Fighters' Blight As was mentioned in a previous article, I was nine when Street Fighter II was released. As was also mentioned in said previous article, that fact kind of blows my mind. I remember when the fighting genre was new. RPG's, action games, platformers, all of these game types have been around since the NES era, but with the additional buttons and graphics of the future, the humble fighting game rose from the ashes of the beat 'em ups like Double Dragon and Final Fight to become the dominant gaming force for probably about half a decade or more. Evidently I've been playing fighting games for more of my life than I haven't, and mostly in arcades (the only way to vent your own frustrations and insecurities on a stranger before the internet) that were ruled by the likes of Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and eventually Virtua Fighter, Tekken, and Soul Edge. And the fighting was pure: simply drop in 25-50 cents, beat the crap out of some guy, (your mileage may vary) and then proceed to either further beat crap, or put in some more cash. They were simpler times, with simpler rules for face-punching. But some people wanted more. And thus began the bane of the fighting game. Extra modes. Street Fighter II, the granddaddy of fighting games, did have a few "side missions" from the traditional fighting. There were, if I recall, two bonus levels, one featuring your character beating the living heck out of some poor schmo's car (I always wondered about Dhalsim's reasons for vehicular vandalism, while Blanka was obviously just raging against modern technology), and another cracking approaching barrels. These mini-games were fun, but if you didn't enjoy them, no big, they only lasted maybe a minute, and you didn't lose your fifty cents if you didn't care. They were mini-games, and they played like mini-games, having only an affect on your overall score, which had an overall affect on nothing. Ah, the good old days. Now the arcades may as well be tar pits, with dinosaurs permanently sinking into nothingness, random children's field trips the only life the area ever sees. Oh, also a lot of DDR freaks. With the death of the arcade came the death of the arcade mode, the simple, pure fighting game. An authentic arcade experience is now something of an insult, an entirely too simple mode that video game reviewers don't seem to have any patience with. I suppose I am a gaming old fart, unfortunately, because I like to be able to complete a fighting game in thirty seconds. If I want to play a role playing game that lasts 50 hours, I'll play the latest Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, or, God forbid, Wild Arms. I have never, once in my life, said "Wow! I really want to sit down and play Street Fighter for days on end for the plot." Like it or not, RPGs are generally long because they have a lot of ground to cover: dungeons, plot, boss monsters, all told these events take a lot of time; conversely, a fighting game is generally one guy fighting another twelve or so guys, and that's it. Not to say one can't spend 50 hours with a "pure" fighting game, it's just a much more technical experience, like a sport one can get better at with experience (I assume one can get better at sports with experience, I've heard of it happening). But now RPG-elements have bled into many fighters. Few games today offer fighting games that simply reward the player for fighting, while more and more fighting franchises now require the player to commit to some crazy "mini-game" that is even longer than the "real" game. I say "require" because a major part of any fighting game is the fighters themselves. If you don't like the guy who uses the ninja moves, why not choose the guy with the karate moves? It's a pretty simple concept pioneered by Street Fighter 2's eclectic cast of characters. Today, you know your favorite character is in the game. He's in every game, he's got to be in this one... so why isn't he selectable? It turns out, according to a FAQ you had to find on the internet or a strategy guide you had to buy for fifteen bucks, that Favorite is only unlockable if you play 20 hours into some crappy mini-game focused around a character you couldn't care less about. HOORAY! So the designers of the game you just shelled out fifty bucks for are preventing you from enjoying your purchase because you must play a stupid side-quest to have a complete play experience in the main game. All in the name of "variety". It's just not fair, I tells ya! However, not every mini-game in a fighter is horrible. It's best to take the good and the bad on a case by case basis, and I just happen to have three cases below. We'll begin with early 2005's... Tekken 5 The Good: Tekken 5 stuck to the good old standby of unlocking further playable characters by beating the game with the