WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Final Fight CD

Publisher: Sega Developer: Capcom (original), Sega (port) Release: 1993

Final Fight was one of those games that was at the center of the battle between the SNES and Genesis in the early nineties. I mean to say that, when the SNES launched in North America, one of the main, third-party games was an impressive port of this arcade smash – something that you couldn't get on Sega's system.

Sega soon fired back with Streets of Rage, of course, which is pretty much a better game in every way save for, perhaps, the visuals.

But the SNES version of Final Fight was neutered. There was an entire level missing, including its grenade-tossing boss, Rolento. And of course, a whole host of changes to make the game more vanilla than its Japanese counterpart – scantily-clad transvestite enemies became men, darker-skinned enemies were bleached, and some of the more offensive named like Damnd and Sodom were changed, and any hint of blood was erased.

The biggest and most memorable change, though, was a lack of two-player mode. This was central to the game, and took what was a great arcade experience and watered it down to a stunted, single-player adventure. Furthermore, one of the three playable characters – Guy – was left on the cutting room floor. Capcom later attempted to rectify this decision by releasing Final Fight Guy as a rental-only, Blockbuster exclusive that swapped out Guy for another character – Cody – and remixed enemy position and difficulty. The missing level and censored bits didn't change, however.

Enter Final Fight CD. This latest in a long line of Capcom titles ported by Sega righted a lot of wrongs: all three main characters were playable, much of the censorship disappeared (though transvestites Roxy and Poison weren't quite as scantily-clad as their arcade counterparts), Rolento and his level returned, and two-player mode was included.

On top of that, Final Fight CD included all-new time-attack stages and an amazing, remixed soundtrack that stands as one of the best on the Sega CD.

Looked at somewhat objectively, Final Fight isn't really that great of a game. It's extremely straight-forward with a limited moves list. This is especially noticeable when  you compare it to something like the Streets of Rage series.

Still, it's one of the games I constantly go back to. It's loads of fun just to pick up and play through a credit or two. The presentation being so wonderful doesn't hurt one bit, either.

By the time Final Fight CD released on the Sega CD, it wasn't really as relevant in the whole SNES/Genesis war as one might have hoped. But Sega CD owners sure were thankful of an early, “legitimate” arcade in a sea of multimedia full-motion video games.