the 80s, the yen was actually worth more than that.

No, I guess the – anyway, it doesn't matter. Basically, you're pumping a dollar into the game every time you drop a coin in, whereas in America, it's a quarter dollar. So, you know, there is a difference in the valuation. And on top of that, American arcades tended to get their earnings not from the machines themselves, like the number of quarters that were dropped in there, but basically the change dispensers, the coin token dispensers. So you would like slide a dollar, five dollars, ten dollars, a twenty, if you were really just rolling. and you would get just this handful, like a cupful of tokens that were the equivalent of 25 cents. But, you know, there is that sort of fiat money thing where you drop in this money and you get imaginary coins in return. And suddenly it ceases to have real economic sense.

It's the same way as when you go overseas to like Japan or to Europe or something and you have all this money that's not American money. And you're just like, well, this has no value. I don't know what this is. It's just, it's magic. It's magic currency and I can just spend it however I want. And I think tokens really sort of instilled that same mindset. So they would watch Americans play, you know, they took research trips to America because they really wanted to crack the American arcade market and succeed over here because it was huge at the time. And they would just watch, you know, how Americans played video games, probably at, you know, golf land in Sunnyvale or whatever Capcom used as its sort of creative development. farm. It's skunk works. And they noticed that Americans didn't have a problem with just pumping in coin after coin, just like throwing cash into the machine until they could win. So they took that back with them and said, you know, let's kind of build a game around that. And that is my extremely long-winded shaggy dog story about how final fight is more than happy to just accept as many coins as you want to throw into it. I think it's really telling.

that when you look at the market in 1989 like Double Dragon was already a huge hit, so there were already plenty of other games that were beat-em-ups. Like the beat-em-up was already a genre when this game was first created. So they had plenty of examples to look

at, and they had plenty of sort of ideas to sort of roll around in their heads. And yeah, they looked at all this and they came up and it's like, okay, well, what if we just do this? What if we do this and we make it and we design this game to be popular with Americans and there was absolutely what they set out to do and it worked. It absolutely worked. And I think good on them.

The other influence that, or the other kind of philosophical approach that they took to the game to make it popular in America was to add Guy, because Capcom's president at the time told the designers, Americans love two things, ninja and dinosaurs. Thankfully, they did not put a dinosaur in this game. That would have been like, just wouldn't have worked. But they did throw in a ninja. And there are a lot of really interesting influences that Aki-Man and Nishita. have talked about, you know, things that went into this game.

There were some surprising ones. Like, you know, everyone jokes about Mike Hager, the burly ex-wrestler, ex-con guy who is running around shirtless even though he's the mayor. Everyone jokes about him being like Jesse the Body Ventura, who did eventually become like the governor of Minnesota. But they didn't mention him in any. of their interviews about the influences of the game. What they did say was that he was heavily inspired by one a Japanese manga called Mad Bull 34, which I don't know anything about. Are you

guys either? Are you familiar with that? I think there's an anime of it. Okay. So I'm guessing I've never seen it. I think there's a big beefy guy with a mustache. And I think he might be a cop, but that's the extent I know of it. I mean, he also has kind of that, you know, friend Mercury, Thoms of Finland looked to him. So I think, you know, he's sometimes seen as kind of like a gay icon. I can't speak for this, but that's the impression I've gotten. But no, those were not the influences. It was Mad Bowl 34 and Jean Valjean from Le Miserables, because apparently Nishitani was really

big into Le Miserab at the time. So that's, that was the influence. Like, you know, the former, the former convict, the strong. man who reforms and, you know, turns away from his life of crime and becomes an adoptive father to Cosette and lives a life of abiding by the law, becoming the law, becoming the mayor and still nevertheless hounded by the law. You don't have a cop after Mike Hager, but you do have to fight EDE. He's one of the bosses who is a corrupt cop. So he's kind of like the Harvey Bullock of a final fight. So, yeah, everything, the, the, the,

Javert meets Harvey Bullock, I guess. So, yeah, a lot of a lot of really surprising influences. Another thing that really just blew my mind was that Aki-Men talked about how, of all things, Mr. Yoshimura, the character, the super racist caricature by, played by, oh, man, who played him? was it? Mickey Rooney, yes. In Breakfast at Tiffany's, like, I find that character cringy, just absolutely painful to watch,

but they were like, oh, yeah, yeah, we saw that, and he was really eccentric, and we wanted a character like that. So that's where the sort of sumo-like Chinese warrior, Wong Hu, was inspired from in final fights. So, you know, just all kinds of curveballs. This was, this was definitely Capcom, just absorbing their creators, absorbing tons and tons of Western media and trying to synthesize it into a game about dudes punching each other. And that's cool.

if a little weird. I mean, obviously, you know, they mentioned streets of fire and movies of that ilk. We've got to do a streets of fire episode of retronaut at some point just because it always comes up in these 80s action games, like the post-apocalyptic or, you know, crime-laden New York City type things. But, yeah, Akiman said at one point in his interview, they didn't have a lot of development time. This game came together in like six months and was very stressful. and they had to like crunch it into a bunch of memories. So in order to sort of take lessons away from all this media, they basically had like a system set up, like a monitor wall.

There were like three TVs playing simultaneously different movies and other, you know, inspirational media. So they were just like, they couldn't actually take the time to sit down and watch and really absorb this stuff. So it was just kind of like, you know, constantly there flashing at them. and they were picking up things by osmosis and aesthetics and that sort of thing. And that's actually, that's actually an interesting way to go because you definitely do get a sense of like, well, this, this, you know, the city, what is it? Metro City definitely feels New Yorkish, but it's not like authentic America.

It's not, you know, like the real America. But it's the sort of impression of America, kind of like, you know, when we create things that are the impression of of China or Japan or the Middle East or whatever. It's not accurate, but you get the flavor. Really, the lesson that we're learning here is that between Streets of Fire and Le Miz, the final fight really missed out by not being a full musical. Well, you know, there was, um, what was that Dojan fighting game that was based on Le Miz? Le Miz fighting game. I heard about this a long time ago and completely forgot about it until just now.

There's a game called Arm Joe. It's a 2D fighting Dojin game based on Le Miz. So basically, Final Fight's reality was eventually fully realized by the Dogen fighting scene nearly a decade later. I think the characters, especially the enemies, made a really big impression on everything. Like, the first guy was damned, I think his name is supposed to be pronounced because it's missing a second E in there. He really sets a stage for the rest of the game because you start off. He's the guy that you see in the introduction. He's the guy that when you first start the game, he's the one that this is cackling at you.

And though he's the first level boss and he has a very unique fight pattern because you beat up a bunch of guys. you attack him, then he jumps off the side and whistles and calls guys in at you. And it just gives everything a really unique personality. And Double Jacket had sort of the same thing. Like you remember the guys like a Bobo and Linda. And this was kind of that, but since the characters were so much larger and richer, like they were just really, really memorable. And almost all the bosses are like that.

Like that's kind of one of the reasons why they work so well in later Street Fighter games. They exemplify that Capcom design philosophy. that really stands out. Yeah, and if you go back to the interview, Akiman, who had worked, who had worked on the Forgotten Worlds game, they talked about the fact that, you know, they put all this work into all the enemies and characters in Forgotten Worlds, but because it's a shooter, you know, everyone comes on screen, and if you're, if you're blasting the fire button, you're not going to see anything.

