Some genres weren’t well suited for early handheld consoles. Fighting games on the Game Boy, for example. Developers often tried to shoehorn their successful home console games on to the weaker hardware but rarely worked to optimize the experience. Game Boy ports of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat for example are barely playable. Others, such as Battle Arena Toshinden, fare better but don’t feel the same as a traditional fighting game experience. I gave up hope long ago of finding a great fighter on the Game Boy. Enter Killer Instinct. I expected this to be a lazy downport but I was shocked to discover it’s actually one of the best traditional fighting games for the system. Let’s take a look!
The story in this handheld version is the same as it was in the Arcade and on the Super Nintendo. Killer Instinct is a fighting tournament held in a futuristic world and is organized by an evil corporation called Ultratech. The purpose is to gather the strongest fighters to test their super strong living experiments against. It’s pretty dark but quite over the top which is not out of the ordinary for a fighting game released in the 90s. The roster is very unique with such over the top characters as Spinal (a skeleton), cyborg, werewolf, etc. A few fighters are more grounded in reality such as Orchid and Chief Thunder, but no one feels particularly out of place. I like how over the top it is. Unfortunately Cinder and Riptor didn’t make the cut in this handheld port, but that’s no big deal.
Killer Instinct on Game Boy is a fighting game, and retains it’s large focus on combination attacks. That’s an understatement; the entire premise of this game is to chain attacks together because that’s the fastest and easiest way to drain your foes life bar. You can try to avoid this mechanic but anyone with even a slight grasp of it will easily mop the floor with you. Yes, combos are really that important here. Aside from this aspect Killer Instinct is a pretty traditional Mortal Kombat clone. It’s a side view one-on-one brawler where you choose from one of nine characters each of which is armed with their own moveset, combos, and unique punches/kicks. This includes a single finishing move (or fatality for the layman) per character.
The most unique aspect of Killer Instinct (and one that is maintained in this Game Boy port) is the dual life bar setup. The victory is determined in a two out of three match set up. When a character’s life bar is depleted they fall down, and then get up again fully restored. The match only pauses temporarily before you’re at it again. You have to drain a foe’s health twice, and you aren’t restored when the action resumes. This gives a bigger advantage to the winner of the first match, and I can see how this mechanic could rub some people the wrong way. Personally I like it, and it does help Killer Instinct to stand out in my mind. At its core this toned down edition of the combo happy brawler retains what made Killer Instinct, well… Killer Instinct.
So where did Rare succeed where almost all others failed? They focused on the gameplay engine first and foremost. Characters animate fluidly and the framerate is surprisingly decent. Even things such as performing special moves and jumping are smooth in execution. Killer Instinct actually feels like a real fighting game, and you can use real strategies you would in other similar titles. That might not sound particularly novel, but when we’re talking about the ancient Game Boy hardware it is. A competent fighting game on the go is something that was as rare as unicorns back then.
With that said the game does have its issues. There’s a slight input lag which took me a little bit of time to get used to. It’s not crippling by any means, but it does present a slight learning curve even for genre veterans. Furthermore not all of the special moves made the cut. There’s enough variety, but just barely. Killer Instinct on the Game Boy also suffers from a lack of inputs. In the arcade and home console versions you have a variety of weak and strong punches/kicks. With just two buttons Rare had to map these different strikes to holding directions when pressing the corresponding input. It works, but does take some getting used to. Because of this Killer Instinct is a bit more difficult to ‘git good’ at then it’s home console iteration.
The number of combos each character has at their disposal has also been reduced. Because of the aforementioned lack of buttons they’re also much more difficult to pull off here as well. I struggled to get above a ten hit combo with just about every character for the longest time. Even then I never felt like I was as good at this game as I am at the home console port. I know it’s rather petty, but the lack of an over-the-top announcer shouting out the name of the combos here is disappointing. I didn’t think I liked this feature from the Super Nintendo version as much as I did until I played Killer Instinct on the Game Boy.
Killer Instinct is a surprisingly good looking game. Rare was able to keep the digitized character designs and they look amazing for the hardware. You can easily tell who is who, and thanks to the light coloration on backgrounds you’ll never get lost during a fight. What’s more is that they animate with surprising fluidity. Special moves also look great and I never was hit by a projectile or strike that I didn’t see coming. This is probably the best looking fighting game for the original Game Boy hardware. The soundtrack doesn’t fare quite as well. Killer Instinct is well remembered for its rocking music (anyone remember the Killer Kuts CD?) but it just doesn’t translate well here. The music sounds like random bleeps and blips. It’s all pretty bad and barely recognizable as the Killer Instinct soundtrack. No matter because that’s par for the course with Game Boy ports.
Fighting games are a dime a dozen on the original Game Boy. Good ones are an entirely different story. Killer Instinct is a real diamond in the rough in this regard. It’s one of the few fighting games on the Game Boy that actually feels like a fighting game. It even feels like the home and arcade versions of Killer Instinct. That’s better than most GB fighters.
