When the PSP came out Sony kept saying that they were bringing portable consoles out of the ‘handheld gaming ghetto.’ This stems back from the days where we could expect nothing but bad ports and poorly designed titles that ran terribly on the limited hardware. Anyone who owned a Game Boy is familiar with how badly fighting game ports turned out for the unit. It couldn’t handle the fast paced action. There are a few worth playing, but most are best forgotten. You would think then that a fighter custom tailored to the hardware would fare much better, right? Enter Raging Fighter. This Konami fighting game from Konami is one that has fallen deep into obscurity. I was able to find a cartridge for the sake of reviewing it. I must say that even despite being an original title it’s one of the worst fighting games for the platform.
Okay so I’ve played the game for hours on end and I wasn’t able to find any semblance of a story. I’m sure there’s some explanation in the instruction manual, but my copy didn’t come with one so I’m left in the dark. Basically near as I can tell there’s a fighting game tournament with seven participants. You choose one and face off against all of the remaining combatants to reign supreme. What’s kind of cool is the fact that the characters all have anime designs. This game was released at a time when anime was not a cool thing in the North American market (obviously Konami changed the boxart) and so Raging Fighter is a bit unusual in this regard.
The roster is painfully generic with your typical hulk character, Ryu look-alike, and some guy who is doing a bad impression of Guile. The whole cast of seven looks like rejects from Fist of the North Star to be perfectly honest. Either way it’s time to get to the gameplay. This is a typical one-on-one fighting game. You begin by selecting your character and choosing to have a practice match or participating in the main story. With the latter you start at the beginning of a platform and move your way up ala Mortal Kombat. You have several difficulty settings but honestly I couldn’t be bothered to set it above the lowest one because the game is so difficult and unfair. Enemies can drain your life bar with ease.
The reason most Game Boy fighters are barely playable is because the hardware can’t really support rapid and fluid animations. I must say that I was quite surprised initially at how large the characters are and how many frames of animation each of them has. The astonishment quickly gave way to disappointment. Raging Fighter runs slowly even by Game Boy standards. Your characters walk like the floor is covered in molasses. The engine is painfully slow, but oddly enough the jumping is fast. It almost seems to freeze the action when you jump though which is completely unforgivable for any type of game let alone a fighter.
When you knock an opponent down however the game sort of freezes for a second. You have to wait for the Game Boy hardware to load the falling animation. At least that’s my best guess. Sometimes you won’t be able to tell if you got the upperhand in an aerial strike or if your foe came out on top. This renders any sort of combo system in place completely unusable. The game doesn’t recognize any inputs when you’re waiting for your foe to finish falling. That’s pretty sad, and makes Raging Fighter a real slog to play.
The characters all move at the same speed too which takes out any strategic agility one may have over the other. Finally, they seem to have all the same reach with their punches and kicks. There’s very little diversity among their most basic attacks rendering each of them too similar to one another. Konami wasn’t well known for their fighting games, but by the time this title was released they had Street Fighter II to follow as a template. That’s why I’m not going to cut it any slack in this regard. Everything is so low effort here.
It’s no secret that the Game Boy’s controls are ill suited for the fighting genre. Back then developers had to come up with inventive ways to get around this limitation, and that’s precisely what Konami tried to do here. Despite having only two buttons at your disposal the development team found a way to give you a lot of options for attack. Holding down or up and either left or right results in different punches and kicks. It sounds intuitive on paper, but it’s really not. The engine stutters so badly that half of your button inputs simply aren’t registered. There’s a huge delay with all of your attacks, and before they’re carried out these are often canceled out by your opponent.
I told you earlier about how the characters are too similar. They do however each have their own set of special attacks as per pretty much every fighting game ever. Konami managed to fudge even this aspect up. Each character has only two special moves at their disposal and that’s just sad. Furthermore while many are your typical sweeps followed with the attack button others actually require you to use the up direction. As other fighting games had proven before the time of this release it just doesn’t work because it causes your character to jump more often than not. It’s clunky and awkward. At least they had the sense to have your character block when you’re holding the back button, but I mean come on. It’s almost not even worth noting but at least they got something right.
If there’s one positive here then it’s the graphics, but only if you’re looking at the game in still shots. The character sprites are huge for the system, and they’re very impressive. The animations are also really good as well, but as I mentioned earlier they take so darn long to carry out that it reduces the game’s speed to a snail’s pace. Still, the game is very nice looking for a Game Boy release. The backgrounds are surprisingly full of detail. They have no animation and are therefore just static pictures, but nonetheless I liked them even if they are a bit bland and lacking in character.
Fighter portraits on the selection screen are also highly detailed. One thing I don’t understand is why they couldn’t fit all of them on a single screen. You actually have to scroll to reach the latter half of the characters. This shows a lack of effort in my opinion. The profile pictures are good, but they’re not that amazing to have to showcase them in such a way. The soundtrack is pretty unimpressive as well. The composers seem to not have a good grasp on the Game Boy hardware and therefore it sounds like crap. This is not a soundtrack you’re going to download to your iPhone.
