The Pirates of Dark Water (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
377A playthrough of Sunsoft's 1994 license-based beat 'em up for the Super Nintendo, The Pirates of Dark Water.
Played through as Ren on the default difficulty level. The game begins at 6:10, once the intro and all of the character bios have played.
The Pirates of Dark Water was a reasonably popular cartoon back in the early 1990s, eventually becoming the basis for a Marvel comic series, a line of action figures, and of course, the obligatory tie-in video games.
The game is one of many arcade style brawlers that showed up on the SNES in the mid-90s, and it's unfortunate that it seemed to slip through the cracks without much notice. Sunsoft's reputation had been in decline for awhile at this point, but The Pirates of Dark Water showed that they could still put out a good original game.
You get your choice of Ren (Cody, the average), Tula (Guy, the speedy), and Ioz (Haggar, the hulking mountain), and though they all carry weapons, they play just like their Final Fight counterparts.
Everyone gets the standard three-hit combos, grapples, throws, and life gauge-draining heavy attacks as we saw in Final Fight 1-3. Truth be told, if someone swapped the graphics out and put Final Fight 3 on the title screen, nobody would've ever questioned it.
That's not a bad thing, though. Capcom had the formula down, and Sunsoft managed a near perfect imitation. The controls are sharp and intuitive, the action moves at a good pace (especially in the 2P-simultaneous mode), and the stages feature an interesting variety of settings and traps. The game lasts a bit too long at eight stages, but that's my only complaint about the gameplay.
And how awesome is that boss battle against Phoenix?
The graphics are great - there's a good level of detail in the backgrounds and the character sprites, and the cinematics stuck nicely to the feel of the show. The music, though. Yech. If you liked Final Fight 3 and Mega Man X3's soundtracks, you'll probably like this, but I found the gross, twangy attempts at electric guitar sounds to be thoroughly grating.
If beat 'em ups are your thing, The Pirates of Dark Water is a worthwhile one. It comes damned close to the quality of Capcom's best 16-bit brawlers.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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