Today’s article contains one (arguably) graphic GIF of Playstation 2 quality. The image is basically the point of this essay, but if you are squeamish around such a thing, please be aware of its presence beyond the “read more” link du jour. Probably nothing you haven’t seen before, but, ya know, it bothered me, which brings us to today’s topic…
Where is your videogame uncanny valley threshold?
Today’s game is Final Fight: Streetwise. As many people know, this was Final Fight’s attempt to enter the 21st Century with a Playstation 2 game that upgraded/marginally rebooted the original arcade classic. And, given Final Fight was always a handful of baseball bats away from just being The Warriors, this could have worked out well. Fight weirdos in strange costumes across a generally grungy city? Tale as old as time! And, while Final Fight: Streetwise maintained the concept of “beat ‘em all up”, it went a little off the rails when it decided to start aping the wrong crowd.
The blitheringly obvious greatest influence on Final Fight: Streetwise? Grand Theft Auto 3.
And this was not a good thing.
It is easy to see what happened here. Grand Theft Auto 3 was possibly the most popular and influential videogame of the era. And, to be clear, “influential” in this case absolutely means “there were 10,000 games all trying to get a piece of that sweet, sweet GTA3 pie”. This was the epoch when “sandbox gameplay” became a bullet point on every game cover from Final Fantasy to Hitman. Some of these copies were net goods, though. Spider-Man went from having “levels” to gaining the sprawling cities he always needed, and we likely would have never seen something like Fable without it being pitched as a “medieval GTA”. But, on the other end of the spectrum, we had any number of titles that wanted to make a claim at “gigantic, open worlds” without putting in the effort to actually design said worlds. And thus did we play through a number of games that would have been simple, progress from level to level affairs a few years earlier, but now had to have “hub cities” that were about as densely populated as Lost Springs, Wyoming (look it up!). And now you were forced to putter around for hours between missions and maybe the best you could hope for was some kind of collectible scavenger hunt. Apparently, the lesson so many game designers took from GTA3 was not that it had a fun, varied world where you were constantly learning you could do new things (God, I could write an article just about the exhilaration of finding a car jump ramp for the first time in GTA3), but simply that it was “big”, and you could walk around at your leisure. Oh, and GTA has a lot of “maturity”. Maybe we should shoehorn some cusses into our games, too…
Final Fight: Streetwise decided to chase the gameplay concepts and maturity of Grand Theft Auto 3 like a Japanophile running down a katana collection. FF:S takes place in a largeish (by PS2 standards) world with distinct neighborhoods, shops, and citizenry. There is the main plot, and a variety of “side quests” that can be distributed by assorted townsfolk/drug dealers. There are quests, both required and optional, that allow for the player to experience an escalation of regular gameplay, or more “minigame”-like fare. And, while Final Fight has always been a “street” franchise that included mature themes (the boss of Level 3 is a corrupt cop! You can eat his gum!) and roaming, malevolent gangs, the decision was clearly made at some point to make Final Fight: Streetwise feature characters that could be immediately described as “hardcore”. The central problem of this story is not a princess kidnapping, but a new drug on the streets. Our current hero is battling in an underground fight club to make ends meet, and all the previous protagonists are all suffering from various states of decay and corruption. And the new characters are all either morally compromised, or clearly too good to survive the whole of this adventure. This is a real story about real people in a real mean neighborhood.
And, unfortunately, you are not at all prepared for how this game is blitheringly, rock stupid from top to bottom.
You can read a game summary, Final Fight wiki article, or even the previous paragraph and think to yourself, “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.” You may be like me, and imagine a game that indulges in that “grim ‘n gritty” style, but, even if it’s not your thing, it can still be good. It has happened before, right? It doesn’t have to be bad! This is a Capcom game! They know what they’re doing!
Well, bad news, folks, Final Fight: Streetwise is an aggressively stupid game. There is no other way to describe it! This is a story where the featured characters are all idiots that always choose the single stupidest move possible. “This guy tried to kill me once, but maybe if I be polite, things will be better… whoops, got tricked, now he tried to kill me again.” That’s a plot point! It is meant to be a surprise when the mafioso that initially threw the protagonist into a deadly pit fight then again tries to kill the hero through an immediate bout of arson even though he was being so polite. And, granted, “being polite” should be rewarded for Kyle Travers, as his default mode is just cursing and punching people. I am not just talking about during gameplay, either! Kyle immediately resorts to fighting literally everyone he encounters. With a deft hand, a writer could portray Kyle as a man that knows he is in a rough situation, and immediately reacts to even the slightest kindness with inversely reciprocal brutality. But this is not a story written by a deft hand. This is a story about solving every problem with punching, and being rewarded for punching as hard as possible. And this translates to the gameplay, as literally everything in this world, from the sidequests to the gyms where you can spend your rewards, exists exclusively to power Kyle’s punches. And, again, this is a videogame, that could work. But, unfortunately, it all works to make this Final Fight world seem entirely too small to support the kind of game that could be happening here. It makes every corner of Kyle’s quest feel… stupid. This is a stupid hero doing stupid things in a stupid world.