Everything just explodes. But in this game, a character comes on screen, and it's going to take you a few seconds. It's going to take you time to fight them, hit them, knock them down, and, you know, knock them out. So you get a good look at everybody. So even though there aren't as many, there aren't that many types of enemies, a lot of them are just pallet swaps to one another. Everyone has a look. Everyone has little attacks they can do. Everyone has a name.

You can see their names when you punch them. That's like, that's wild. Yeah, I think that does a lot to really, it's weird. It's such a tiny detail, but it gives everyone kind of their own personality. Every character has their own life bar that appears at the top of the screen when they take damage, you know, when you attack them. and then every character, you know, like their life bar is accompanied by their name. So even though you don't necessarily, you can't necessarily tell who is who in a big scrum, because unlike Double Dragon, this game will throw like three different types of enemies at you at once.

But, you know, eventually you kind of realize like, okay, this guy I'm punching, this is Hollywood. And obviously the lady I'm punching, that's Roxy, because that's a, that's definitely a lady name. And then, you know, this other guy, this is 2P, okay, cool. And then, you know, if you're really into your Capcom history, you realize, oh, 2P is the character sprite from the second player character sprite from Forgotten Worlds. They got a little bit of their own history in there, the dev team history. But that does go a long way toward giving these characters some personality, you know, and just kind of giving them their own kind of defining trait. Like each character has sort of their own style, you know, poised. and in Roxy, the two female pallets brought swaps, they use very acrobatic attacks and will

flip away out of damage, you know, to avoid taking damage. Hollywood likes to throw fire bombs at you. You have the sort of big guys like G. Orreber and Bald Bull or Big Bull, whatever his name is, Bilbel, that's it. And they'll, they'll do charging attacks at you from across the screen. Like, they'll kind of start off screen and you have to really be mindful when they're in the fray because if you don't see them, there's a pretty good chance that they're charging up to just do a smashing attack across the screen. So you don't want to be caught in the middle of a combo when they do that. So yeah, there is a really great sense of personality to the game. And it does come through in the visuals and also just the little details. So that makes a big

difference. I like the cop guy. He spits out his gum, which you can then pick up and eat, which gives you a whole bunch of points. Just like the grossest aside of that game. Yeah, you know, that's, that is absolutely just them goofing around after a like three days of no sleep and saying, hey, this little, this little goofy little animation that we put in here, even though we don't really have room for it. Let's do something with that. So yeah, that is, that is the magic of sleep deprived game development. By all accounts, you know, the interviews about this game make it sound really stressful like, you know, artists coming to blows and, you know, getting into fights. So like the, like the, the interviews about this game make it sound really stressful. Like, you know, artists coming to blows and, and, you know, you know, you know, the violence of Metro City spilled out into the real world into Capcom's offices. And really, when we talk about character variation, we have to also really go back to the fact that this game gives you three characters to choose from, and each character looks and plays completely different. You know, a lot of the beat-em-ups of this era, the characters were basically interchangeable. You know, Double Dragon, you've got two twin brothers, and they do exactly the same things. They just look, they just have different colors.

Yep. Jimmy and Bimmy, they're just clones. Right. I mean, even if you look at the Teenage Ninja Turtles who had a very popular game at this point, the four turtles, they all look the same. They have different weapons, but they don't operate that differently when it comes to the beat-em-up as far it goes. But in this game, you've got Guy, you've got Cody, you've got Hagar. They look and play totally different. You get a different experience depending on who you choose. And if you get two players, then you really, depending on who the two of you choose, you're going to get a different game. The payers have a very different. sort of give and take to them. Yeah, I agree. Like, if you play it solo or play it with another person, there is, like, yeah, you, you kind of gravitate towards your favorite character. And you did mention Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And really the main differences there are basically the range and speed of your weapons. Like, in the arcade game, no one really wanted to play Raphael because he had such short range, even though he was fast. But lots of people love Donatello because he could pick up dudes with a stick and throw him. That's cool. And here you,

kind of get the same thing, but even more, more gloriously. You know, you have basically a different move set for each character. They're similar, but they have different range. They have different speed. They have different kind of animations. And, you know, they each have their own special move, which again, you have to hit the attack and jump button at the same time. And that will deplete some of your life, but give you an ability that kind of gives you some safety range. So, you know, if you're in a bad situation, using that special attack, sacrificing a little life is much better than sacrificing a lot of life by getting beaten up on by a posse of enemies. But then each character has his own weapon specialty that kind of matches his personality. Like Cody Travers, I guess the

main character, he's the boring one, so he must be the main character. Like Ryu and Mario, just kind of like the baseline character. He's just a dude. He's just a dude. in jeans and a white t-shirt and is kind of a street tough like he he seems a little especially with the later canon a little bit of a loose cannon uh and so naturally his his specialty is using knives he's really good with with knives and basically does more damage when you we pick up a knife from a fallen enemy and can stab people with it or throw knives at them uh mike hager being the big guy like he really goes for the blunt weapons so if you find a pipe or you know I don't think there's two by fours, but there are some sort of large, blunt objects that you can pick up.

And he just can wail on guys with those things. Whereas guy, obviously, he's a ninja. He wears sneakers, but he's still a ninja. And he doesn't have a stake in the story. You know, the story is that Mike Hager's girlfriend, or Mike Hager's daughter, Jessica is captured. And she happens to be Cody's girlfriend. So they have a stake. But guy is just like, you know what?

I'm a ninja. I got to go beat up some dudes. I've got to get some blood on my sneakers. So his specialty is katana's and large bladed weapons. So there aren't as many of those in the game, but when you can find one, you can do some real damage. But ultimately, I think, you know, it kind of comes down to do I want a slow character? Do I want a fast character? Do I want like a big, tough muscle dude?

Do I want someone who's smaller and faster? Kind of down to personal preferences. It's not as granular. and, you know, there's not as much differentiation as in Street Fighter 2, but you can definitely see them getting there. They're definitely moving in that direction. And having those three distinct characters does, you know, really have a big part of the appeal of this game.

And it's a big part of why the Super NES port is such a piece of crap. I always like playing as Hagar in this game compared. Like, most other heavy characters are really slow, but Hagar can actually pick up dudes Ed walk around, which I felt gave him a lot more versatility than, like, Max and Streeteridge, too. Yeah, it's the pile driver, you know, it's, it's two things. It's the pile driver and the fact that he makes the weirdest noises. I mean, they all make weird noises. No one sounds like human being in this game, but Hagar makes the absolute strangest.

I don't know, like, there's a move where you jump and you press down an attack. You do a different attack than just a jump kick. and it sounds like Hagar is saying, like, Uri Geller, the guy who bends spoons with his mind? Like, I don't know what the hell he's saying. I can bend spoons with my pile driver. It's guttural. It's, it's, it's, it's, we, I would just do it to make myself laugh. I'd just do it again and again.

