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“You’re already dead.” Three of the most unforgettable words in anime... mostly
because, shortly after they were uttered, you knew some Big McLargeHuge was gonna eat
it by exploding in various gratuitous ways. Well, it’s kinda tough to get that level
of grotesquery onto the Game Boy, so they didn’t even try. Perhaps because I needed
to come down off of my Persona 4 Arena high, here’s... a Fist of the North Star 2D fighter
for the Game Boy. Which, actually, wasn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting. Granted,
as delayed reactions are kinda the status quo for this series...
… naah, who am I kidding? It’s a basic-*** fighting game, less Street Fighter II, more
Yie Ar Kung Fu. You choose from an 11-man roster (which is pretty impressive for a Game
Boy game) and travel the post-apocalyptic wasteland, by going directly from bout to
bout and not travelling or getting any semblance of the plot whatsoever. You’ve got a punch
button, a kick button, and maybe a projectile attack if you hold the punch button down for
a while. Not exactly the most taxing of systems, but... yeah, Game Boy. On the upside, even
though there’s very little in the way of attack options, and no real way to block,
you can still exhibit some semblance of strategy in where and how fast you attack, whether
to go with high jumps or the little axe-kick jumps that seem to work so well... and occasionally,
just stick your opponent in the corner and chump-shot him into a pattern. Arino would
be so proud.
But what sets this monstrosity apart is the use of... EXPERIENCE POINTS! Hells yeah, I
will find RPG elements in everything if I wish to. In this case, the fighters will level
up with repeated use... though as there’s no battery back-up, you’ll need to input
the latest password each time you return to the game. As levels are gained, the fighter’s
stamina increases, as do the attack strengths of the A and B buttons. There might be a better,
more contextual way to phrase that, but nope. A and B attack. That’s it. Look, we can’t
really ask for much. This game came just about a year after Viz released the first series
of the Fist of the North Star manga here in the states, making the game a kind of eerie
parallel to Ranma ½: Hard Battle in that regard. But that game had pandas. Now, if
Kenshiro punched a guy so hard he turned into a panda... that would quite nearly make my
head explode.