ClayFighter Review (Super Nintendo, 1993)

The 90s were a wild time. This is especially true when it comes to video games. In this time publishers flooded the market with ‘edgy’ titles featuring mascots and characters with attitude. It’s a bit cringe looking back now but at the time we all just wanted to be cool. One very interesting time piece from this generation is a fighting game called ClayFighter. It was clearly an attempt to appeal to the Nickelodeon crowd with over the top characters made of clay. I played some of the sequels later on but never the original. Against my better judgement I’ve decided to right that wrong and give ClayFighter a chance. I knew the art style wouldn’t age well, but perhaps the gameplay holds up, right? Well let’s find out.

The story begins as a meteorite made entirely of clay has crashes into Earth. More specifically it has hits a circus. Everything the mysterious goop touches is transformed into claymation versions of their former selves as they all come to life. This includes several people, and even formerly inanimate objects. Now these guys want to fight it out to determine who is the new king of the circus. It’s now an all out brawl between clay figures to bash each others squishy heads in.

ClayFighter is wacky. There’s no way around it. Fighting games were taking themselves way too seriously at the time so I can appreciate this approach. It’s completely over-the-top and obviously aimed at a younger crowd than something like, say, Mortal Kombat. Unfortunately it feels like a time capsule. No one has cared about claymation in a very long time. The characters and art style are now more weird than they are funny. While it had its time and place the main appeal of ClayFighter is pretty much defunct now. I’m sure when I was younger I would have found everything at least slightly funny. Now it’s just annoying and off-putting.

Let’s try to put this aside and get to the gameplay. After all if a game is fun it doesn’t really matter what it looks like, right? ClayFighter is a two dimensional one on one fighter. It doesn’t really have a gameplay hook or gimmick. It’s just a traditional brawler. Gameplay consists of a series of best out of three matches where you and another opponent drain each others life bar. The first to win two matches is the overall victor. In single player mode you fight through each opponent and face off against a boss character at the end. Upon emerging victorious you’re given a single screen text blurb for an ending which is kind of lame to be honest. The developers really tried to hit the humor home with these but every one I saw failed to stick the landing.

It’s time to dive into the character roster. With a game based around clay figures the sky is the limit, right? This is one aspect of the game that I think they did okay with. Bad Mr. Frosty is an angry snowman that serves as the poster child for the franchise. Then we have a manic clown named Bonkers, Helga a large opera singer dressed as a viking, a pumpkin headed horror monster named Ickybod Clay, a piece of candy named Taffy, an Elvis impersonator named Blue Suede Goo, and more. Blob is just a simple hunk of clay but I thought it was neat that he can transform into various tools and weapons. The roster is rounded out at eight different fighters and I thought it was actually decent. At least in terms of what the developers were going for that is.

The fighting engine is messy to put it mildly. I blame it on the digitized graphics engine. Characters have very few frames of animation which makes gameplay very awkward. Each clay figure is armed with a weak, medium and strong punch/kick as well as a series of four special moves. Unfortunately these are highly derivative and the developers had virtually no ideas here. Most of the characters have a simple projectile attack performed with familiar sweeps and punches. Other special moves tend to be very simplistic acrobatics and slides. Ickybod Clay can teleport himself short distances, but besides that there aren’t really any new ideas here. There are several far better fighting games with significantly more diverse movesets from this time period.

Unfortunately ClayFighter is also very slow. Characters move around like they’ve got time to waste and all movement is very clunky. I suppose one could argue that they’re made out of clay, but come on. Jumping is also very awkward. Whenever you leave the ground it feels like characters are hanging in the air because of how slowly they fall. The game has a speed option in the menu and even turned all the way up it’s still slow as molasses. Hit detection is also a major issue. I felt like strikes that should have hit often don’t, or those that should have missed connect. This is only exacerbated when you’re in mid-air. With airborne foes you have to hit them in exactly the right place or else no contact is made. There’s too much ‘jumping into each other with no effect’ in this game.

ClayFighter’s fighting engine just lacks polish. It’s rather surprising that the developers didn’t include finishing moves here. I mean come on. The term ‘Claytality’ pretty much writes itself. It also doesn’t help that the movepool for each character is so limited and similar to each other. Many of the special moves are also very insignificant. You also have to contend with a slight delay in performing these attacks even when the input was correct. Many times I was left wondering if I did something wrong because of this only to see the action carried out just a few moments later. It’s this lack of polish that really holds ClayFighter back. The game just feels sloppy and undercooked. It’s not uncommon in USA developed titles in this time, but the fact is especially unavoidable in ClayFighter.

The game also suffers from a lack of options and modes. While I think the roster is one of the game’s strengths only featuring eight characters in a late generation fighter is kind of disappointing. There’s also not very much content. You have only two modes of play. Single player and vs mode. A practice option would have been nice, or even a build your own tournament feature. As it stands the game is just over too quickly. Multiplayer is mildly entertaining in short bursts but you’re unlikely to find anyone else willing to play this dinosaur of a fighter. The options menu can be used to change some of the game’s algorithms which is nice. You can select the gameplay speed but why bother when the slowdown basically makes it run in slow motion anyway. There are also three difficulty settings and the controls can be changed too.

I really don’t like the graphics in ClayFighter. I’m sure the digitized clay figures were impressive once upon a time, but Mortal Kombat II came out a year earlier and looks a generation ahead of this one. There are too few of frames of animation per character. The models themselves look okay but seem very low resolution to my eyes. The backgrounds are bright and colorful but the theming is kidn of off-putting. It’s just not a very good looking game. The soundtrack is also rather lackluster with clear midi compositions that are goofy in a bad way. There are some high points however. The title screen song has actual vocals which sound surprisingly clear. The announcer also sounds wonderful and announces each character by name. Unfortunately everything else kind of sounds like a Sega Genesis audio, and that’s not a compliment.