The Beat Up #30 - Nekketsu Kakutō Densetsu (PS4 Kunio World)
2I had high hopes for Nekketsu Kakutō Densetsu, a 4-player Famicom arena beat-em-up included in "Kunio-kun: The World Classics Collection" on PS4, and it does have a lot of appealing aspects, but, at least in single-player, a lot of kind of annoying ones as well, so I don't expect to be messing around with it a whole lot, although I suppose you never know.
See, it's one of the closest things I know of to being a sort of procedural beat 'em up, which I think could be really cool. Here you have four characters in one of seven (?) dangerous arenas, just konking each other over the head, along with the usual adorable Technos Japan music and super-deformed graphics. There are 16 big-headed characters to choose from: 4 brawlers, 4 boxers, 4 karate practitioners, and four judo dudes. Give each of them a decent number of moves utilizing the Famicom's d-pad and two action buttons, let 'em loose, and how could you go wrong?
Well, I'm not sure. I guess maybe it's just a little too frenetic and repetitive for me to feel like this is something I want to come back to. With some buddies, it could be a good quick blast, but the CPU is very predictable; it seemed overwhelmingly tough at first but surprisingly quickly I was just crushing it routinely.
Now in this video you see me playing the arenas as just a series of one-off 2-on-2 fights: you and one CPU against two other CPU characters. But if you and your team-mate survive, it makes the two of you fight each other, so I quickly realized that the easiest thing to do was just to find some high ground or other advantageous position in the arena, and hit everyone who came near, friend or foe. Turned out this worked far too well.
There's another mode that I don't cover in this video, where you go through the arenas in succession, leveling up (I guess; it's all Japanese so I dunno how it worked, exactly) with your CPU team-mate as you go. In that mode, you don't have to fight your team-mate at the end of each match, and I *think* maybe the opposition gradually gets a bit better, so that mode is probably a little more compelling for on-your-own play.
Some of the later arenas have not-very-eye-friendly visual effects, like full-screen flashes, or really hardly color-cycling water. This really made me not want to bother going back to see how far I could get in the other mode.
Character selection is odd: you don't pick your character directly; instead, it seems to be selected for you based on the character data (like blood type?) you input before being shown what character type you've been assigned. This would have been really annoying if I hadn't just happened to find that inputting a certain Japanese character for the name, or whatever, and mashing through the other options would reliably get me a karate man, which is the type I wanted. : P
A little while back what I guess is probably a sequel or whatever to the original Famicom game came out on PS4, but the stages look less interesting, and also they're in 3D. : P
Come to think of it, I suppose there's a Technos-inspired game mode closer to a decent procedural beat-em-up already on PS4: Double Dragon IV's "Tower Mode" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We0cg86Elgc . So I suppose I should just go play that instead of mooning over what might have been here!
Recording: PS4 to Elgato HD60 (cropped to 4:3 1080p 'cause my laptop can't quite handle 16:9 1080p at 60fps : P)