Waku Waku 7 [ARCADE, 1996]: Arina Makihara Playthrough (Default Difficulty)
19Footage (& enhanced filter visuals) taken from the Final Burn Neo emulator.
0:00 Set-up
0:36 Neo-Geo Boot-Up & Game Intro + Title (including an Easter Egg if you input 7 credits before starting the game)
1:47 How to Play
2:29 Character Select/Run Start
2:48 Stage 1 [Tesse]
4:18 Stage 2 [Mauru]
7:01 Stage 3 [Rai]
8:35 Bonus Stage [Bonus-Kun, 1 round]
9:46 Stage 4 [Politank-Z]
11:41 Stage 5 [Slash]
19:16 Stage 6 [Dandy-J]
27:09 Stage 7 [Dark/Fake Arina (Mirror Match)]
29:36 Final Stage [Fernandez]
35:29 Arina's Ending
36:32 Final Score Tally & Staff Roll/Credits
With me opening the new year with a couple of runs through the original Power Stone, I figure I'd follow up on that by playing through yet another old-school underrated game, this time from the Neo Geo days. Waku Waku 7 is a 1996 fighting game made by company Sunsoft, and is one of two said fighting games they've made that are noteworthy to their name from that time period (following 1995's Galaxy Fight: Universal Warriors... which I'm also considering doing a playthrough of later). I did a Arina vs. Arina Double KO video years ago, but never actually properly covered the game in a playthrough, so now I figured that I'd do my favorite girl in the game a solid and give her a proper playthrough.
A 4 button fighter, WW7 is notable for it's extremely vibrant and light-hearted tone and it's fun, colorful cast of characters; the athletic humanoid bunny girl (and star of this playthrough) Arina being chief among them (as she still to this day tends to get fan-art along the interwebs by people that remember she exists). Gameplay wise, it shares a lot in common with Capcom's Darkstalkers games, though obviously with it's own twist. The plot of the game consists of the cast trying to collect all 7 of the mythical WakuWaku balls will have their greatest wish granted (does this remind you of Dragon Ball yet?), and this is played off in the 1P version of the game: every main character has one of the 7 and you gotta rough up the others in order to get the rest. You start off with 1 bar of super and as you defeat the cast, you steadily unlock one more bar per opponent to the maximum of 7 by the time you fight the Dark mirror of your character towards the end of the game. On top of gaining meter the usual 2D-fighter way, the super gauge has auto-recovery so having stocks available at any given time for your EX Specials, Super Moves (called DokiDoki Attacks) and WARNING! Attacks (called HaraHara Attacks, which are extremely telegraphed but are Unblockable and deal TREMENDOUS damage on hit if they land), is a sinch. On top of these attacks, every character also has a Super form that they can activate that gives them a damage boost by pressing any 3 buttons at the same time (even during block-stun, which acts like a damaging Burst from Guilty Gear).
The game is fairly fast pace and full of tricks like wall-recovery options, pursuit attacks, wake-up options, chain combos and the like, and for the most part, is pretty fun in a casual setting. As usual, the game ends with one heck of an SNK boss with the Giant Fernandez (quite a name for something like that... [though sometimes it is localized as "FernanDEATH", which sounds much more threatening for a final boss]), but lucky, despite his insane range, damage and speed, he has one glaring weakness that Arina manages to exploit to ultimately win the day and her wish...
....also the ultimate irony of this particular run EXACTLY using up all 7 credits I initially put in just to show the Title Screen Easter Egg.
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