The best one-on-one fighting games combine refined artwork, innovative special effects (including twists on the laws of nature/reality) and a level of game depth that cannot be found in most shooters and platform games. The single most important focus is upon strong character design, without which the software immediately falls flat; consider Doomsday Warrior or Pit Fighter as examples of reasonable aesthetics but mediocre character design, and Super Street Fighter 2, Samurai Shodown or Mortal Kombat 2 as games with strong aesthetics and strong character design. Can you remember anything distinctive about Doomsday Warrior's or Pit Fighter's characters? How about those in the latter three games?
Way of the Warrior is as derivative of the whole fighting genre as Data East's Fighter's History was of Street Fighter 2. WOTW borrows the best features from four or five major fighting games and rolls them into a single package, in the process easily besting all competitors in sheer bravado but rarely using the effect as well as its inventor had. Take the camera zooming from Art of Fighting and combine it with the digitized human actors and fatalities of Mortal Kombat. Make the character balance and game depth like Street Fighter 2, include the vast number of secrets found in Mortal Kombat 2, have as many special moves per character as Eternal Champions, and include a magic system like that in Slaughter Sport. For variety, add the item bonuses from Samurai Shodown. If it was a great idea before, Way of the Warrior has it, and even if the execution is occasionally flawed, the good points outweigh the bad. Don't forget that there's a soundtrack by White Zombie to accompany everything.
Sound great? Well, it is. Each of the nine player characters is an intentionally caricatured martial artist or street brawler with an interest in becoming the greatest fighter in the world. The Dragon is a standard Hong Kong Kung Fu artist with a body like Mortal Kombat's Liu Kang and a tongue lifted directly from Bruce Lee films and their parodies ("You wanna fight? Fight me!"); Shaky Jake is an Australian staff wielder somewhat like Fatal Fury's Billy Kane; Nobunaga is a Japanese Kendo character similar to the one found in Samurai Shodown; The Ninja is a generally original but predictable take on a character seen in classic fighting games such as Yie Ar Kung Fu; Konotori is a Stork Karate master who can fly with aid from his two golden fans; Nikki Chan is a new take on the typical young Oriental girl fighter popularized in Fighter's History and World Heroes 2; Major Gaines is a former British Special Forces agent with grenades and the ability to inject steroids (!); Fox is a Algerian- bodyguard who wears a shirt and tie, has voodoo powers, carries sais and can teleport himself; last but not least, Crimson Glory is a white trash bar brawler who lights her opponents on fire after dousing them with alcohol. Should we be exposing stupid young kids to a game which implies that a person could fly with fans, become bigger with steroids or dispose of enemies by pouring flammable liquid on them? That's why there's a parental advisory on the box -- "guidance for (kids) 17 (years old) and younger." (grin)
WOTW's graphics are an absolutely exemplary display of what the 3DO can do when properly programmed. Every background in the game is a colorful, texture mapped scene with complex themes and fully changing perspectives based on the camera's location. Did you like the line-scaling floors and ceilings in Street Fighter 2? Imagine an entire room that adjusts to the viewer's central view and does it effortlessly while zooming in and out, then combine that with characters as large as those in the Neo-Geo version of Art of Fighting (half screen height or taller). Parallax scrolling is also on display; while you're in "The Temple," you can see a building in the close distance on one level of background, mountains and sky behind them on another level, and a snowstorm blowing in front of the two other layers... but you're inside a building yet in front of those three layers, and everything is moving in realistic perspective with beautiful color. Full motion video, while not of the best quality seen on the 3DO, is full of great computer animations and cool computer modelled camera work.
The graphics have two problems which seem to be the only sources of visual complaints about the game. First, the character animation isn't consistantly fluid, which can be attributed somewhat to the memory limitations of the 3DO, which allows roughly 2.3 megabytes of game data to be running at any given time; while this is by no means an incredible limitation given the SNES's 160k total video/working RAM, there's a lot more going on in WOTW than you'll ever see in a SNES game. In terms of a tradeoff, Naughty Dog opted to have more background graphics, bigger characters and more moves than Mortal Kombat 2, at the cost of smoother character animation. The animation turns some people off and other people don't mind it; I count myself as someone who minds imperfect animation but doesn't think the game suffers tremendously because of it.
