A playthrough of Capcom’s 1991 beat ’em up for the Super NES, Final Fight.
Played through with Haggar.
Final Fight is one of my favorite beat ’em ups, and most of that stems from this version of it. I absolutely loved it as a kid when I got it for my birthday. To my nine-year-old eyes it looked just like the 1989 arcade hit, and being released just a month after the launch of the Super Nintendo in the United States, it was of those really impressive games that made people stop and say wow when they saw it. The characters were huge and were so much more detailed and better animated than anything else before it on consoles, and the SNES’s large color palette made for some dramatic and eye-catching backdrops.
Final Fight had an intuitive control-scheme that simplified the then-standard Double Dragon-style controls, making it simple to pull off any move, throw, or combo without getting bogged down with finger gymnastics. At the time, the only comparable 16-bit console game was Sega’s excellent Streets of Rage, but even it couldn’t match this cart’s graphics or fluid handling.
The SNES version made a big impact when it came out, but for as well as it reviewed and sold, it certainly earned its fair share of criticism. The programmers’ lack of experience with the hardware is evident in the lack of 2P simultaneous play and in the slowdown that plagues the busier scenes, and the limited memory capacity of early SNES carts resulted in a couple major cuts: Guy has been removed from the roster of playable characters, the entire factory stage has been axed, and there are no longer any animated transitions between scenes. The compromises, however unfortunate, are understandable and were most likely unavoidable at the time, but they did leave some people feeling salty.
So anyways, maybe it’s my nostalgia for this one that makes me still love it so much, or maybe it’s that lovably cheesy remix of the soundtrack. Whatever it is, I still have a ton of fun with it, so much so that I generally pass over my Sega CD copy (I’m not a fan of that CD music) in favor of this one when I want to bust some heads in Metro City.
If you’d like to see the 1994 re-release, Final Fight Guy, you can check it out here:
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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