playable characters initially provided to you. Nothing wrong with that, just takes a little bit of elbow grease and possibly setting the game options to "easy" and "1 round fights". Nothing wrong with that, either. Another fun but easily ignorable feature was the ability to modify an existing character, and level up the fighter in some sort of tournament setting. It was excellent if you wanted to get really good with one character, but for those of us with really short attention spans, and play fighting games to nurture said short attention spans, it was kind of too repetitive. And Tekken 5 did also give us Tekken 1, 2, and 3 (arcade versions) on one disc. Considering they were all good games to being with, there's hours of gameplay available right there. Which begs the question of why they had to include... The Bad: Devil Within Mode. Remember how I said fighting games evolved from beat 'em up style games? Final Fight and the like? Well here's a gigantic step back. Tekken had had a few similar modes in the past, but they could be completed with any available character, and did their best to maintain their unique fighting styles and moves in a different environment. Devil Within simply features one character (Jin) using a super, mega-condensed move list and control scheme. Control isn't everything, but Jin is also up against the same enemy, over and over again, for five levels. And each level is topped off by an either cheap or completely pointless, but always generic, boss fight. If you ever meet someone who says neck-punching can't be boring, you just punch them right in the neck and shout, "Play Tekken 5: Devil Within, bitch!" Completion of Devil Within Mode is necessary to unlock one of the better, more interesting characters on the Tekken 5 roster, so for a full Tekken 5 Main Game experience, it's a necessary evil. An evil straight from the bowels of Hell. At least playing the horrible side-game is only needed for one character, as opposed to half the roster as in... Motal Kombat: Deception The Good: Mortal Kombat Deception attempted to break the bank with useless mini-games. One such mini-game was actually kind of enjoyable because, in my opinion, it maintained what's fun and good about a fighting game while transporting it into an unique genre. While it was very similar to Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, Puzzle Kombat was a puzzle game played in 1-on-1 battles that lasted longer than the average slug-fest, but still felt fair and balanced. It also featured super-deformed lil' cutie versions of the Mortal Kombat cast, finally making the flaming, demon avenger Scorpion palatable to five year olds. Can Mortal Kombat: Babies be far behind? No, that'd be retarded. But not as retarded as... The Bad: every other goddamn thing in this game. When I was ten I played chess a lot on my PC, and I came up with an idea for Battle Chess, that instead of just watching those little pawns fight, why not control those pawns and fight for your little pieces. After kicking the idea around my brain for longer than five seconds, I realized it was stupid because instead of focusing on the strategy and intelligence needed for chess, it would create a match based on who is better with the fighting engine, so why not just play the fighting game as opposed to the fighting chess? I realized that at ten. Over a decade later, Midway decided it was a good idea to implement that idea in Chess Kombat. It turned out as pointless as expected. But at least Chess Kombat was pointless, and could be completely ignored if the player so desired. We were not so lucky with Konquest Mode. Konquest Mode, for those of you lucky enough to avoid it, was an attempt at meshing Mortal Kombat fighting with a lush, in-depth RPG style environment. It really sounds a lot better on paper. Just a few of the major faults with this mode include: Many areas contain RPG-style gabby NPCs. Only problem is they all have prerecorded messages that cannot be skipped. So if you accidentally tap X in the general vicinity of a NPC, expect to hear, for the seventieth time, a two minute diatribe on that particular loser's missing cat. It's like Livejournal without an "ignore" button. "Treasures" that are necessary to unlock additional characters in the "real" game, basically the only reason to play this "mini" game, are activated by being in one particular area of one particular world at one particular time. And, no, those previously mentioned NPCs don't offer any helpful clues for treasure hunters. The relative odds of finding everything on your own are basically a million to one. Shit Alert: if a game requires a FAQ or strategy guide to find something most games give the player, there is shit happening. The plot of Konquest focuses exclusively on a completely new character, Shujinko McDouchebag. Shujinko