What I do dislike is the second problem, a seemingly ill-planned set of character animations used for the most basic poses and moves in the game. When most characters are standing in one place (moving a little to show huffing and puffing), the looping camera footage is pretty poor, quite like Kano's goofy sway in Mortal Kombat. When you're looking at a tough guy martial artist or brawler, you hardly expect to see the person making only slight arm and leg movements, and this is often the case with WOTW characters. When walking or throwing a punch, there isn't a great feeling of flow to the movement; compare the movement of Crimson Glory or Fox to a Chun Li or Guile -- with less memory, the Street Fighter characters just look cooler walking around, jumping and attacking. (Shaky Jake and Dragon don't suffer from the problem as much as other characters do.) Another obvious problem with the animation: the majority of moves in the game are performed by actors who aren't doing anything spectacular with their hands or feet. Rolling attacks are pretty dull, some of the jumps just look really bad (Crimson Glory notably) and completely artificial looking hurricane kicks (Ninja, Dragon) don't look very polished. As the non-professional actors were all friends or acquaintances of the programmers, this can be expected somewhat, but why does the 38-year old Major Gaines look 23 or thereabouts? I'd hate to see his chalked driver's license from high school...
But, again, the good points far outweigh the bad points. What other game features perfectly moving reflections of large characters off of marble floors, the ability (using magic or special moves) to make your character do all of his/her moves while scaled large or shrunk small, and backgrounds as beautiful, detailed and texture mapped as those in WOTW? The special effects used in Way are indeed special, as you'll see transparent characters, shadows relected on both floors and walls (and even from different angles), neat scaling in teleports and other cool miscellaneous effects. Even with worse visual flaws (and related gameplay flaws) than those listed earlier, Mortal Kombat was a popular game -- WOTW, at the very least, plays 100 times better and attempts 100 times more than Mortal Kombat ever did.
[A word on gore and fatalities: Expecting the gore of MK2? Don't be. There's more blood than Street Fighter 2 but the gore level never rises much above that of Mortal Kombat. Cheesy fatalities include a swelling head that explodes, impalement on a pole and on an arm (sigh), a diagonal slicing-in-half and a charring electric shock. Cooler fatalities include a fall through a roof onto a marble floor (complete with Untouchables' Caponesque blood), a plummet into an open grave and a trip through the blades of a spinning fan. The copious, noticable liquid blood of MK2 is far more clear than it is in WOTW, which is a little less sadistic and a little more humorous.]
As for the game's sound effects and music, White Zombie contributes some of the coolest audio tracks you'll ever hear in a game. To say that WOTW is at the fore of a very promising trend (getting a single popular American band to contribute their best music for a game) isn't enough; the soundtrack is really quite excellent even from the perspective of a person who doesn't really like most of the bands who perform in the same style. On the flip side, a large majority of the sound effects are annoyingly inappropriate. There's an announcer who essentially contributes all of the good sound effects, including color commentary on the progress of the fights. The individual characters do a lot of talking mid-fight, such as Crimson's repeated Kentucky-Fried "loser," "dirtbag" and "yeah, buddy" phrases and Major Gaines "how's that FEEL?," "feel GOOD?" and "yeah, baby," lines. Hearing these as taunts alone wouldn't have been bad, but these come in addition to the taunts (Crimson's "Com'ere" and "Let's go, pal" and Gaines' "Com'ere, wuss," and "Come'on, man") and victory voices. While it's commendable that Naughty Dog included so many voices per character, two good ones would have outstripped all of the annoying ones.
