7th's Five Worst Fighting Game Characters
Posted by 7th on November 09, 2005

E/N writers are, for the most part, a pretty tight group. We may not chat every day, or hell, even every month, but we generally keep an eye on each other, so as not to step on anyone else's toes from a creative standpoint, and just to keep up with what our buddies are doing.

Every so often, one of us gets an idea that he deems so huge, so magnificent, so AWE INSPIRING TO BOTH GODS AND MEN, that he decides every E/N site on the damned planet needs to take part in the realization of it (websites who don't participate in such events are generally considered to either be stuck up snobs (Seanbaby) or unfriendly/distant in general (Matt from XE).) Justin from Dyslexic Penguin is of the friendly, outgoing variety.

A couple of months back, he sent me a message asking if I'd be interested in contributing to a cross-site article (a suggestion I'd made to him several months prior), the topic of which had not yet been decided. I said sure, why not.

He later sent me a message saying "Okay. We're all going to write about the worst fighting game characters ever, so I need to know which characters you're going to choose so no one else does them."

"Ah," I said. "I see... Interesting (I'm terrible at stalling for time.) I'll think of something. Gimme a week to come up with my list."

I then promptly forgot about it.

Yesterday, I was tooling around the web, taking a gander at everyone's most recent endeavors, and I noticed that Justin had gone live with the piece, including a note stating I may eventually contribute, but he wasn't sure.

I'm not sure either, and I'm writing it at this very moment, so that should clue you in on my current mindset.

But I digress...

Fighting games have never, ever been my genre of choice, nor do I have any great amount of expertise in them. I started out the way many of you did, with the old Black Belt arcade game and Karateka on the Apple IIe (when I was in school, we didn't even have Oregon Trail. All we had was Karateka, Ultima 1, and Montezuma's Revenge) which was really more of an early attempt at a side-scrolling action title than anything else.

My first real memory of playing a game in the fighting genre as it is now known was the original Street Fighter, its only home console version that I know of being the Turbografx-16 title Fighting Street. I didn't care for it. "Why doesn't the screen scroll?" I asked. "Why are there no mushrooms to stomp on? Where are the candles that I can smash with my whip? Hey, where's my damned WHIP?!" I was a gifted child, but remember, these days the Government considers that a mental handicap.

To this day, I really have no strong love of fighting games. They're extremely repetitive in my estimation, and all of them are essentially the same thing packaged with various diffferent eye candy and combo structures to give the illusion of variety (with rare exceptions such as Bushido Blade and Power Stone.) Soul Calibur (and the aforementioned Power Stone series) for the Sega Dreamcast is the only fighting game I've enjoyed enough to spend more than five minutes at a time with that I've played in the last ten years (the hours I spent staring at the bouncing polygonal boobs of Dead Or Alive 2 notwithstanding.) But nevertheless, I have amassed a mental collection of fighting games that should never have been made to begin with.

On the top of that list was a Saturn/Playstation game called Criticon, but I didn't include any of its fighters on this list, because the game was apparently so bad that no one has even bothered to put images of it on the web. Suffice it to say, it was more like watching a badly rendered FMV of aliens dancing than a fighting game, because nothing you did with the controller seemed to actually accomplish anything. It really was that bad, the worst controller response of any game I've ever seen.

But like I said, I could find no images, so I have to work with what I could find, and my admittedly swiss cheesed memory of a genre I don't really give a shit about to begin with. But I assure you, I have no intention of letting a complete lack of interest in the subject matter stop me, so I hereby proudly present 7th's Five Worst Fighting Game Characters Of All TIMEAHHH (ah, ah, ahhhhhriccolaaaaaaa...)

5) Luke Skywalker

Title: Star Wars - Masters of Teras Kasi
Platform: Sony Playstation

The Star Wars franchise has not had a history of releasing playable games (the recent Battlefront series being the exception to the rule) and MOTK was not the game to break that chain of god-awfulness.

