Street Fighter II may have started the fighting game craze, but Mortal Kombat popularized heavy use of gore and finishing moves in the genre. The original MK was not a very technical fighter, and therefore it was easy for any old developer to push out a clone in hopes of striking it rich with its audience These were almost all bad. This is why it’s hard to believe that developer Naughty Dog (renowned for such acclaimed releases as Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, Uncharted and more) stooped so low as to develop a Mortal Kombat clone of their own. They opted to release this game, Way of the Warrior, exclusively for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer. This is a console well known for a largely mediocre library, but Way of the Warrior is bad even by these standards.
Way of the Warrior has a terrible story even by fighting game standards. This game focuses on a fighting tournament that occurs in the Himalayan Mountains in a citadel. Nine fighters from around the world have been summoned to participate. The winner will be recorded in the Book of Warriors (I suppose that’s a prestigious honor or something). There isn’t much in the way of explanation as to why each of the characters are participating in this tournament, but trust me when I say that’s the least of Way of the Warrior’s problems.
First of all the roster is just dreadful. The characters are highly generic, and some of their gimmicks are just plain bad. We have the militaristic strong man Major Gaines, Australian outdoors-man Shaky Jake, makeshift ninja Konotori (who is obviously Jason Rubin in costume), another ninja named Ninja (original huh?), a Bruce Lee wannabe named Dragon, Nobunaga the samurai, businessman Malcom Fox, kimono wearing Nikki Chan, and a drunk bar brawler named Crimson Glory (one of the token female characters). Few fighting games can match Way of the Warrior when it comes to the sheer lack of inspiration. This is one of the few fighters in which I didn’t like a single character.
Way of the Warrior plays in a similar fashion to most other two dimensional fighting games of its time. You begin by selecting a game mode (you can compete against the computer opponents in the main story, or battle a friend in the two player mode) and more. Gameplay is the same regardless of your selection. Way of the Warrior is a two dimensional one-on-one fighting game that makes heavy use of digitized characters. This means that the combatants are real actors, and they animate with frames taken from video. It’s the same method used by Mortal Kombat and most of its clones, and this method hasn’t aged particularly well. I’ll get to the graphics later.
Each fighter has a life bar on opposite sides of the screen which is depleted when hit by the opponent. Characters have their standard line-up of punches and kicks, but what’s interesting about this title is the fact that they don’t all hit at the same height and in some cases they vary slightly in effect. The bread and butter of any fighting game is the special moves, and each character has several at their disposal. Unfortunately these are all generic projectiles, aerial attacks, and everything else we’ve seen a hundred times before. Each character has at least ten special moves which would be impressive if they weren’t so boring. At least Naughty Dog stuck to what works; the button inputs are mostly sweeps, holding buttons, and pressing two inputs at once which keeps things pretty simple.
Like so many other developers Naughty Dog incorporated fatalities into Way of the Warrior. I’ve always viewed this aspect of fighting games as cheap and gimmicky because often times there’s no creativity put into these. I’ll start with the good. The finishing moves are much easier to perform here than in most fighting games often requiring only three or four inputs. Additionally all characters have four of these fatalities apiece. That’s a pretty hefty number for a fighter of this era, but this fact is less impressive when you consider the fact that two of these are stage based. Things only get worse with how unoriginal they are. It’s hardly worth the effort to pull these off when they’re reduced to decapitations, burning your opponent, and stuff like that. I was really disappointed by the lack of variety, or even creativity, in this game.
The only cool effect in the entire game is how your opponent’s skeleton hits against the screen after being burned by lava in one of the stage fatalities. The specials and finishing moves are boring, but the biggest issue with Way of the Warrior is the fighting engine. The characters move sluggishly, the game suffers from slight input delay, and the jumping is insane. Seriously, just by tapping up on the directional pad your character will almost go off screen. To make matters worse they have almost no horizontal momentum while jumping which makes aerial attacks extremely awkward because you’re always coming up super short. These issues make Way of the Warrior an absolute chore to play.
Mortal Kombat is ugly, but Way of the Warrior is an absolute train wreck in terms of graphics. This game was released in a time when developers prioritized the size of their fighters. Naughty Dog didn’t get the memo that no one cared. The developers quite obviously used their friends for the digitized graphics. These actors obviously have no real-world fighting skills because everything from their punches to the idle animations are awkward. I never though Mortal Kombat was particularly polished. Compared to Way of the Warrior it’s a masterpiece. Sprite based cartoon styled characters can look really good when they’re blown up, but digitized ones? Not so much.
The fighters all look absolutely terrible. They look awful and suffer from slight pixelation which is not something you would expect from more powerful hardware like the 3DO. Unfortunately they animate very poorly as well. The developers got a little overly ambitious by having the actors make wide movements when they were limited to so few of frames. It looks like the game is stuttering whenever Dragon is a match participant; it’s that bad. The game does kind of stutter when your characters jump; it looks like they’re warping around the battlefield which makes it tough to keep track of them. That renders things like using combo attacks completely out of the question.
The biggest offense however is this game’s lack of visual identity. It doesn’t follow one motif. Instead Way of the Warrior chews a bunch of ideas up and vomits them up for. It’s an unmitigated disaster in terms of style. Why would a lady bar fighter ever face off against a samurai? There’s a clearly defined line between comedic and stupid, and Way of the Warrior is clearly on the wrong side of it. Even the soundtrack feels out of place. Naughty Dog licensed several music from White Zombie’s album La Sexorcista, but none of it fits the on-screen action in the least. It’s bizarre, and makes the entire package feel like a practice in neo-surrealism. I have no idea how this game was ever released.
Way of the Warrior is one of the weirdest fighting games I’ve ever played, and not in a good way. I feel downright uncomfortable playing it because I know that human beings put work into this title and were devoted to its development cycle for around a year. The reason it makes me uneasy is because this is pure and utter garbage. The developers should never have allowed a game with this tragic of a fighting engine ever hit the production line. Everything about it; the character roster, graphics, soundtrack (despite mildly enjoying White Zombie), and controls just make me mad. It’s not often that a video game puts me into a rage over how poor it is. This is one of those rare cases. I’m not even a fan of the original Mortal Kombat, but this doesn’t even deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as it.