is a complete tool. All he ever does is inadvertently help the big bad. And, unless you have an IQ of 6, the "twist" of, "Oh no! Shujinko is working for evil!" is seen about 7,000,000 miles away. Unfortunately, Shujjy, whom you should be able to relate to and possibly care about, is a complete blockhead throughout his whole adventure. Hell, the fact that he doesn't automatically suck Scorpion's spectreized dick upon their first meeting is sign enough the guy is a jackass. But at least there's fighting? Well, sort of. Shujinko must learn the fighting disciplines of basically every character in the game, which means the long and boring process of actually learning the moves from each discipline, such complicated moves as "kick", "punch", and "run". By the third "sensei" teaching Shujinko how to pull out a weapon (press one damn button, real brain surgery), for the third time, you kind of lose interest. Repeated repetition is redundant. If I wrote an article that was just saying the same thing over and over again, and didn't even make it remotely entertaining, would you keep reading? Wait a minute... I could go on about this one all night. Suffice it to say, it's a lousy, time-wasting, not fun "fighting" mode that I wouldn't have even touched if it wasn't for the fact that it was absolutely needed to touch half of the Mortal Kombat: Deception roster. Thanks a lot, Ed Boon. Though I suppose one can expect whacky craziness from the Mortal Kombat franchise, as it has always had a reputation for hidden things being indecipherable (Meet me in the pit?), and a constant need post-Mortal Kombat Trilogy to improve the MK formula, for better (MK:Deadly Alliance) or worse (Mortal Kombat 4). At least they didn't try something completely out of left field, as in... Soul Calibur III The Good: While the new Create A Soul (CAS) character creation mode could be looked upon as idle masturbation (or a masturbatory aide, given how few clothes you can grant a female soul), I find it rather enjoyable. There could be a level up feature for fighting your buddy's leveled up CAS, but it would just lead to a battle of who has the most time on their hands to play whatever CAS leveling up mini-game that could have been added. No, I just like making my own little Captain Planet CAS and having him take out someone's boring old Astaroth. Though I'm glad there's no online mode, as I would just weep every time I had to beat down yet another cat-girl CAS. Bob to fanboys: stop making cat-girls! It's been done! Now go make more 80's references! I want the whole A-Team recreated for Soul Calibur III on my desk by tomorrow morning. Chop-chop! Though I just had to mention leveling up, didn't I? Oh well... The Bad: Chronicles of the Sword mode is a blend between a tactics game such as Phantom Brave or Ogre Tactics and Soul Calibur. Of course, it really isn't. Another case of the game designers believing their audience to be five-year olds (on a teen-rated game), it's nearly impossible to not see the computer's "tactics" coming. Here's a tip, they're all trying to fight you. They will come right at you so you then have to fight them, that's it. That is all the computer does. And the "fighting" entails actual Soul Calibur III fighting as opposed to whatever the hell is going on on the map screen, so it's another case of Kombat Chess. There's this whole mode entirely based on delaying the time between fights, and the one who will be victorious is simply the one with the better fighting skills, not the better strategy. So the tactics part of the tactics/fighting blend is completely null, leaving it at just... wait for it... fighting! If only there were some other mode in the game that was just fighting, then we could all just play that. Ah, I must be a dreamer. And, for a sense of completion, I feel I must point out that Chronicles of the Sword is also necessary for unlocking certain characters. It's not as bad as Mortal Kombat, and the unlocked characters seem to be tacked on to boot, but they're still characters, dammit. It seems we will continue to see weirder and more "creative" fighting modes as time goes by. Luckily, at least Capcom seems to stick to the "just a fighting game" model, though the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom vs. The Law Firm of Phoenix Wright may deviate from the fighting mold a tad. I suppose we just have to hope for a better future. But when can we just go back to punching cars for kicks? Are we doomed to forever play fighting mini-games exclusively to unlock new content? Can this continue? 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Game'in Over

All non-copyrighted material is copyright 2005 Robert Pollack. Reproduction of most anything without Robert's express permission in whole or in part is prohibited by law. Ain't that a kick in the pants?