But it is still a world. And it is a world that, with its “streetwise” aesthetics, tries to be realistic. The voice acting and graphics are great (by a Playstation 2 standard), and, if you are willing to forgive a number of (stupid) limiting choices in the game, you could easily see this as more of a “real world” than the cartoon world where you frequently see a dude in a gi tossing fireballs out of his hands. The venues in Final Fight: Streetwise are like those from the original Final Fight: subways, fighting rings, and the mean streets. And, while there are a few fantastic special moves as Kyle levels up, the majority of the fighting is based on traditional punches, kicks, and grapples. It is easy to slide into the simple comfort of playing this generally mundane game, and imagine you are controlling a real character in a real world.
And then you bash a sleeping dog with a baseball bat.
I think I’ve figured out how Final Fight has influenced the characters of Final Fight. Here are my findings:
So Final Fight: Arcade is how it all happened. Where does that leave Final Fight SNES, though? This is a Final Fight title, but it is missing the Factory Stage, Rolento (the Factory Boss), and, most glaringly of all, Guy. One can forgive a lack of a two player mode for not impacting the canon, but two whole characters missing? And not even mentioned? What happened there?
And speaking of testimony, Final Fight One, the Final Fight version that appeared on Gameboy Advance, allowed “new” Cody and Guy to be playable characters. After punching enough dudes, you can select not only Guy, Cody, and Haggar, but also Street Fighter Alpha’s Guy, and Street Fighter Alpha 3’s Cody. This means you can play as Cody in his 2nd evolution: a down on his luck convict wearing his prison stripes. Given the dialogue spoken during Final Fight One (and, yes, this is the one [non-mighty] Final Fight version where the characters actually talk past the opening), the “future” characters are revisiting their own memories of Final Fight as their older selves. So why would that be happening? The answer lies with “Prison Cody”: this is one of Cody’s many parole hearings, and Cody and Guy are both testifying about how Cody is an upstanding citizen (that punches hundreds of other citizens). Future Cody even admits that he does not remember the factory area (because he took a shortcut), but goes with the story because he wants to show accurate parity with Guy. Everybody on the same page? Great! Maybe Cody will be back on the streets and… fighting? Again? No, probably best to keep this malcontent locked up.
Actually, let’s focus on Belger. In the original Final Fight story, he is a “legitimate businessman” kingpin of crime that has kidnapped Jessica because he wants to extort the mayor. In Mighty Final Fight? Belger is a cyborg “beast” that kidnaps Jessica because he has a crush on her. He’s practically Bowser! And does that make Cody into Mario? Maybe! And what else is missing from Mighty Final Fight? Edi E., the corrupt cop that previously stalked around Metro City. With the removal of a “morally gray” police officer and his favorite sidearm, Mighty Final Fight becomes a lot more kid-friendly. Right down to Mike Haggar getting a “whacky” hammer to swing at his foes (oh, there’s the Mario of the group), everything about Mighty Final Fight seems to be made to appeal to younger kids not yet old enough for the “real” violence of Final Fight.
Let’s Talk about Mighty Final Fight for a second: This is one of the few beat ‘em up games where it feels like the level up system is justified, as it doesn’t completely break the difficulty of the game depending on your level (it mostly just gives you extra health and a fireball). This, almost by default, makes Mighty Final Fight one of the best beat ‘em ups out there, and certainly top two for the NES (see also 
What’s in a name: In addition to Poison’s identity issues, the SNES/GBA versions rename Damnd and Sodom (to Thrasher and Katana, respectively). I understand having to think of the children when seeing a name that sounds an awful lot like “damned”, but Sodom is biblical, people! You religious people love the Bible, right? Leave the poor Japanophile be. And he was named for a German thrash metal band, anyway…
I’m a professional computer geek, but I’ve never analyzed the specifications of my cherished video game systems. From the Atari to the Playstation 4, I’ve made a conscious decision to stay away from looking at the nitty gritty of any given gaming hardware, because, frankly, I don’t want to know. I know that I can get… obsessive about details, and, like avoiding checking my checking account balance every five minutes, I figure I’ll be happier if I don’t know that game x is only using 80% of the processor speed, and, ugh, this game would be so much better with a proper frame rate. I like Clerks and Star Wars The Force Awakens equally despite their wildly disparate budgets, why should I judge Cave Story against Super Mario Galaxy just because they happen to be on the same system? We’re well past the point when graphics or framerates were the be-all end-all of gaming (if such a time ever existed) so knowing the exact specs of any given hardware isn’t going to give me a good idea of whether or not its games are “good”.
