Karate Supers. Whaddya think? As a label for the genre overall?
It's not as specific as I'd like, but that's been the bane of me coming up with a genre tag, frankly. I want to be too specific, and I end up with something really clunky. "2-D anime-like superheroic martial arts fighting game" is specific enough (although it might leave room for stuff like Guilty Gear or Blazblue, which I'd rather not, actually) but it's too long and doesn't exactly trip off the tongue. Karate infers the martial arts tradition that's important to the genre, it infers the Japanese nature of the games (karate being a specifically Japanese martial art) and it infers the weaponless nature, excluding games like Samurai Shodown or Last Blade. Supers infers the superpowers that the characters routinely exhibit, which sets these games apart from more realistic martial arts games, most of which tend to be three dimensional, like Virtua Fighter, Tekken or Dead or Alive.
It doesn't really exclude games like Mortal Kombat very well, except by fiat. Mortal Kombat wasn't made by a Japanese company, after all. It also doesn't exclude a fair number of other games, which I won't really ever address just because I don't have any interest in them. For example, the fighting game (as opposed to the side-scrolling beat-'em-ups of the same name) Double Dragon and Rage of the Dragons. Nor does it exclude stuff like the Power Instinct series, or Waku Waku 7, or Rumble Fish or Arcana Heart, or plenty of other examples. That's OK; I don't need to exclude them, and frankly they seem like they fit into the genre as well as, say, the Art of Fighting series. But like I said; just because the definition includes them doesn't mean I'll talk about them here.
Karate supers. The more I think about it, the more I think I'm unlikely to come up with anything better. Although not meant to be completely inclusive, I figure the games (and game series) that are the iconic ones that belong to the genre are the Street Fighter games, the Fatal Fury games, the King of Fighters games, the Darkstalkers games, the Marvel and Marvel vs. games, and the Capcom vs. SNK games.
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