Yes, it was 3D. Yes, you could fight as a Jedi Knight, and as the Dark Lord of the Sith himself, Darth Vader (though Vader here appeared to be too short and rather skinny... a foreshadowing to Episode III, perhaps?) the graphics were impressive for that time, and the music was spot on, being based on the John Williams soundtrack.

Everything else was complete shit. The combo system was half-assed, and the controls unresponsive. Many times I'd try to do something as simple as a jump-slash attack, and end up doing something that more resembled, well... scratching my ass with my light saber.

Luke was the worst offender of this. Many of the levels were quite dark, and by default, Luke is dressed in his black jumpsuit from Jedi, so he's not always easy to see. Sometimes, the blend was bad enough to make him resemble a floating head with a bright green stick. Anything that reminds me of Irritating Stick is not a good thing. I also was displeased by the fact that, considering this was Luke Skywalker, there was no "overact button" that I could use to lull my enemies into a state of pity by rolling on the floor screaming in agony until the timer ran out.

4) Red Eye

Title: Last Bronx
Platform: Sega Saturn

This was one of the last games to be released for the Saturn before it bit the dust (along with a stellar list of limited copy releases such as the legendary Panzer Dragoon Saga, Burning Rangers, and Magic Knights Rayearth.) It was easily the least impressive of the entire bunch (though I never failed to be amused by the brief audio clip that played when the title screen popped up, which basically consisted of a young Japanese kid trying to say Last Bronx. Of course, it came out sounding like "Rast Bwonk," which is only marginally less amusing than meeting a guy from Osaka whose favorite movie is Free Willy.)

Last Bronx was an urbanized pre-cursor to Soul Calibur. It was a weapon-based fighting game, and the control systems were very similar. But that's where the similarities end. The whole production screamed "rushed to milk what's left of US Saturn sales dry." There were no real cinemas to speak of, the menu system sucked, the graphics were blocky, and the music was your typical 80's guitar rock crap that the Japanese continued to cling to well into the 90's.

The only shining point was the gameplay itself which, while not nearly as polished as Soul Calibur, was very precise, and responsive. If you lost a fight, it wasn't because of shoddy programming.

The final boss of the game was a guy named Red Eye. Red Eye looked like Hellboy's blonde nephew, with weird green eye goggles. He wasn't visually impressive, by any means, and he wasn't particularly difficult to defeat. He fought rather like a monkey, bouncing around over your head, sneaking pot shots in with his clubs, and generally being as hard to land a punch on as possible. All that was missing was the hurling of feces. But if you managed to pin him in a corner, he was done. Plain and simple.

No backstory was given concerning Red Eye, or why it was so important to fight him. I am assuming he was some kind of gang leader, based on what little info I could get from the "game cinemas." And no, beating him did not unlock him as a playable character. Another let down with Last Bronx was the deplorable lack of hidden features or unlockable extras.

Ah well, he sucked. Next!

3) Raxel

Title: Fighting Vipers
Platform: Sega Saturn

The first time I played Fighting Vipers was at the arcade at Hamilton Place Mall in Chattanooga, Tennessee (the arcade is gone now, first replaced by a Johnny Rockets restaurant, and then by a sports clothing store.) What impressed me about it was not only the graphics (which were exceptional for its day) but the interactivity with the fighting arenas (this was, naturally, before games like Power Stone were even remotely possible.)

There's something inherently pleasurable about beating on a guy so badly that it knocks chunks of his costume off. And naturally, it's even more enjoyable to do so to the female characters, not from a "I like to pick on women" standpoint, but more in a "Check out this wicked combo I just pull-OHMYGOD WHAT A SET OF TITTAHS!" vein. And it's even more satisfying to hit them so hard that you knock them through a wall and out of the arena. That was the appeal of Fighting Vipers. It was very simplistic in its combo structure, and the soundtrack was more lame 80's guitar rock, but damn, it was sure fun to impale your nearly naked opponents on fences, or knock them through glass windows from 40 stories up.