Yeah, it kind of reminds me of, um, at, at, um, Magfest, like, for whatever reason, people will just walk around making the colossus noises from, uh, from X-Men, the X-Men arcade game. The hurrah! that yeah this is this is very much along the same lines like i get those two sounds mixed up in my head like haggers grunts and colossus's grunts they're kind of the same but but yeah i don't i don't normally gravitate toward large slow beefy characters because i just don't find them that interesting to play they're you know they're slow and you have to get in close yeah that's not interesting to me but but i do i you know i do like hagger he's he is a different character and he's good at kind of keeping distance with characters uh he's got like that sort of

body like splash thing where he throws his legs out and kicks you know kind of like you mentioned and it's good at you know sort of keeping a distance from from enemies of sort of clearing the zone around him so he's not getting totally overwhelmed by enemies who are fast and able to get in past his guard so yeah they did a good job with with kind of defining these characters and giving them balance and I think it says a lot that all of these characters have shown up in other Capcom games. You know, like they would make their way into fighting games. And Hager was actually the first.

He showed up in Saturday Night's Slam Masters, which was a wrestling game. And I guess kind of details what Hager did before he was mayor or maybe it's meant to be like later in continuity like, you know, returning from retirement. It's, uh, it's Hager. He's not just cleaning up the city. He's cleaning up the ring. Whatever. So, you know, it speaks well to the, the sort of fundamental appeal of these characters.

is a pretty good triangle. And also the fact that, you know, if you look at the sequels and the ports and the home versions, like, Hagar is the one who's never cut. You know, some games don't have Cody. Some games don't have Guy. But every game has Hagar. You cannot, this game doesn't, the game doesn't work without Hagar. He's the mascot, if you will, and the mayor.

That's true. He's the boss in many respects. Also, the boss of this game is really interesting, Belgar. You don't really see him until the end. And when you first come up against him, it's a little off-putting because he's a dude in a wheelchair. You're like, wow, am I really going to beat the crap out of like an old guy in a wheelchair? He's wearing like a ruffled tuxedo shirt.

And he's, you know, he's got Jennifer or Jessica captive. He's got her like sitting on his lap as he rolls around in his automated wheelchair. So he's kind of using her as a human shield. And he's got a crossbow. So he's not playing fair. But still at the same time, you're like, you know, I just beat my way through hundreds of goons. And I am about to use my wrestling mayor to just throw the hurt down on this old disabled man. That's terrible. Can I do

this? And then, you know, it turns out the wheelchair is just a sham. So then you feel good about throwing him out the window. I have to wonder how much Belger was based on Mr. Big in Narc, which came out the year earlier, because that's another game that ends with a boss in a wheelchair who moves very fast and shoots at you and eventually you destroy the wheelchair and then you just fight him in a different... In the case of NARC, he turns out to be a giant mutant of some kind.

But, you know, I definitely knew what NARC was when I played Final Fight. I was like, oh, it's another wheelchair boss. That's weird. There's got to be some sort of pop culture touchstone that I'm missing out on. Like, I'm sure if you go back and watch some, you know, Streets of Fire type movie,

there is a boss who's pretending to be, you know, handicapped and, in a wheelchair. But I do not know that genre of film well enough to be able to say, ah, yes, this is it. This is the Genesis. There was definitely an evil wheelchair guy in Leonard Part 6, but I don't know if that was big in Japan. I like the escalation of the weapons from the different beat-em-ups. Like, Renegate hit a guy with a pistol and then Double Dragon had a machine gun. It's like, where do you go from a machine gun? Well, we're going to go to a crossbow. Well, if you've ever played, you know, a modern action game, you know that

crossbows are the deadliest weapon, much more so than machine guns. It's. We're the Spirit Hunters, and we're a show that treats Hunter Hunter and Yu-Hakishu's author as the center of the universe. Some weeks, we do linguistic analysis, so the Chinese meaning of this character is to smelt or refine, but so the changed meaning, in Japanese it means to temper. Other times, we get absolutely smashed. So we take one shot every time.

Yuske uses the ray gun. One hour later. This is the least coherent episode. Sarah, you're... I think your pirate is haunting. I think you're drunk. I can find out more about the spirit hunters right here on the Greenlit podcast network.

Hi, Stu. Hi, Luke. Do you fancy doing a podcast? Covering every segment of every episode of the beloved 90s cartoon Animaniacs. No, I hate animaniacs. Join me, Luke, the Warner lover, and him, Stu, the Warner Resister, for Animani Chat.

Covering every segment of every episode of the hit 90s cartoon Animaniacs as well as its many spin-offs, Comics, video games and the movie. Not to mention the recent reboot, it's going to be explaining to the max. Ugh. So, yeah, that's, I guess there's not really that much to say about Final Fight. It's, you know, kind of a one-note game, the note being Punch Guys. But, you know, it's very addictive, very fun to play, and was a pretty big hit for Capcom.

Like, you know, a much bigger hit than Forgotten Worlds to the point where basically after creating this game, Capcom was like, hey, guys, you should then go and make another Street Fighter game. And so that's where Street Fighter 2 came from. It was pretty much the same team. A lot of the same talent was taken over. Obviously, the leads, Nishitani and Akimun were carried over. Like they, you know, were the ones who headed up Street Fighter 2. But, you know, a lot of the thinking and the design elements that you see here show up there.

Like you have the destructible oil barrels and stuff. in this game or people being toasted and turning into like this flame mummy as they fall backward and take damage or beating up cars. Like all those things showed up in Street Fighter 2. There's, you know, if you play this game and then play Street Fighter 2, as many of us did, it definitely feels like there is, you know, they're of a piece. And so even though this game was not really meant to be a street fighter game despite the marketing potential there, it's, it's, it's, very clear that, you know, the sort of influences that that final fight would have on the Street Fighter series going forward.

But unfortunately, before we got to Street Fighter 2 and its mini-spinoffs, well, I guess around the same time, we had to live through the home conversions of this game, which, I don't know, actually, they're not mostly that bad. The really bad one is the most successful and most high-profile one, which is a super NES game, but, you know, they kind of made up for it in later years. I think Diamond, you mentioned that you played the Street Fighter or a super NES game? I played it, I think, at a friend's house, but I definitely, it was just, you know, they cut so much. I mean, they cut the most essential feature, which was you can't really play with a friend.

And they cut one of the characters. So it's like those, those are two huge cuts. You can't. Yeah, they didn't just cut the most, you know, one of the characters. They cut the one who's like super popular in the U.S. Like, I don't know anyone who really cares about Cody. But everyone loved Guy. But I think because Guy was put in there for the U.S.

you know, the, like the U.S. appeal. And this game was designed initially with the Japanese market in mind and ported with the Japanese market in mind. They were like, well, we can get rid of the guy for Americans. And then they didn't put him back in. And then when the game did come to America, or like when a version with Guy did come to America, you couldn't buy it at retail. It was only a blockbuster video.

I don't think I heard about that version until years, years later. And I couldn't believe it if it was real. but it's all evidence points to it being real. I remember seeing it at Blockbuster at the time. It has like this incredibly boring box that's just orange and it says Final Fight Guy and it has a drawing of guy on it. That's it. Like just like the standalone little cutout clip of the character.

