Final Fight is a classic retro arcade game made by Capcom with some amazing raster graphics for the time. Capcom released Final Fight in 1989 and it went down a storm with arcade dwellers and fight game fans alike. Inspired by the idea of Double Dragon 2 the team that created Final Fight at Capcom set about creating one of the most famous side scrolling beat em ups ever to be released, and could be considered the heir to Double Dragons throne.
Final Fight was set in the fictional Metro City where the city’s mayor Mike Haggar receives a message from a criminal gang called Mad Gear. Mad Gear have stolen Mike Haggar’s daughter Jessica in an attempt to bring Haggar into line with their crime plans for the city. Along with Jessica’s boyfriend Cody and his martial artist friend Guy, Haggar sets off to rescue Jessica from the clutches of the Mad Gear gang.
In Final Fight the main goal is to head from left to right dispatching the Mad Gear hoodlums with the character of your choice. One of the very cool features of Final Fight at the time compared to something like Double Dragon was the ability to choose your character, all of whom had different qualities. Haggar was large and slow with more power, Cody was the middle of the road guy not as slow as Haggar but a little bit faster. Finally you had Guy who was the fastest with the least power, and more importantly they were all individual sprites, with totally unique moves rather than different heads or arms stuck onto the same body with a different coloured t-shirt, which is something we have all seen before.
Moving onto the graphics, Final Fight was one of the best looking beat-em ups to ever appear in the arcade, it had huge sprites and characters and the colours and style were as with most Capcom games very well designed. You had the variety of the backdrops from the train section, complete with flickering lighting, to the battle in the wrestling ring at the end of round two. If you managed to get further into the game, the cliché’s started to add up but all in all the backdrops in Final Fight were pretty impressive and varied. Capcom later carried this for the time very large graphical style, huge sprites which were later continued in the legendary Street Fighter 2, which was not surprising as both the Final Fight main game designer, Akira Nishitani and the Final Fight character designer Akira Yasuda worked on Street Fighter 2 also.
Final Fight was a massive hit with the public and the industry alike winning numerous awards and accolades and eventually was released on a wide range of game consoles and home computers.
It was in 1990 that Final Fight was released on the Super Famicom, that’s the SNES in Europe and America, and was almost an arcade perfect port minus one playable character, Guy, and missing the two player mode. In 1991 Final Fight was ported onto a range of home computers, including the Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga, the commodore C64, the ZX spectrum and the Amstrad CPC and while these version were never going to be arcade perfect they didnt quite measure up to the SNES version.
In 1993 Sega ported a version of Final Fight for their SEGA CD machine and they added a variety of extras to this version including voice acting during the cut scenes, which I never got to hear as I never owned a SEGA CD, maybe there is a YouTube video floating around, or if any of you played that version let me know what it was like.
Final Fight sure got around back in the day and its still a bit of a go er today, its been on the Playstation 1, the Xbox, the Gameboy Advance which had Final Fight One, essentially an upgrade on the original SNES version with the full two player mode. You can even get the original SNES version of Final Fight on the Wiii Virtual Console although you can’t use the Wiimote to hit people, shame!
Final Fight spawned a raft of spin offs and sequels, from Final Fight 2 and Final Fight 3 on the SNES both produced specifically for Nintendo’s popular home console. Even the original NES got a Final Fight game in Mighty Final Fight which adapted to the consoles limitations, making super deformed mini versions of the main characters, Haggar, Cody and Guy.
You next generation console owners haven’t missed out either, Final Fight Streetwise was released on the Playstation 2 and the Xbox which took the Final Fight concept and moved it into the 3d realms.
So we have so far been able to look at the Final Fight legacy which has spanned 20 years. Final Fight is in need of a revamp though, with all the spin offs and sequels its kind of lost its way, and I would love to see Final Fight get the next generation remake treatment on the PS3 or Xbox 360. We have all seen the great job done with the latest 3d Streetfighter game, can you imagine an updated 3d version of Final Fight with those graphics? Capcom we are waiting!
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