One thing the game wasn't known for was its stellar characters (for example, the Japanese version had an unlockable fighter called Pepsi-Man, who was essentially a giant Pepsi can with arms and legs. He was replaced in the US version because of trademark laws by a giant bear type creature who looked like he'd been sucked straight from an episode of Ranma 1/2.) One of the most memorable characters (outside of the final boss Bahn, who looked exactly like Serpentor from the G.I. Joe cartoon) was Raxel (an obvious send up of GNR front man Axl Rose), a guitar swinging metalhead who liked to drop to his knees in fulll-on Jon Bon Jovi mode as his patented victory pose.

There was nothing wrong with Raxel's move list, or his responsiveness. In fact, it was really fun beating the shit out of people with what was essentially a Gibson Flying V guitar. You just felt like a real tool doing it, because his entire character was so out-of-date. In Japan, he was probably considered the coolest of the cool, daddy-oh-san. But in the U.S., he was like the guy in high school who took all his classes in the vocational building, had a mullet, and whose entire wardrobe was made up of concert tee-shirts from the likes of Def Leppard and Britny Foxx. And no, it was never explained why the lead guitarist of a rock band would compete in a fighting tournament... as if story realism has ever been an issue. In the last almost two decades, we've had Indian contortionists (Dhalsim), private detectives and mermen (Eternal Champions), and even flaming homosexuals (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Mike Tyson's Punch Out!) A hard rocker is hardly a wild stretch by comparison.

2) Colonel Guile

Title: Street Fighter - The Movie
Platform: Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation

This is one of the few times (and no, at the moment, I can't think of any other example) when a game was made into a movie, and a game was made from that movie that was based on a game. It was a sort of ouroborus. Where did it begin, and where did it end? I'm still unsure.

Regardless, it was one festering pile of shit. It played more like a stunted Pit Fighter or Mortal Kombat than a Street Fighter game. And wouldn't you know it, all the actors played themselves in the game, how fun!

This included Guile, naturally, played by Jean Claude Van Damme, a name that, thanks to direct-to-video (and despite a nostril-eating coccaine addiction) still refuses to die.

I must admit though, having him in this game was its only saving grace, simply because it was so enjoyable beating on him (it was also fun to beat up on the Asian doctor from ER who played Chun Li, but not quite as satisfying. An hour after kicking her ass, I wanted to fight again.)

Which brings me to Numero Uno:

1) Bean The Dynamite

Title(s): Sonic The Fighters, Fighters Megamix (hidden character)
Platform: Sega Saturn

Ah shit, where to begin? I never played Sonic The Fighters, as it never made it out of Japan. But two characters from the game made it into the fighting game lover's wet dream title Fighters Megamix (the other was named Bark, and was a doglike thing, as I recall.)

In the Sonic mythology (who knew there even was such a thing, eh?) Bean was keeper of the Green Chaos Emerald. His fighting style basically consisted of dropping bombs, and dropping his giant duck ass on your head. Controlling him waas slow, cumbersome, and unresponsive as you can imagine. But the most infuriating aspect of the character (as far as fighting against him goes) was his damned lifebar. It took FOREVER to wear him down. A punch that would take off a tenth of any other character's life bar would barely even nick Bean. His feathers must have been made with titanium and covered an adamantium undershell, 'cause next to nothing was getting through that downy armor.

I also hated the character for my friend Kevin's incessant habit of using him to fight me, and trouncing me, and following up each win added to his endless string of victories by standing up, doing the HHH crotch chop, and yelling "GET THE DUCK OUTTA HERE!!!"

I had very dorky friends when I was younger.

You probably guessed that.

After all, look at what I write about.

I need a Tylenol.

-=7th=-

(Click HERE to read the other "Worst Fighter" Cross-Site articles)