It's it was like, you know, this was 1994, I think. It was really late. I was like, why, who would want to play this? It took a few years. I think another thing that was another thing that was at the point. problem, the fact that it was years late and it had a lot of cuts. And by that point, you know, Street Fighter 2 was already the new hotness. So yeah, I didn't, I'm sure I've played it. And I'm sure I was like, well, this isn't, you know, this was fun at the time, but I don't need to revisit

this. I don't need to be, I've already beaten this game many times over. I don't need to practice it at home in this version, this compromised version. Yeah, I mean, the, the Super NES version and Super Famicom versions, both did really well. Like, they sold a lot. They were very successful games financially, but I don't think they did anyone any favors. I mean, they made the Super NES look bad because, you know, at the same time, you had Streets of Rage coming out over on Sega Genesis. And yeah, the characters in Streets of Rage were smaller, but you had a cooperative play. You had more stages. You had more moves. And you didn't have slowdown. The Super NES version was one of those launch window era games where Konami and Capcom, especially,

especially their games really suffered from this. Graddeus three super ghouls and ghosts. This was one of those where things just constantly chugged to a halt. When Hollywood comes on the screen and tosses flame, everything slows to, you know, five frames a second or something. It's terrible. It's really,

it just makes the super NES look bad. So, yeah, it was a big letdown. Like I said, I rented it and said, oh, wow,

I don't like this. This is not good. But it did, you know, it did really well, like to the point where, the two sequels to Final Fight were super NES, super Famicom Exclusives.

And that's interesting they went that path because there were so many follow-ups to Final Fight in the arcade, but none of them were Final Fight. You know, I think in the arcades, Capcom, you know, they kept making brawlers, but I think they focused on licensed brawlers, you know, catalogs and dinosaurs and, you know,

that sort of thing. Maybe I'm wrong, but I just feel like they went more for the kind of big scale, big name property, tie-in type stuff. And then they, you know, they really doubled down on fighting games when Street Fighter 2 took off. So I think that there was just no place in the arcades for Final Fight 2 and 3. It didn't make sense for Capcom's business division for whatever reason.

I guess they decide to just, like, vary their, what I call it, like the theme? Because the immediate follow-up was Captain Commando, which is like this goopy, really goofy superhero theme game. And then later on down the line, there was King of Dragons, which is like Magic Sword, two kind of, and Knights of the Round. And eventually that led into, yeah, like Alien versus Predator, which I've always gotten the impression is the most popular of their licensed beat-em-ups. It does a very good beat-up.

Oh, it's excellent. You can almost see there's two prongs. It's like the arcade business, like, well, let's keep doing these beat-em-up games, but each one is going to be bigger and bigger than the last one and we'll have a lot of properties, and those games basically didn't get ported at home at all. But on the home front, like, okay. well, we're just going to make final fight games and they're going to be in the home version.

So it's like, you know, there was never, I mean, I don't think there was ever an Alien v. Predator or a Punisher or Captain Commando home versions was there? I don't ever remember seeing them. I think there were. Didn't Punisher make it to Super NES? Punisher made it to Genesis, but it was, I think, American-only game. I think it was done by an American studio.

Alien versus Predator didn't because Activision had the other unrelated fighting game for the Super Nintendo. Cadillacs and dinosaurs, there's a different Sega CD game. King of Dragons and Knights of the Round ended up on the Super Nintendo. But, like, battle circuit, that was way too late. That didn't. Captain Commando also ended up on, like, a really late PS1 port for some reason. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, some of these games made to PS1. I'm thinking of Worries of Fate, which is like, what a final fight but ancient China. Yeah, yeah. I absolutely love. I love that game. I think that came out on PS1, only in Japan. And, yeah, it was a kind of game that I played. I played in arcades when I was actually in France.

And for the next few years, I'd have to tell people about it. And people wouldn't believe me. It was because it sounded crazy when you describe it to another person. And, of course, the PS1 version was not available in America. And I was like, no, it really was a real game. And now, of course, you could just play it. But that's a personal favorite of mine, too. Yeah, I think, you know, as far as Nintendo ports of the original Final Fight go,

the NES port is actually much better than the Super NES port, because on NES, they obviously could not reproduce the original Final Fight. those huge sprites, the detailed design, it just wouldn't work. So they said, you know, let's not. And they made Mighty Final Fight, which is, you know, like basically SD Final Fight. It's really goofy and silly, but it plays really well. Like, it's surprisingly convincing. And this was a late release, so it's very expensive now because it was probably produced in tiny quantities. But it's weirdly good.

Like, it shouldn't be this good. And yet it is. it's surprising how it goes back to the double dragon and ES idea of giving everyone experience points and levels again you know you actually level up your character by fighting I like how it is it's like both a port and not because all the all the enemies are basically the same but the levels and the music are different

so it still has a unique experience even if you play the arcade game and there was something that I learned was cut out of the American version like Abigail's one of the bosses later on and in the Japanese version he gave you a quiz. And I think if you got any of the answers wrong, he'd try to kiss you. Oh, dear. So all of that was cut. But the American manual still makes a mention of it. So yeah, I guess it was something that was written before they actually saw the game or was just translated from the Japanese version. Yeah, I mean, one thing I do enjoy about the, about Mighty Final Fight is

that it adds story to the game. Not a lot, but there's a lot of dialogue and it's very goofy and silly. Like, there's a little bit of dialogue in the arcade game, but, uh, it's much more elaborate here. And it's, it's very like cartoonish and sort of self-parodying. So they, they clearly had fun with this. And, uh, it's definitely one of the stronger late era NES releases and definitely worth playing if you can find it. I know it was put on the Capcom, Capcom classics collection for Game Boy Advance, but now that's been like 15 years. So, you know, I doubt that's easy to find, but I feel like they might have put it on virtual console also. I think it is, it may be only in Japan, but yeah, I think it did come out there.

Only in Japan. Why would they do that to us? I don't know. I don't know. Okay. And then there was kind of the apology tour. And once again, showing that Sega's Genesis was doing what Nintendo don't when it came to 16-bit brawlers.

And that's Final Fight CD on the Sega CD. And that was still not perfect, but definitely felt like a make-good for all the things that went wrong with the Super NES version. It's fine. It doesn't look as good, but it does have content-wise everything and it has like an extra time attack mode with new art and stuff. But by that point, like Streets of H2 was already out. It was on a cartridge. Streets of H-2 is probably better than Final Fight. So it really just felt like a little old by that point.

but you know for for capcom fans for the diehards who wanted you know a proper conversion that was the way to go and you know even final fight guy uh it still wasn't perfect like they didn't add any of the the lost stages they didn't add any of the you know fix any of the slowdown and instead of giving you all three characters with multiplayer it was still single player and they just replaced cody with guy like yeah it just it felt like really phoned in like really half-assed um and i feel like we wouldn't get a proper super nes version of final fight until game boy advance with final fight one a decade later which was you know basically all the the missing stuff and then they threw in uh sprites from street fighter alpha um and yeah it's very very chatty like no one will shut up

That's the kind of the big downside to this game. That in the cropped screen proportions where everything is really tight and you don't have a lot of view of the world around you. But, you know, in terms of playability, it definitely beats the Super NES game. I like the new Shinkira art that they had at the cover. That was at the time when S&K was sort of on the outs, so Shinkira needed somewhere to go. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was how the game caught my eye the first time because I looked at the box art.

