Final Fight basically kick started the beat ’em up genre when it launched in arcades, and developers from all around the world were scrambling to cash in on the success. It wasn’t the first brawler by any means, but it put the genre on the map in a way that Double Dragon never managed to do. At first everyone seemed to fail at it. Sega put up a valiant effort with Street of Rage but they didn’t really catch fire until the sequel. I must admit that I was never a particularly big fan of the now defunct developer Jaleco. It’s not so much that I hated their games as I really just wasn’t very familiar with them at all. After hearing that they had a semi-successful series of beat ’em ups on the Super Nintendo, and given the fact that this is one of my favorite genres of all time, I figured they might be worth a look. This led me to Rival Turf which was released in Japan as Rushing Beat. It was tough to get over the awful boxart (I mean, come on) but I definitely gave it a fair shake. Unfortunately Rival Turf is one of the most generic brawlers ever released.
You need look no further than the storyline to discover how derivative this title is. In Rival Turf you play as a street fighter named Jack Flak whose girlfriend has been kidnapped by the leader of a gang called the Street Kings. It’s up to him, along with his police officer buddy Oozie to rescue the pixelated damsel in distress and kick the rogue thugs to the curb. It’s basically the story of Final Fight but with totally forgettable characters set in one of the most generic cities imaginable. What’s worse is the fact that in an obvious ploy to appeal to fans of teen martial arts genre that was flourishing in the early 90s the boxart features two young teens. It’s a terrible depiction of the anime style adult protagonists, and is actually kind of hilarious. Though there are few dialogue sequences (the ending is the only one I recall) it’s written in bad Engrish. It’s pretty obvious that as a publisher Jaleco just didn’t care that much and put in the minimum amount of work.
If you’ve played Final Fight or Streets of Rage then you’ve basically played Rival Turf. It’s a poor man’s clone of these two celebrated titles, and while it keeps the gameplay principles of them it loses all the bells and whistles while offering nothing new itself. You begin play by selecting from one of the two available characters. Three was the standard back then for the genre, and it’s super limiting that you can only choose from two. What’s more is that they aren’t all that different from each other. Jack is smaller but he’s not significantly faster, and Oozie is stronger but it isn’t well defined. Gameplay isn’t altered in a major way by your choice of protagonist. Once you get going you’re thrown into a variety of different two dimensional environments. In traditional fashion you can move up, down, left and right. Stages are linear and in them your goal is always to the right. Enemies block your progress and you often cannot move forward until they’ve all been defeated. At the end of the stage you face off against a boss character who is stronger and has more health. In this game these encounters usually involve an endless supply of incoming grunts (two at a time) to help impede you further. It can be annoying because you aren’t given any grace period after defeating the lesser enemies before the next one walks back on-screen. They just serve as distractions.
The combat engine is clunky to say the least. You can walk, run, jump, punch, perform a dash blow, throw and more. Your basic strikes can be performed in combination by repeatedly pushing the punch button. This results in knocking the enemy down temporarily, but you can only get a few subsequent strikes this way. I found this to be one of the clunkiest aspects of the game because almost at random the enemy will hit you back interrupting the combination attack. Even the basic opponents have too much health and it can take a lot of time to wear them down. This is frustrating and artificially increases the length making Rival Turf an absolute chore to play. What I discovered early on is that the only way to cause significant damage to your enemy is by throwing them. After this I was significantly more successful when I would hold down the run button and rush opponents to throw them. Unfortunately this is a very boring way to play when you spend the entire game running back and forth throwing your foes off screen repetitively. This gets old very fast, but even as a veteran to the genre this was the only way I had much success in Rival Turf.
Rival Turf just isn’t a very good looking game, and when I say that I’m simply comparing it to Super Nintendo games of the time. The character models are painfully average and animate with very few frames. It’s kind of pathetic looking to be honest. The attacks are either too fast or suffer from slowdown which is unforgivable considering there’s few to no background animations in any of the stages and the engine supports only four characters on-screen at once. The biggest offense however is that the throwing animations on the enemies are incredibly slow. I’m talking painfully bad. For some of the characters you’ll be stuck in their grip for no less than ten seconds. That completely ruins the pacing. The animations are just terrible even aside from that. It’s laughable how you can pick up and throw a barrel or oil drum and they skid upright against the ground. It’s horrible. The soundtrack is equally as offensive. While the music isn’t terrible it’s painfully boring. Each stage features its own theme but you’ll be hard pressed to remember any of them after you’re done playing. This music is exceptionally bleepy and blippy than your typical Super Nintendo game, and it just doesn’t sound great. More time and care was needed here.
Even though this title features co-op play (which was lacking in the home port of Final Fight) I would recommend Capcom’s home port over this. Rival Turf has absolutely no character, charm, and it’s one of the most generic video games you’ll ever play. The developers had not even one moment of inspiration whatsoever. The stages are boring, the gameplay is stilted, the soundtrack is awful, enemies are terrible to deal with, and it just isn’t fun. This is a definite pass; I feel bad for anyone who received this as a child.
