Game:

Seifuku Densetsu: Pretty Fighter (1994)

Duration: 14:59

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Pretty Fighter is, regrettably, a notorious (predominately) girl-centric fighting series by Genki/Sol and published by Imagineer during the mid 90s that attempted to go up against the ever popular Street Fighter franchise as well as the (far superior gal games) Variable Geo and Asuka 120% franchise. Since we can already assume my reaction to this game is pretty critical, I'd like to talk about Imagineer for a minute.

Imagineer gets a pretty bad wrap for putting out a lot of pretty polarizing games, and they have, but it's important to note that they published some pretty good games too. Imagineer has been very active for over 20 years, from the mid 80s to the late 2000s, publishing games not just in Japan but in many regions of the world, and are highly prolific. "The Battle of Olympus", "SimCity", "Elite", "Lemmings", "Dolucky", "Battle Cross", "Melty Lancer", "G-O-D", their name is attached to some pretty neat stuff! Their motto is to turn the imagination into form, with the name being a combination of "Imagination" and "Engineer". They still operate to this day, providing electric services to the Japanese community and collaborating with "Line Corp" on mobile endeavors under their "SoWhat" subsidiary. Why is any of this important? Because a lot of companies have disappeared or been fully absorbed. Nothing is guaranteed in life, so whether I play games that are amazing gems or total stinkers, I still want to remember them.

That said... good grief, this game. I did not one, but TWO things I don't normally do for a video: I used post production to reduce some of the crazy amount of artifacts and discoloration of the game's terrible FMVs, and I rose the audio volume of said FMV segment by over 300% to be more balanced with the other audio (and it still sounds awful). This is telling because every other aspect of the game is just as unbalanced and awful except the in-game music, which is just slightly better than the Super Famicom game that preceded it. Released only half a year after the SFC game in 1995, "Seifuku Densetsu Pretty Fighter X" is an updated version of Pretty Fighter, with four new characters, opening and ending FMVs for each character (that don't really play into any real story at all), updated graphics, and random, somewhat suggestive illustrations for each character after every few victories. They even made a subtle nod to the Saturn's architecture as the clock tower stage displays time based on the internal clock. For a game that came out only six months after its previous entry, it "sounds" like they did quite a lot of work... but do you want something done quickly, or done right?

The "updated" graphics are terrible! The original game wasn't a system seller for sure, but its strictly pixel-based graphics looked quite good, were vibrant and colorful, and the characters were more cohesive. The cardboard cutout (or I guess you could say hand-drawn) look of the characters in this game contrast poorly with the bland backdrops, and the rough look of the style makes a lot of things appear to lack detail, not to mention the user interface is bland and the load screens make it look like a tech demo. The cutscenes really don't add much to the experience either, it was just something to justify the shift from the cartridge format to CD, so they had to fill the space with something. The soundtrack is decent, which makes sense because it's mostly arranged versions of the SFC game, though the SFC tunes had more punch to them. The sounds are not particularly good.

The gameplay is what really sinks this title though. Broken is the only way to really describe it: weird input registration (especially for the grappler, who has 360 degree moves that won't register unless done a certain way, or she'll do a different throw), delay between inputs (from when you press a button to when a movement actually occurs), no real emphasis on hitstun, off hitboxes, lack of character balance (the grappler can avoid many attacks just by standing), broken frames, complete anti-airs, etc. The only notable addition is the Team Play mode, where six-on-six (one at a time of course) can fight to see whose got the prettiest skills. It is known as a "kusoge" for good reason, but FIST somehow took this idea and made it even worse.

There is value in terrible games too (actually, some people make it a point to hunt them down). Just like you can't win all the time, you have to learn from mistakes, and this series followed the three strike rule. Pretty Fighter was just mediocre, PFX was bad, and FIST was the nail in the coffin. If this IP ever surfaces again, I'd love to see what somebody would do with it, but I highly doubt it will. This is a video of the game in action. Enjoy.

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