I was like, wait, is that Shinkero working for Capcom? That's probably how I found out the news. I see someone added Final Fight double impact into the notes. I don't actually know anything about that version. But it seems it includes Magic Sword because, okay. That was just a really kind of out of nowhere 2010 release. It was an HD remaster of Final Fight and it was digital only. I think it was probably $10.

And it was like, oh, here's Final Fight. It's Arcade Perfect. And here's Magic Sword. So, you know, Kurt's Arcade come to life. And yeah, HD remastered graphics Remixed soundtrack by It sounds a lot like the Bionta Commander Rearmed guy

Simon Viclin I want to say, yeah It sounds like his style And it was It was just the game again But you know at the time it was It was certainly well received I enjoyed it a lot

I know the PSN version Got controversial because it had like That weird always online DRM Which is like why would you do this but whatever. I mean, it was the game that I wanted to play, and I played it again. It was like, okay, great. But, of course, you can't really play it now anymore because that was PS3.

It's not on PS4, PS5. But they've since released, you know, the Binoa bundle, which, of course, includes Final Fight and Warriors of Fate and a bunch of other, and Captain Commando, and a bunch of other good ones. Well, it was Xbox Live also, so would that work on Xbox 1 and series SX? probably although i think they also released capital also released like a collection of all those games that they put together so yeah if you if you were an xbox owner and you you bought it then you probably can still play it but yeah if you bought it on ps3 then you need a ps3 yeah and it needs

be online all the time yeah that was i didn't buy any of capcom's games from this era because my internet connection at home was not super stable so as i discovered when i was playing demon souls it would just disconnect sometimes and I couldn't play anymore. I would lose, you know, an hour's progress. So that really kind of curtailed my enthusiasm for online gaming at that point. It was a really good conversion

because it offered a mode where it looked like you were actually looking at an arcade cabinet, which is something you've seen more standard lately, especially on the Sega games. And I think even the recent Capcom arcade collection and did something similar. But for the time, it was, like, one of the first ones I saw like that. Hmm.

All right. Well, that's final fight for you. So lots of opportunities to play it. I think they're working on Mr. Corps that would support this. This was a CPS-1 game, right? I believe so, yeah. So, yeah, it's probably supported to some degree on Mr. I haven't checked lately.

Oh, yeah, another home port that obviously didn't make it to the U.S. was the X-68,000 version for the Sharp X-68,000 home computer. And because that was basically identical hardware-wise to the CPS-1 board, that was one of the extremely authentic home conversions, like arcade perfect, like Strider. Like if you've ever played this on X-68,000, which I've seen at, you know, Long Island Retro Expo with the annual, wow, some guy brought his deluxe setup with the X-68,000 here.

play a game for 30 minutes. That was the gold standard back in the day. But of course, that was, you know, a multi-thousand-dollar computer and didn't come to the U.S. So kind of irrelevant to those of us who were kids playing games in America. Anyway, Final Fight 2 and Final Fight 3 came out of 93 and then 95, respectively. Super NES exclusive in Japan, Final Fight 3 was just called Final Fight tough. But these were, yeah, there was definitely some diminishing returns with these. And I never really paid that much attention to them just because the first Final Fight turned out so badly on Super Enos.

But they did kind of steadily patch things up, make amends. add in two-player action, starting with Final Fight 2. But Final Fight 2 makes the mistake of erasing guy again. They're like, nope, ninja guy that everyone loves in America. Let's get rid of him. Let's put in sexy Ninja Girl instead. So we get Maki, who is basically My Shura Nui, which, I mean, her name even. It's Maki, take the K out, you get Mai.

Come on. That's not even subtle. It's really close. I think I'm like, like, somebody did once tell me that technically this game came out before Fio Fury 2, but, like, it's a little too close to be coincidental. It might be. Oh, so this is like an Ants Bug's Life kind of thing. Yeah. Armageddon Deep Impact. It's like, we need a sexy ninja girl. Well, there's only so many different types of those, so. Right. So put her in a red outfit with like mesh over her cleavage and, okay, whatever. I mean, you know, in terms of how she plays,

it's nothing like Mai. Like, Mai is, uh, she, she uses a lot of, um, accessories, like her fan and her the tails of her tabard. I don't know what you call that. But, yeah, like, Maki is a very different character who, you know, plays like a standard street fighter or final fight character. I think she's good at, am I remembering Tanfa?

Is that correct? Like, that's kind of especially. I think that's what they're called. Yeah. Those thick things. Yeah. So, you know, she looks like Maya, but she's not, like, in terms of mechanics.

But this is, uh, the big difference is this is no longer set in, in just Metro City for some reason. I think it's going off to Street Fighter 2. It just carries that same vibe. It gives slightly different settings, even though it still mostly looks pretty similar. You know, that kind of loses something that I like about these brawlers, which is that they are basically documenting a journey. Like, you are a person, usually a dude who starts at, you know, square one, and then you fight and slug your way through a set landscape and reach the boss.

and it's all one continuous journey of just like dude after dude, you know, really kind of reaching back to Karataka and the sense of like invading Akkima's castle. Like it all kind of ties back to that. Ghost and Goblins, you know, running into Satan's Lair. When you actually look at like Double Dragon or Final Fight laid out, you're basically walking like six city blocks. It's not, it's not really that far, but it feels like an epic journey. And, you know, breaking it up like Castlevania Bloodlines is just kind of, like, let's

flutter Paris and punch guys for a block. Okay, well, I'm done. I was going to compare it to Double Dragon 3, which also like becomes a global journey. And then basically you just get random levels that everything's different. You're like, oh, okay, I guess I'm in Italy now. All right. Yep. So if I'm not mistaken, Final Fight 3 changes that. And it is much more of just like a fight through the city. It's been like a decade now, more than that, actually. But I did, One time I was at an 8-bit cafe in Tokyo on a trip to Tokyo game show. And I was just hanging out there with Sam Kennedy, the EIC of OneUp.com. And, you know, they have, I've had, I don't know if it's still this way,

but they had a bunch of consoles just set up and just random games you could plug in. So we plugged in Final Fight Tough and just spent, you know, an hour playing together, getting all the way from the start to finish of the game, drinking lots of water down booze and it was fun but I remember nothing about it including the fact that they replaced Cody with two characters Dean and Lucia who I remember nothing about looking at them like Dean fires like he's electric what and Lucia is a sexy cop it's very strange it does go back to the city it's another it's another all-city adventure but there's like there's some sort of cutscenes and

there's some drama there but it is it is very much it's more in the spirit of the first game and that you're fighting your way through the city, you're fighting gangs. I think there's some better bosses in Final Fight 3. Like Final Fight 2, almost every boss is just a big muscular guy. Whereas Final Fight 3, you get a little more variety.

There's like a sailor who's got an anchor. And the last boss is like just some weird colonel with an eyepatch who's, you know, okay, kind of looks like Hydern, but he also kind of looks like the colonel from Kaiser Knuckle, I guess. But I don't know. It's a little different than Final Fight 2 where it's just basically all

swollen muscle guys. So, you know, one step forward, who's this back? Yeah, but as someone put in the notes, this is the first super NES version of a Final Fight game to have female foes as opposed to just dudes.

