Game:

Ultimate Fighter (1992)

Duration: 15:30

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Being the last game released outside Japan by Culture Brain within the "Hiryu no Ken" series to adopt the rebranded "Flying Warriors" theme, Ultimate Fighter is a retooled Hiryu no Ken game (known as "Hiryu no Ken: Golden Fighter S - Hyper Version" in Japan) and "sequel" to the NES Flying Wariors. For those unfamiliar with Culture Brain, they were a relatively small but prolific development company who makes and/or publishes many interesting or innovative titles and were most popular from the 80s to mid 90s, but began to slowly decline after the 32-bit era (releasing many super niche titles, mahjong games, and simulation titles). Some of their notable titles include "The Magic of Scheherazade", the "Hiryu no Ken" series, "Baseball Simulator" series, and "Nintama Rantarou" series. Magic of Scheherazade was an exceptional game that was far ahead of its time and considered by many to be a cult masterpiece.

Ultimate Fighter continues the tradition of the side-scrolling Hiryu no Ken games by blending the brawler genre, fighting genre, and RPG genre into an interesting package, but there's one problem that restricts this game from becoming a cult classic like several others: it lacks polish. While Culture Brain was capable of flaunting their ingenuity almost effortlessly on Nintendo's NES/FC platform, they had difficulty adjusting to the new architecture of the SNES/SFC and would produce many mixed-bag games that did not sell well or were flawed in various technical aspects, and didn't begin to get used to the hardware until midway into the SNES' life. While titles like "Super Ninja Bros." and "Super Baseball Simulator 1.000" were good fun, other titles like Ultimate Fighter did not fare as well (which just isn't right given how much precedence it had over the latter titles).

Visually, there isn't too much wrong with the game, but you can see it was rushed in some areas. Characters are large, there's a few decent animations, and things are colorful and well-defined. Some things are not edited properly (for example, if you notice our hero, Rick/Ryuhi, during a sweep, his sprite has a different face and head during certain animation frames) and some objects just appear or don't have any decent collision effects when struck, but it's acceptable overall. The music does not take advantage of the hardware, but it remains catchy like many prior CB titles. Gameplay-wise however, the game is quite sloppy.

The game features many of the features that made the original Hiryu no Ken popular; there's several modes of fighting from side-scrolling action to one-on-one fights to tournament versus-style challenges which are more technical in nature and implement the "Mind's Eye" feature to evade attacks or strike weak points. You can also play "Animation Mode" where you can choose to fight boss characters in a more RPG fashion and a Versus Battle to play as other characters normally. You can fight some special enemies as a Flying Warrior (this is the only time you can change party members in Story Mode) who have special powers too. However, the game is just too clunky, repetitive, and the hit detection... well, it's just awful. There are various enemy exploits, but controls freeze too much on bosses during close-quarters combat (this is generally a feature of the series, but seems more like a detriment in this game and too long). There's little denying that this game could've been a cult classic with some fine-tuning. This is a video of the game in action. Enjoy.