Battle Blaze (SNES) Playthrough
236A playthrough of American Sammy's 1994 fighting game for the Super Nintendo, Battle Blaze.
2:59 The Hero mode
22:15 The Battle mode as Tesya
35:57 The hidden Extra Play mode
Battle Blaze was second of two fighting games created by Sammy-subsidiary Aicom, releasing in Japan a year after their 1991 Genesis game Fighting Masters. In early 1994, Battle Blaze finally released in North America where it immediately belly-flopped into oblivion.
Aicom was best known for their platformers, which included hits like Astyanax, The Legendary Axe, and Vice: Project Doom, but they were also responsible for Viewpoint and Pulstar, a pair of popular shmups for the Neo Geo. They eventually went on to break away from Sammy in the mid-90s, rename themselves Yumekobo, and shift focus to Neo Geo game development under the direction and funding of SNK. They were talented folks, and by playing to their strengths, Aicom managed to produce several bonafide classics over the course of their thirteen year history.
Fighting games, however, were not one of their strengths. Fighting Masters was a fun bit of rental-fodder with simple action game mechanics and a creative cast of characters, but it quickly fell out of favor once Street Fighter II entered the scene.
Battle Blaze is cut from the same gameplay cloth as Fighting Masters. You have an attack button and a jump button, you block by holding back, and most special attacks are done by holding the d-pad in one of the cardinal directions and pressing attack. That's all there is to it.
It plays more like a brawler than a fighting game. Remember how some beat 'em ups - Double Dragon, Streets of Rage, Turtles in Time, etc. - had a special two-player 1-on-1 battle mode? Battle Blaze is, in a nutshell, that battle mode gussied up with a story and packaged as a standalone title.
The developers were clearly Sega fans, too. Battle Blaze bears more than a passing resemblance to Golden Axe, so much so that it would be easy to confuse it for a Golden Axe game at first glance. The Conan-esque hero Kerrel looks just like Ax Battler, Tesya is a knock-off of Tyris Flare, Gustoff is basically Golden Axe's orc enemy with a few more frames of animation, and the overly-brown backgrounds are made up of a familiar assortment of villages, crumbling stone buildings, and mountaintops.
Battle Blaze isn't awful. The controls are fine, the graphics are fine, and the sound is fine. It's the utter lack of substance that kills it. The hero mode is the same thing as the battle mode but limited to a single character, and unless you input a code to unlock the boss, Autarch, the battle mode has just five unique characters to choose from. (Lang is just a palette swap of Kerrel with the same exact moveset.) And when the core gameplay is this anemic, you're left with an experience that would've served better as filler content in another game.
If you like Conan and Golden Axe, you might get a short-lived kick out of it, but there's nothing for you to sink your teeth into.
The Japanese version's cover art was pretty bad ass, though!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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