Because Poison and Roxy, I guess, were too spicy for America or Nintendo was like, you can't hit girls. That's not nice. So they got swapped out for some very generic looking guys, whereas this game does have ladies, but not Poison or Roxy apparently? No, they're, they're, I think they're called May.

They're definitely not dressed. I mean, I think the Poison Roxy problem was, it was twofold. It was both, we don't want to have men punching women, and also the fact that Poison and Roxy are barely wearing clothes. Right. Like, in the arcade game, you can see a lot of underboob when they're punched. So I think those are two strikes and just like, okay, let's just cut these characters and they became generic sort of dudes named Sid and Billy. So these women are a lot more covered.

But of course, somewhere in there, this is where we get the story about poison not being a cis woman but a trans woman, which of course doesn't quite make sense because why would it be okay to punch a trans woman instead of a cis woman? and then they've sort of, some people deny it and some people said, oh, we're just kidding, but somewhere in there, I think it just became a reality. And at this point, I think a lot of, I mean, based on internet chatter, I think a lot of trans women sort of have accepted poison as just, oh, this is now a trans icon, this is now a famous trans video game character, we don't have a lot of those. So I think ultimately it's a good thing, but definitely, I don't think it started out as a good thing. I think it sort of came from a place of ignorance, but I think we ended up in a good spot

with it. Yeah, and Poison's character has been rehabilitated a lot through the years. She went from being just like a random, basically sex worker that you beat up because she was doing backflips at you to Anderre's manager in the Street Fighter games. So she's like, you know, a businesswoman. She still, you know, dresses in basically nothing, but she's got an eye on business and managing a fighting character in the circuit. So that's cool. Oh, geez. It wasn't like a year ago or so where somebody found the fashion magazine where they had gotten poison style from. And I can't remember what it was from. Oh, yeah? Yeah. It was like very clearly that Ackyman or whoever the designer was like, yeah, this is this is what they looked at. It was really neat to see, though. Yeah, that was,

that was pretty common was just finding inspiration and, you know, media that probably no one that and their target audience was ever going to know about. Like, they couldn't possibly have anticipated internet detectives 30 years later. Like, that's just, that's ridiculous. Yeah, but mentioning Poison's career moves is a great segue into the next topic I want to discuss, which was basically how Final Fight fed back into Street Fighter. And beginning with, I guess, Street Fighter Alpha 2, you started to see Final Fight characters suddenly kind of take their place in sort of Street Fighter canon. And this was around the same time that Capcom was like, hey, American Division, please make us a Final Fight fighting game.

And that was Final Fight Revenge for Sega Saturn, which, thank God, never came to the U.S. It's terrible, just dreadful. We don't need to talk about it. It was bad. But at the same time, Final Fight characters were sort of folded into the Street Fighter series. And at this point, there's like a dozen Final Fight characters who have some sort of stake in the Street Fighter series. whether it's in Alpha, the prequel, or in the sequels, and that's pretty rad. So I think the first to make the jump was Rolento, I guess, Rolento and Sodom.

It was actually the very first Street Fighter Alpha had Sodom and Guy. Guy was in Street Fighter Alpha One? Okay. Yes, he is. And what's fun about that to me is that Sodom now has a very distinct character, whereas he is now established. It's more a thing in Japan, but eventually it got translated into America, too. He's established as a, he's not Japanese, but he wants to be Japanese. He's a wee-a-boo.

Yeah. So if you play the game in Japanese, all his win quotes are sort of mangled English that sounds like Japanese if you read it out loud. It's really weird. And, like, he's got, like, he uses kanji, but the kanji's, like, not quite right. It's just, he's full of jokes that you have to, you have to know Japanese pretty well to get them. But it's just a funny little thing that he's just a character trait. And, yeah, instead of carrying his swords, he's got, um,

he's got sort of those I don't know what they're called but they're like they look like sigh but they only have one they only have two prongs instead of three but he also has grappling moves

it's a it's cool how much they've changed that character and it's kind of a shame that of all the characters who are in Street Fighter Alpha he's one of the few who never came back for Street Fighter 4 or 5

so Sodom is kind of a lost character maybe because he's called Sodom maybe that's just too spicy could be I mean his name was changed to Katana on Super NES And then when Street Fighter Alpha 2 came to Super Nias, he was still Katana there. So there is something interesting about a character whose name was lost in translation, being a character who's really bad at incorporating into, you know, integrating into Japanese culture.

But yeah, I know like the famous, the famous one quote, instead of saying, Di Jobuddeska, he says, die job death car. So, yeah, that's, he's almost got it, but not quite. Yeah, so Rolento appeared in Street Fighter Alpha 2, and then I think Cody and Maki both appeared in Street Fighter Alpha 3, and maybe Maki might have only been in the home ports, but yeah, at that point, and then Cody shows up, and he's like a prisoner, he's wearing like a striped suit, like a jailbird. It's a really, like, I don't know the fiction of that, but I guess he killed somebody. The fiction is that he just, yeah, he just can't, he's, he's, he's a final fighter. There is no final fight for Cody. He's a hot blooded street brawler. And it, you know, strained his relation with Jessica. And eventually he just kind of went off the rails. I don't know if he was framed up or if he actually did shiv someone.

But, yeah, he is now like a jailbird and wears the striped pajamas. And doesn't he have like a ball and chain around his ankles? Am I around his ankles? He's shackled up. Yeah, shackled up. Yeah. And he begins every match with a knife in the middle that he can grab. Yep.

But he goes on a real journey. You know, he's got the jailbird look in, in the, Street Fighter Alpha and then in Cross Tekken and then his Tree Fighter 4. But then he comes back to Tree Fighter 5 and like I think he's the new mayor of Metro City. Like he's, you know, he's turned his life around. It's another hero's journey. Another Jean Valjean. Okay, yeah, so, you know, Rolinto is interesting because he was one of the characters cut from the Super NES version of Final Fight. So I didn't actually remember him when I saw him in Street Fighter Alpha 2. So I had to be reminded, you know, reading later like, oh, this guy was one of the bosses in Street Fighter. or in Final Fight. So, yeah, kind of making good there on some cuts.

I have a suspicion that Rolento is the reason, because Final Fight is 1989, and Rolento had a very unique factor that when he moved on screen, he had this sort of weird blue shadow behind him as he sort of jumped around the screen. And a few years later, that just became the standard for what happens to every character when they do super move. And I think that's, I think Rolento is the start of that. That's just pure speculation. But, you know, Relento also cheats.

You know, he brings grenades to a fighting game, so. He also has, like, minions who, like, will come in and he kind of jumps up and hides out of sight and the minions attack. Yeah, he's got, in three-fire alpha-two, he is, like, weird. His super moves involved, like, pulling you up on a string and, like, he has, like, other characters can kind of stab you from off-screen. He's a really weird guy, but I also, like, I love playing against him because he is so weird and he's very agile.

Yeah. He throws things. He's definitely a bastard. Definitely an evil cheating bastard. So then we move on to Street Fighter 3, which toned things down a lot in terms of the final fight cameos. And I think that's because, one, Capcom was really interested in sort of creating their own mythos for Street Fighter 3 and separating as much as possible from what had come before in Street Fighter lore to the point where you basically only had Ryu and Ken as returning fighters in the original Street Fighter 3. They kind of turn that down, but the one character you get is Hugo, who is one of the André clones, and he's got his manager poison there. So he's like, you know, a big grappler type character, clearly patterned after Andre the Giant.

