xeno3998's Full Review: Final Fight One for Game Boy Advance
It's hard to say whether the beat-em-up as a genre is making any sort of comeback. On one hand, the last four years have produced at least three excellent beat-em-up games in The Bouncer, a new River City Ransom, and Cannon Spike. On the other, innovation is continuously absent, and the rate of high quality releases is less than one per year. If we were to judge by Final Fight One, the future would look rather bleak. Final Fight One (henceforth FFO) could serve as a reminder of why the genre failed: it is repetitive, uninspired, and ridiculously short, its finale coming after less than one hour of continuous play. If there is any hope of a comeback for beat-em-ups, FFO would make it seem like a cruel lie.
FFO starts off with a still-screen intro that initiates the game's shallow (and therefore apt) storyline. A crime lord kidnaps the new mayor's daughter in a bid to turn him over to the dark side. Not about to give up his principles, the mayor, Mike Haggar, sets out to rescue her, and finds company in Guy and Cody, who also wish to see an end to the crime and corruption.
It'd be redundant to expand upon the shallowness of the plot, as that comes with the territory. Not one game in this genre, to my knowledge, has ever had anything more than a shallow plot, thrown in as an afterthought to justify all the carnage. To even bother analyzing the story in a beat-em-up would be punishing it unfairly. So it's all up to the gameplay...
Unfortunately, FFO fares poorly in this regard. The game offers a mere six levels with one boss each. Although the combat takes place in six different stages, they all play exactly the same - a single plane, viewed from the 2/3rd perspective, with oil drums and crates serving as the only offset to an otherwise bland environment. The items, found in said containers, are also incredibly uninspired - you get a knife, pipe, and sword. And unlike Streets of Rage, you can't even throw the latter two.
Also subpar is the AI, which regardless of difficulty can't seem to overcome the simple strategy of standing in one spot and mashing the attack button. It is only when you maneuver around the plane that you become susceptible, to some extent, but then if you're really in a tight spot you can just tap the R shoulder button and knock everyone away with a spin attack. Suffice it to say, much of FFO is as challenging, and enjoyable, as watching paint dry.
And lastly, how about some enemy variety? Just about every boss in FFO attacks in the same way, following many of the same patterns, and falling for many of the same attacks (last boss? run around, body slam, rinse, repeat, done.) It feels like you're going through the first level five extra times, with a marginal increase in difficulty at each turn.
Where Final Fight One does impress, its single area of achivement, is in graphics. FFO boasts top-notch character animation and detailed, active backgrounds. Attention to detail is high, also, with one background in the subway level featuring active trains that rush by, causing the entire platform to tremble. Neat.
One thing that might have been nice was if the designs themselves didn't look nearly exactly like those found in Streets of Rage. Everything from the neon-coat punk to the morbidly obese sailor/chef guy is in here. The industrial stage is also close in design to a similar stage found in SOR. Without the ridiculous naming (Wong Who, etc), FFO might easily be mistaken for an update to Streets of Rage.
While nothing can compare with Yuzo Koshiro's excellent score for Streets of Rage, FFO is no slouch when it comes to music. The battle-theme is perfect for the kind of combat that characterizes Capcom's beat-em-up.
Saved to some extent by excellent visuals and the fact that it's fun for about forty minutes (increasingly so in two-player), Final Fight One is an otherwise repetitive, uninspired, unimaginitive, and unrewarding experience; a waste of a cartridge, in nicer terms. Some might argue that it has nostalgiac value, and I might counter that that value is reduced significantly with the updated visuals. Others might point to the difficulty setting; that I should raise it up to "Very Hard" or something for replay value. Sounds like a cheap way to excuse a short, tedious game with terrible AI. The argument of simplicity does not apply here, either -- FFO is simple, sure, but it's also repetitive and devoid of challenge, meaning it also would have sucked fifteen years ago. In the end, FFO stands as impeccable evidence that what worked in the 8-bit generation does not work now.
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