Literally the very first game I ever bought in order to do a review of it. That’s right, I found this game for a decent price and decided that the novelty of having it was definitely worth it. This was put on my worst Saturn Games list based on my memory of playing it as a child. Now the memory of this game is fresh in memory and I will never escape it. This was… painful.
First, of course, let’s play the story mode. The newly fresh impression? Yeah, everything is ugly as hell. The character designs look so fake and real at the same time that they’re hard to look at. Movements make the limbs and the extremities of our characters look like they’re Barbie and Ken dolls. The backgrounds lack any real color and decide, instead, on dull and uninteresting greens, grays and browns. Even Guile’s “blue” camouflage looks drained of life. It sure was innovative to use a 32-bit system in something that has already been done, far better, on a 16-bit console. Tell me again, how was this better than Street Fighter II?
I get it, Mortal Kombat was the hot snot back in the day and Capcom wanted to try something different. However, the real problem with it was that the story mode was just that: a story mode. The story mode loosely followed the movie… very, very poorly. First and foremost, you start off as Guile vs M. Biso--wait, what?! Seriously, they start us off with the main protagonist against the main antagonist. The story continues whether you beat him or not. So, not only are we fighting with ugly as hell characters in terrible backgrounds, but we also have to fight against a time limi--wait, what?!
Oh, yeah! There’s a time limit because the hostages will be killed in about an hour and you need to wade through a “choose your own adventure” plot that mimics scenes from the movie. They are… stretching the limits of reasoning here. The first thing that comes to mind is one minute Balrog is holding a news camera, the next minute, he wants to fight you for literally no reason. Yeah, they shoe-in a fight with him and then you choose what you want to do next. It never gets any better. The movie screen shots are off-putting and every fight makes you want to play the Street Fighter II… or III… or even V! Hell, even the original Street Fighter arcade game is looking good by comparison!
The fighting is horrendous! Not only is it ugly to look at, but it’s about as basic and generic as you can imagine. The moves are your normal Street Fighter fare, only they look ridiculously terrible in this context. Why? Because they don’t match with the designs, like everything else. The sad part is that the actual fighting is the best part of the game itself (unless you enjoy making fun of terrible stuff, then this is definitely a game for your library). Yes, as awkward and stupid as it looks, the fighting controls are still responsive… enough. They feel floaty and you do random moves without trying. However, it still works well enough that you can play it. That’s more than you can say for a lot of fighting games.
The real problem with this game is, visually, it is very hard to look at for just about every reason. The story mode is worse than Mortal Kombat 9 in the ways it makes excuses for fight segments. It’s long, drawn out and very hard to play unless you want to make fun of it. The Street Fight Mode makes you fight ridiculous amounts of enemies without the ability to get back to the main menu without restarting the game. Outside of relishing in its awfulness, there is literally no reason to play this turd. Flush your Virtua Toilet!