But I think another factor there is just that the animation standards for Street Fighter 3 were so demanding that they had to be very sort of conservative with. the characters they added. And then, you know, Street Fighter 3 got really weird with some of its characters also. So I think the final fight thing just wasn't really part of that. But you move into the Capcom versus series and you do get a lot more of the cameos because, you know, the whole thing is not just Street Fighter, but just the Capcom Pantheon. So it's pretty much a free-for-all. Yeah, unfortunately, no one made the cut for Capcom versus this K-1, which was basically almost all street fighter characters in the Capcom side, but once you've got

Capcom S&SK 2, you get Relento, you get Maki, so you can have Maki Fight Mai. Does they have unique dialogue when they do that? Gosh, I sure hope so. They might have a special animation because they look like twins. But then Hugo appeared on the S&K side in S&K versus chaos, SvC chaos,

excuse me, with poison. And then years and years later, Hagar showed up in Marvel v. Capcom three, which was a big surprise, because that's a game where everyone, you know, has giant fireballs and huge moves. But here's Hagar. It's like, no, I'm here. I've got Pile Driver. I've got a pipe. And I'm just here to fight. And finally, we move into Street Fighter 4 and beyond, which is basically Street Fighter 5, but I guess some of the crossovers also. And it looks like there's a pretty decent laundry list here, including, I guess, just two newcomers,

Lucia. I didn't realize she was in Street Fighter 5 until I, you know, was putting together notes for this, and that's because I haven't followed Street Fighter 5 at all. But she and Abigail are both playable characters in Street Fighter 5. How does that work, since I have not played Street Fighter 5? Did they turn out well? Like, I don't know anything about that game. Abigail was bizarre, you know, like Abigail, if you look at Abigail in Final Fight 1, he basically looks like Andere with a different head, you know? He's got his body, but he's a different head. Whereas Abigail in Final in Street Fighter 5 is like this misshapen human. being. He doesn't, he doesn't, he looks like an alien. Like, he's got entire tires around his

biceps. It's almost impossible to understand how his body works. Okay. It's really, it's really, it's a psych to see. I haven't played, it's like, Street Fighter 5 is a street fighter. I've played the least amount. But I've definitely, I saw the announcement. I'm like, really, Abigail. No Sodom but Abigail. Okay. Oh, yeah. He looks like one of those dudes who, um, body builds just to for show and has like so much muscle mass he can't actually move and has no actual strength honestly he looks like a bobo from the drugble dragon movie like that's how weird he looks yeah he is he is a he is a freak i haven't played i haven't played it since like the second season but lucia came back but they gave her like a hat and a ponytail and i think some weapons i don't know i thought lucia

was kind of cool in final fight three throw i was happy that she brought her back well i'm glad someone remembers her. Someone, someone has to. They made her, especially for me, even though I haven't bought that season pass. Wasted resources, I guess. Alas. That's why they had to sell off EVO. Anyway,

I think that's the series. There's not too much more to say unless someone else wants to say a thing. There is streetwise. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was kind of hoping we could gloss over that. But yes, go ahead. It was Capcom trying to bring back Final Fight for a new generation

But it made it really dark and gritty Sort of inspired by the success of Grand Theft Auto So it doesn't actually star any of the characters It stars Kyle, who's Cody's brother And it's sort of this open world brawler where you take on missions And beat up guys to get money and follow the storyline And it got terrible views at the time And it was half justified and half not

because it is completely different from everybody everybody actually wanted. At the same time, it has a really gritty atmosphere, but it does still kind of have a goofy sense of humor that's really subtle, at least at first. And I think you could make some parallels between this and the Yakuza series, as much as it is like, in open world, sort of RPG brawler.

But yeah, it's still not terribly good. all right well that's that's the most you can say about it but it's capcom production studio eight who also made final fight revenge made this game uh coming off the two maximo titles uh but this one was not successful okay well that's that's fine that's the most anyone has said about final fight streetwise in years so it probably works just as well camis in there somewhere there's some cameos but okay some cammyos uh yeah right on so that's all we have to say, but we did open this up for a listener mailbag and, uh, some people

have responded. We get letters and written letters in the mail. We're going to read them to you now. So this first letter is from Christian. Final Fight has always been one of my favorite games. It's probably the one I own the most copies of across different systems. Fond memory, I can remember walking up to the local video rental shop with my mom, one stormy, snowy night to get pizza

and rent this on Super Nias, shortly after it had come out. Later, I remember my dad watching me play, beating up the car with the Japan license plate. He said he was offended by the anti-Japanese sentiment he saw on this, which that's very interesting. But not the blasphemy. Well, that's good.

Nope. Well, you know, on Super Niesu is, oh my car. They did they, you know, they baudlerized it. I later bought the Sega CD version of it and had a lot of fun. Uncensored intro. bonus attack mode with extra graphics, better sound, guy, I had so much fun playing this. All these years later, and I'm only recently learned that the game has a special bonus ending

if you can beat it on one quarter. I'm impressed this was kept secret as in I didn't know about it for so long. I must admit, I don't know what the special bonus ending is. Nope. Was it just a thank you for playing? Yeah, I tried. There was some version that had some sort of developer commentary in it. It may have only been in the Japanese version, but I think I remember reading out on the

cutting room floor. maybe he's referring to that I don't know I tried I tried booting up Final Fight CD recently on my my FPGA combination and it wouldn't load for some reason so I didn't get to play it

to refresh my memory alas but so it goes Diamond go ahead and jump in and grab the next letter okay the next letter comes from Alex if we're talking just the 1989 release of Final Fight I can't comment as I first play Final Fight

fight with my sister on Capcom Classics collection for the Xbox. See, that's what I was talking about, the digital thing that I think they put out. Yeah, included like Wolf of the Battlefield and all that stuff. Yeah, so my sister received the compilation on Christmas and we spent what would be a

very formative morning playing that Forgotten World and Merks. Hell yeah, Merks. At the time, it was among my favorite games and still holds a significant place in my heart today. The simple beat-up action enthralled me as a kid and even as an adult, Final Fight remains a graphical showcase and stands as one of the best ways to

pass an hour. Defenestrating Belger, yes, defenestrating, a great word that people don't use anymore. Defendistrate Belger is one of gaming's simplest pleasures. Picking up EDE's bubble gum is another one of them. It has remained a cultural touchstone in my house, as even my brother, who stopped playing video games in the mid-90s is familiar with wrestling mayor Mike Hagar. I played the Super Nintendo sequels although the original remained my favorite.

I don't know if Capcom needs to make another one. Sometimes it's best to let sleeping dogs lie, but I do like the slow integration of Final Fight into Street Fighter. The addition of Final Fight's three, Lucia, into Street Fighter 5 was very cool. Now, if only they'd bring back Maki. Love the show. Thanks for reading. Thank you, Alex.

