Fatal Fury

While I discussed last time, six weeks or so ago, that SFA3 is my "go-to" Street Fighter title; the one that I'm much more likely to play than any other title in the series when I'm in the mood for some Street Fighter action, it's a bit more difficult for me to say that about any of the games in the Fatal Fury series. I still regularly return to the original Fatal Fury fer cryin' out loud, and I sometimes have a hard time deciding if Real Bout Special is better than Real Bout 2 or vice versa. Mark of the Wolves is, of course, an excellent game too, and Fatal Fury 3 even gets some love. I don't often play Fatal Fury 2 or Special, and I don't have much use for the original Real Bout game, but still--unlike with Street Fighter where I've homed in on a single title as my favorite and play it most of the time to the exclusion of all other titles (except when I want to indulge some nostalgia) I bounce around a fair bit in the Fatal Fury series, trying to decide what I'm really in the mood to play.

Yesterday, for example, I played through Fatal Fury 3 (with Terry; yeah, it's kinda cheesy, but a few characters are really hard in this game!) I have to admit, I think one of the reasons I like this game so much is the little attention to detail; the backgrounds and stuff are really cool and fun to watch. Yamazaki's trainyard background in particular is one of my favorite scenes in any fighting game ever (train-themed stages are very popular in both Street Fighter, Fatal Fury and King of Fighters stages in general. There must be some railfans in Japan. Also; what's with the steam engines? They're cool, that's what. There's no other reason to have them except that they look awesome.)

The character sprites don't look quite as good; they were greatly improved (although also "cartooned up" a bit) after Real Bout, so going back to these sprites feels clunky and primitive. Granted, FF3 improved the sprites significantly from FF2 and FFS (which in turn did so to the FF1 sprites--those that represented characters who recurred, that is) so maybe I shouldn't be so hard on them. The FF characters in the early KoF games also looked quite a bit better, although KoF was usually a slightly more attractive game visually anyway than the FF games.

I had better luck this time playing through it than I sometimes do. Some characters are just harder for me than others; Franco Bash is harder than he should be (especially for for a "Tier 1" character) and Terry is surprisingly hard to get past without having to use a continue or two (or more.) Geese Howard is, of course, a maniac that consumes several continues every time I play, but I only used two or three on him this time, I think. Surprisingly, after defeating Geese, the next two characters are relatively easy.

Anyway, I included a youtube link to the second half of a playthrough of FF3. In Spanish.