The KO #47 - PS1 The Masters Fighter isn't really the worst ever (Takuya play-through)

Channel:

smbhax 2000

Subscribers:

1,840

Published on July 7, 2018 5:01:24 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNIdwo6ugD0

Game:

The King of Fighters '97 (1997)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 31:02

309 views

5

The internet (specifically I think it was TV Tropes) tells me that some people say The Masters Fighter, a fighting game released on PS1 in Japan, is the worst fighting game ever. Who are these supposed people? : P

Okay, it may be the worst *looking* fighting game ever--there's definitely a case to be made there. It looks like a horrible hard drive problem corrupted the character sprites and they were just like well this is all we got, guess we have to ship it anyway. : P

A perhaps a more likely explanation is that Korean developers UNICO--who oddly enough had put out a perfectly normal-looking arcade fighting game three years earlier--weren't able to draw their own sprites, so they just copied them from other games (T660 - see @ 31:01 - has a profile quite reminiscent of KOF's Korean character Choi, for instance), then garbled the interior pixels so they wouldn't be immediately recognizable as stolen artwork.

Another explanation could be that UNICO just had trouble getting a handle on the PS1 hardware, and had to super-compress the character sprite graphics in order to get the game to run. It still runs really badly--I dunno what the framerate is, but maybe like 15 fps?--but I guess it does operate, technically.

Now, when I first loaded up the game after many years here, I was horrified at how it looked, and thought I would hate it. But then I chose the main character, tae kwon do practitioner Takuya, and started playing, and... Well okay, special moves like his fire balls and flying kicks are *really* hard to do correctly, for some reason. That isn't good. And the game doesn't seem to have an actual combo system. BUT... You can hit guys a lot. Sometimes it actually feels like a combo. And doing that, maybe because it's so hard, actually feels super-satisfying.

Sure, the AI is really dumb, and there's no actual difficulty curve, but...I don't quite know how, but somehow the game grew on me. Maybe because I *could* beat it on the first play-through. : P But I found myself having fun, darn it all!

Some of the backgrounds aren't completely horrible. The character art in menus and stuff, drawn in a manga style, is actually really good (when not garbled by a complete lack of de-fringing or something)! And the music certainly has its moments: dig the funky end to the credits music, for instance (29:01).

I like The Masters Fighter a lot more than a whole lot of other fighting games. : o

Recorded with: PS2 to Framemeister to Elgato HD60.

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