See, there is somebody else. You found the other fan. You guys should have a sort of letter writing session or something. I'd say start a fan club, but it would just be the two of you. Oh, I'm being mean. Go ahead, Kurt. All right. On a personal level, Final Fight represents the first connective tissue that was formed between console and arcade games for me. In 1991, my young mind didn't separate both into their own categories quite yet. They are all just simply video games. So when I was

invited to the birthday party of a kid I barely knew from school, I was shocked slash pleasantly surprised that his parents had rented out the local arcade for a few hours for him and his guests. Such a seedy dungeon was usually a quote-unquote no place as designated by my own parents. So it was quite a thrill to finally get a look into such a forbidden world. Final fight stood out right away, the colorful pixels making up each massive sprite, the basic impactful sound effects when enemies were struck. And of course, Haigar's archonic, Ra! When he piles, were firmly driven into the ground.

I distinctly remember getting all the way up to Relento, made less impressive by the fact the arcade opera had each game set to free play. But the experience left quite a mark on me. I was a tough as Nails hero doing what was right to save Metro City. I didn't know if I'd be returned to the game any time soon, at the very least until the kid, I don't recall his name, had his next birthday. So you can imagine how excited I was when I went to a friend's house whose name I do remember months later, who actually had a copy of Final Fight for the Super Nintendo. I couldn't believe it. How? How could the arcade version be shrunk down onto Nintendo?

That's when it dawned to me, the arcades were like these ultimate video games that had to then be magically brought over to the home. This is before I was aware of Street Fighter 2. and while the Super Nintendo version was a far cry from the arcade original, I was too happy playing it to notice and or care. Some 30 years later, I can now. Well, maybe not proudly say I own a near-main copy of Final Fight Revenge

for the Saturn that I'm not going to divulge how much I peed for. Really hope the franchise will continue in some way in the future. Cheers. That was, did you give his name? Yeah, it was Matt McMuzzles. Yeah.

All right. Actually, it looks like there are two more letters. So I'm going to read the first one here. This is Dev over at Thunderful Publishing. I play Street Fighter 5 a fair bit and love the first final fight with its chunky soundtrack and plethora of turkey dinner and

apples hidden about the city. I'm mainly wondering the way that guest characters and final fight have been lent to Street Fighter throughout the years. The absence of a street fight in mayor is keenly felt. Do you ever think we'll get to see Hager's beautiful suspender pants in a street fighter title anytime soon?

Or is he relegated to his one-time wrestling guest role in Saturday Night Slamp? masters. Simply put, is the power of a nice mayor just too powerful for the world. You know, we don't talk with the fact that Hagar basically has a single strap holding up his mighty pants. Like, I guess it is a suspender, but it's one suspender. It's like a bandolier. Yeah. Is that a style anywhere? I don't. I can't, I can't explain it. Yeah. I like to think he's wearing it underneath his, like, you see him in the beginning of the game. He's wearing a nice shirt and tie, even though he's barely contained inside the suit.

I like to think he's just wearing that giant strap underneath it at all times. Holding everything together. Yeah, like a, you know, like a plain-closed cop or something with a pistol custom tailored to his suit. That makes sense. All right. Diamond, do you want to read this last letter and we can wrap up this episode? Sure.

It's from Docky, Cambridge, the UK, he, him. Final Fight always looked so impressive in the arcades and the bulging characters. fit the image of movie heroes like Stallone and Schwarzenegger. I didn't get to play the cabinet at the time because it was occupied by large teens. Oh dear. I later went to a friend's house to play his brand new final fight on SNES. I was holding the player to control it when I discovered that it was single player only.

I watched him play for 40 minutes before having to leave. Final fight remains a game which is more fun to watch than play. That's rough. Just to watch your, go to ruin us. fan. I don't know if I'd go that far, but yeah, Final Fight on Super Nias is, it's tough to love these days. But it's available very freely on virtual consoles. So if that's your thing, there is that. But yeah, I don't know why you'd want to play that when you could get the Capcom Brawler collection or whatever for Switch. I don't know if it's on other platforms, but I think it's on every platform.

Okay, probably so, yeah. I personally played it on Switch, and I can say just personal anecdote, I played through it with my daughter. And she picked Guy, because ninjas are still cool. And we just, you know, we just pummeled our way through the whole game. And she had a great time. Awesome. All right. Still fun for all these years later, even for children.

So that's Final Fight. This was episode 377 of Retronauts. So thanks for listening. And we'll be moving on to future Street Fighter episodes in the coming months. Don't, don't worry. There's going to be lots of talk about. Street Fighter. You're in for a penny, in for a pound, or in for a pounding, maybe.

Anyway, so I am Jeremy Parrish hosting this episode. If you enjoyed it, well, good news. There's so many retronauts out in the world. You can listen to for free at retronauts.com or at the Greenlit podcast network or on iTunes and, you know, podcatchers like that. I guess it's not called iTunes anymore, but that's,

it's ingrained at this point. If you really enjoyed the show, The even better news is that you can get every episode we publish a week, well, every Monday episode, a week early at a higher bit rate quality with better sound quality, no advertisements and cross promotions, et cetera, et cetera, by going to patreon.com slash retronauts and subscribing to our show for three bucks a month, very affordable, very reasonable. If you want to edge that up to $5 a month, give it, throw in the extra $2, you know, sacrifice a, what's $2?

days. $2 will buy you anything, but it will buy you an extra two episodes of retronauts each month every Friday. We have patron exclusive episodes. And on top of that, four or five, depending on the month, extra mini podcasts every weekend, courtesy of our friend Diamond here, along with a little column that goes along with it, and some other bonus stuff. So that's actually, you know, your money buys, that $2, that is the best $2 you can spend in this economy. So check that out, patreon.com slash retronauts. Kurt, where can we find you on the internet? At hardcore gaming 101.net on Twitter at HG underscore 101.

I'm actually working on putting together a, just a volume one on a big book of Vem Ups, which is going to be focusing on Kunio Kun, which we discussed a couple weeks ago, all the double-jacking games, everything else by Technos, all the Capcom games, all the Canami games, and Streets of Rage. That's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot to fit into one book. There's so many other beat-em-ups, which we'll get to someday. Bursting out of the book, like Hager bursting out of his suit.

All right, and Diamond, how about you? Well, I am very active working on those weekly columns for Retronauts, but if you'd like to find me on Twitter, you can find me as Fight Club. That's my last name, F-E-I-T, and then Club, C-L-U-B, like the noun or the verb, if you'd like. You can also find me on Twitch and YouTube as Fight Club. I do stream games sometimes. Or if you wanted to support me, you can find me on Patreon and Kofi at Fight Club. So, yeah, I'm out there.

I'm fun, fun person. Yes, please do not Club Fight. We need them to create cool stuff for us. Thank you. Finally, I'm Jeremy Parrish, as I mentioned before, but I didn't mention the fact that you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. you can find me doing a lot of stuff I've got to slow down the pace a little bit at Limited Run Games. You can find me doing

Retronauts, of course. And you can also find me on my YouTube channel where I post a weekly video each Wednesday about the history of video games. And also, I'm trying to do weekly streams. That's kind of hit or miss because life gets in the way sometimes. But check that out on YouTube, Jeremy Parrish.

That's me. That's the name I use there. My exciting and tricky alias on the internet, yes. Anyway, That's been Retronauts this episode. We'll be back, I believe, in a week with another episode and the Friday stuff on Patreon. You can find that, too. So until then, we're going to do that.

You know, I'm going to be. Thank you.