Review: Art of Fighting on the Wii Virtual Console
The Wii Virtual Console is opening up the floodgates to some exceptionally excellent classic fighting games. We’ve seen the re-introduction of titles like Fatal Fury, but what about that SNK Street Fighter II clone that got everyone worked up? Art of Fighting, I found, was pretty lame when it hit arcades the first time around, mostly because it was such a blatant rip-off of what Capcom was doing with the Street Fighter franchise. Guess what? Re-introducing Art of Fighting to the world via the Wii Virtual Console doesn’t change much.
IGN had the opportunity to take the VC version of Art of Fighting out for a test drive and they were equally unimpressed with just about every aspect of the game. Characters? Hah!
Art of Fighting’s character roster leaves something to be desired, and especially so in single-player mode – there, you can only choose to be one of two different heroes. Fatal Fury was the same way, restricting the selection so the story would continue to make sense, but it’s not much of a selection process when your decision of who to use could be made by flipping a coin.
The rest of the picture doesn’t get much better. They say that it is “lacking any depth in its fighting engine.” The vocalizations for the fighters are “weak” and gameplay is “very bland and basic”, despite the introduction of taunting and a spirit meter. The only positive is the elimination of invisible walls in Art of Fighting, favoring a new “zooming, scaling effect that was very impressive for its time.” In the end, they give Art of Fighting on the Virtual Console a paltry score of 4.5 out of 10.
So, yeah, save your money for something else. Like Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting. Check out the full review here.
One Response to “Review: Art of Fighting on the Wii Virtual Console”
June 16th, 2008 at 10:37 am
[...] The version being offered through the Virtual Console is the one that was originally released on the Neo-Geo, so you won’t get the heavily pixelated graphics of the SNES take on the game. As you recall, Samurai Shodown — released in 1993 — was one of the first fighting games to equip its combatants with weapons. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as slashing down your enemies as a kabuki warrior or sending in a bird as a little Japanese girl. Samurai Shodown is definitely a step above Art of Fighting. [...]
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