As for the gameplay, suffice it to say that I've been playing Way for some time and haven't found it to be as repetitive as Mortal Kombat 2 or as purely balanced as Street Fighter 2. Even without the flashy graphics and audio, WOTW is a very solid *game* and stands completely on its own merits as a fighter, possessing a good set of techniques and a computer opponent that has much better artificial intelligence than most other fighters on the market. First time players can choose from seven skill levels and will most likely find their first games to be either frustrating (on any difficulty level save easiest or second easiest) or full of extremely cheap victories. WOTW promises a number of major- league secrets to discover, and as none have yet been publicly revealed (save a Black Dragon if you double-perfect on the Bridge), the ability to play as boss characters, hidden sub games, hidden characters and at least one hidden background have been confirmed as realities on the WOTW disc. If MK2 seemed full of cool hidden features, you'll love this part of WOTW -- the manual only tells you two moves per character, so there's learning to do from moment one.
[Very important: If your controllers haven't been fixed yet to restore their diagonal sensitivity (by loosening the screws on the joypad's underside), jumping and crouching attacks are nearly impossible. Only after having large problems jumping with Shaky Jake did I discover that the screws weren't quite loose enough, and upon remedying the problem I quickly improved at the game; I cannot emphasize enough how important this controller modification is.]
WOTW has a somewhat unique joystick configuration: the top "shift" buttons are for strong punches and kicks while the A button is a weaker punch, the B button is block and the C button is a weak kick. Combine the A button and Left Shift for a super punch or the C button and Right Shift for a super kick. To my knowledge, WOTW is the first game to have three strengths of punches and kicks in addition to a block button. As far as other game depth assets are concerned, Way plays fast and has combos, counter blows, the ability to hit an opponent when he or she is down, pogo/juggling moves, dizzies and a very capable computer opponent. With fatalities, background dependant fatalities and roughly ten or more special moves per character, there is little argument that a good player can make every match completely different from the fights that proceeded it. Unfortunately, the control itself is reasonably finicky and seems not to execute certain moves (ones requiring the pressing of more than one button at a time, especially) with any degree of reliability. Standard fireball motions (referred to by WOTW as "sweeps") aren't a major problem, though.
There are some noticable problems in the game engine. Comments have been made to the effect that the game's collision detection is weak and that an attack may pass partially or completely through the opponent without causing damage; in playing the game repeatedly, the problem appears to be that only certain frames of a given animation are taken to be "damaging," so that the forwards movement of an arm or leg *isn't* damaging, but the punch or kick at full extension *is*. It's akin to saying that hitting someone with the handle of a knife or the butt of a gun shouldn't hurt them, while the knife's blade or the gun's bullets will do maximum damage. Additionally, though characters are vulnerable when laying unmoving on the ground, they're protected somewhat as they stand up, so if you use Shaky Jake's Dhalsim-like fire breath you'll find that a rising opponent won't be hurt by it. Another little problem is the fact that a punch or kick (unlike SF2 or MK2) won't necessarily move you far enough backwards, away from repeated damage -- blocking doesn't stop every attack, either, so situations can occur where you'll get totally smacked around unless you find a way to jump out of the tight spot. These little quirks are annoying, but they make the game different; the basic game engine is strong, so the problems can be forgiven in the name of diversity.
There is a definite learning curve -- in effect, "find the Way," as the game puts it -- and playing for a while will yield much more satisfying results than experienced when you're first beaten to a pulp and then fatalitied by the computer. Difficulties taunting, teleporting and executing special moves in general have gradually decreased as I've played more, and I think that a lot of the initial anti-Way sentiment expressed by casual players stems from the combination of the learning curved control and play mechanics with the somewhat jittery animation.
While the aesthetics may not be perfectly refined, Way of the Warrior has great special effects and deep gameplay, plus a ton of secrets to find buried in menus and the game itself. Less ambitious games from a gameplay standpoint (such as Virtua Fighters) quickly popularize based on their graphics alone. Way of the Warrior has both great graphics and great gameplay, but it will take a little while before people warm to it.
- Jer Horwitz
[This review is Copyright (C) 1994 by Jer Horwitz for Renegade Technologies Unlimited. All rights reserved. Please contact the author regarding republication rights.]
michel.buffa@cmu.edu