Back in the 16 bit day, it was all about the Sega Megadrive(or Genesis) and the Super NES, when Nintendo got Capcom's Streetfighter 2 on exclusive,Sega had to act quick to make sure fighting fans wouldn’t ignore their console, so they brought in the closest thing to SF2,SNK's Fatal Fury.
FF was meant to be MD owners equivalent of SF2, although FF was ported to SNES and SF2 vice versa at later dates. Except FF never was as popular,nor as good as SF2, although it has gained numerous sequels and several of its characters made the jump to the more popular King of Fighters series, but this is where it all started, Terry’s jacket still had sleeves and Mai wasn’t chasing Andy (she didn’t exist yet) when this one is set.
Being a Megadrive owning kid,I naturally had this,I can still remember me refusing to acknowledge that Streetfighter 2(which my Snes owning best friend had) was better,even though now it's a pretty laughable statement.
Fatal Fury was actually being made at the same time as SF2, and when compared to post SF2 fighters, unfortunately it does kind of show,but when you consider fighters Pre-SF2,its actually pretty good.

The game only uses 3 buttons. Punch (A), Kick (B) and throw(C), as you would expect, this suits the regular MD pad fine, The commands respond decently, not perfectly, but not enough to cause any severe grief, although performing Terry's Rising Tackle (or whatever its called here) has proven impossible for me. I think the arcade version had a separate button for the lane switching, but pressing up while in mid jump performs this here.
Ah,on to the lanes, this is what set the series apart from the countless other 2D fighters of its day, the lanes seem to be loathed by many FF players, and initially they are a real pain to get used to, but once you do they aren’t such a problem. Although they can be easily exploited for cheap victories over the CPU, in many cases, its only payback for some of the horrible things the CPU will perform on the player. The only major complaints I have with the game play is that it is rather slow, and the collision detection is slightly off, actually, in some cases that is putting it nicely, my burning knuckle once went straight through Raiden with no effect, but the Super shot kick (read Crack-shot) cripples all with the slightest touch.

The graphics, for being an early 90s game, are fairly good but were obviously toned down from the Arcade and Neo Geo home version. And they haven’t aged all that well, but in comparison to other games of the time; they are quite nice, if a bit simple. The Vs screen portraits are also rather nice.

The the roster is also toned down from the original, with stick swinging Sassenach Billy Kane and hairless Muay Thai Hwa Jai missing, although the latter makes a cameo in Duck King's stage.
The remaining characters are mainly names that will be familiar with fighting game fans.The Bogards, Joe Higashi and Duck King. And a few select others, the incredible Hulk-esque old martial arts master (Tung Fu Ru), Mike Tyson clone #2(Michael Max), a 'kapo-era' expert who runs a café (Richard Meyer) and a bulky masked wrestler, who reverses all attempted throws into power bombs (Raiden) complete the roster. The infamous Geese Howard is the boss, he seems to be unplayable, but the instruction manual gives instructions on how to perform his violent wave so perhaps there is a way to unlock him.

The characters all have a small selection of special moves, some which are rather devastating on the opponents lifebar, as I mentioned, Terry’s Super-shot kick springs to mind. Some of the moves look slightly different to the ones those who started playing the characters in later games would expect. Terry's power wave is the main example, in this it looks more like those little light up volume things that expensive CD players have to show how loud it the music playing is. It still works the same as every other power wave, it just looks different.

For being on the MD,the sound is pretty good, with a good few characters having small voice parts. I think this is the only game where Terry and Joe actually sound like they are saying 'Burning Knuckle' and 'Hurricane Upper’. Although whatever the hell Terry says, its sure isn’t 'Power Wave’, it sounds more like 'Moe-reese' to me. The music is a mixed bag. All of it is passable but I doubt you will be humming many of the tunes,apart from the one from Geese Tower, after playing.

The game has two modes of play, Championship battle and Street fight. Champ battle is really story mode, where you pick either Bogard brother or Joe and fight through the other characters for a showdown with Geese. There are small, rather pointless but amusing, cut scenes in-between fights to bring the story along. I’m sure you all know the story of the Bogards quest for revenge against Geese because he killed their father, and Joe is just there for the sake of it. In this mode, the AI can be severely irritating. In some fights it is hell (Tung Fu,Raiden, occasionally Richard) and others its ludicrously simple. With Andy,right at the start of the fight, I hit Geese once and he flew into the other lane. Where he stood still until time ran out.
Street Fight is either 1p vs. 2p, 1p vs. CPU or CPU vs. CPU. In this mode, all characters are available to play as, which is mainly aimed at mulitplayer use, so you and your friend arent restricted to the three main characters.

There is no real replay value other than the multiplayer. The endings in story mode consist of a few lines of text and are pretty poor to say the least, but there is always multiplayer.

Trying to rate the game overall is pretty tough. Its a decade old, so of course it cant compare with the likes of Capcom Vs. SNK 2 and Guilty Gear XX, but if you have an old MD or Genesis and see the game on the cheap, there are much worse ways to spend the cash. Its a fun little game that Fatal Fury and King of Fighters fans will want, for historical value if nothing else. After all, this is the debut of a few of the genre's favorite characters.
My score is also slightly affected by nostalgia,so if you never played this as a child, I wouldn't recommend going into this game with stellar hopes of a fighter on par with Streetfighter 2.If you want an absolute classic Megadrive/Genesis fighter, go for Streetfighter 2:Special Champion Edition or Mortal Kombat 2 ,if you are a fighting game fane, I would recommend it,because I cant think of a better fighter out with the two aforementioned series in the 16 bit era.
If this had been the time of its release,it might have scored above average,but I feel scoring it below average would be extremely harsh.


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Recommended: Yes