Now, I want to be clear here: I really like the Street Fighter Alpha series. For one thing, right from the start, it fully embraced the anime aesthetic of Street Fighter 2: The Animated Movie. Street Fighter 2 has practically become a part of my DNA, but I was never really fond of the general “look” of that game. Can’t really tell you why, but if I had to put it into words, I’d say that the designs of Street Fighter 2 look more like an animated adaption of the WWF, while Alpha is decidedly Dragon Ball. Maybe I like super beefy Bison, or this has become a retroactive fondness for the Alpha sprites thanks to 
late 90’s. Following the tradition of roughly every other Street Fighter hitting the SNES (Street Fighter 2, no champion edition, Street Fighter 2 Turbo, Super Street Fighter 2, no super 2 turbo), Street Fighter Alpha (1) completely missed the system… but here’s the superior sequel, anyway! And, yes, this game was released for those “next gen” systems, but who cared about those? I didn’t want Tekken, I wanted more SNES hits like Chrono Trigger and Yoshi’s Island. Why upgrade to new hardware when the SNES is pumping out hit after hit? Street Fighter Alpha 2 arrived the same Christmas as Donkey Kong Country 3, so obviously we’re dealing with a very healthy platform.
Today, these load times are just an annoyance, but back in ’96, this was practically salt in a gaping wound. I was a Nintendo kid, and had decided that the N64 was the only system I would ever need. I didn’t have many concrete reasons for this lifestyle choice, but one of the few irrefutable facts I could hoist in the direction of the haters was that the N64 was cartridge based, so I wouldn’t have to sit around waiting for discs to load like on the hated Playstation or irrelevant Saturn. No load times! That and Mario 64 were all we had! And here was a cartridge game on my beloved SNES (home of Secret of Mana!) that had load times! Betrayal most foul!
If it hadn’t been for Street Fighter Alpha 2, I never would have seen which way the wind was blowing. Yes, I would have bought the N64 (actually… I think I already had), and, yes, I would have bought the Playstation (alright, I would have begged my grandparents for a Playstation… same difference when you’re 14), but I never would have felt that the SNES to N64 was anything but an involuntary transition. Forced obsolescence, right? No, SFA2 proved that SNES’s obsolescence was anything but forced, and we’d squeezed every last drop out of that 16-bit hardware. Time waits for no generation, man or hardware, and Akuma was the reaper du jour.
other country? Sakura is a high school student! Zangief doesn’t even own a shirt!
(continued from page C1) which is why it became a custom of the area to store our cooked meats in crates and barrels.
Most towns don’t declare a city-wide holiday celebrating the day a man was defenestrated through a skyscraper, but Metro City has never been most towns. Mayor Haggar experienced a popularity surge not seen since the days of knights and demons, and many called for Haggar to run for positions like governor, senator, and even president. Haggar was riding a wave of national popularity, but it would be the international stage that would knock him from that perch to the cold, dark waters below.
Mayor Haggar’s journey was now inevitable, but as he prepared to leave his beloved city and join Maki on this deadly quest, another warrior threw his fist into the ring. A curious young man named Carlos Miyamoto claimed that he owed a favor to Haggar and Guy, and pleaded to assist the assault team. Very little is known about Carlos, and he was never seen again beyond this “second” Final Fight, but many have floated the theory that his love of katanas and obvious Japanophile tendencies (Carlos Miyamoto? One doesn’t need to be an onomatologist to see the problems there) reveal that he was an unmasked, incognito Sodom, a bitter former Mad Gear member. This conflicts with reports that Sodom was participating in a martial arts tournament around this time, though rumors still abound.
The Mad Gear Gang was never seen again, but Haggar was not greeted with a hero’s welcome upon his return to the states. He had only been gone a week, but in that time, the worm had turned, and Metro City was in an uproar over its mayor’s latest “vacation”. The Mad Gear Gang had sympathizers in Metro City’s government, and information had been leaked that revealed that Mayor Haggar and his entourage had traveled Europe entirely on the city’s dime. Metro City had been in an economic spiral following the gang wars, it was in no position to support international vengeance quests waged by its politicians, so Haggar was in hot water. He tried to explain that eliminating the Mad Gear Gang “once and for all” would be the only way to keep the city safe, but a city needs more than flying kicks to stay secure, and Haggar had threatened that stability more than a hammer punch ever could.
System: Super Nintendo, though also available on the Wii Virtual Console.
