#3 Last Battle

Obvious product placement.

 "That's not your purse!"

Here we have another weird conundrum much in the same vein as Alex Kidd – a truly terrible game that shows evidence, if one scrutinizes closely enough, of having at least someone on their development team with an idea, just a glimmer of a thought that could have worked. It doesn’t work, not even a little, but what makes both games bad is the presence of possibility that there could have been something to this.

The first thing that gave this title some promise was its license.  Last Battle was actually Fist of the Northstar. Not to be confused with any other game of the same name. This is certainly not a port. No one would have elected to repeat this on more than one console after seeing the results. From what I understand, the Fist of the Northstar license could not be obtained in the States, so they decided instead to base it off the final Narnia book by C.S. Lewis….

Not really. Just wanted to see if you’re still awake. But a bunch of kids dying on a subway at the beginning might have given this game a bit more appeal.

If I had to take a wild guess I might say Taxan could have had something to do with the lack of license for this release. I am sad to report Sega is directly responsible for this particular abomination and my understanding is that the Taxan game for the NES was actually not bad. In its original format Last Battle is based on the second Fist of the North Star anime series. The names have been changed – both for legal reasons and to not slander the franchise by having this game attached to it. I’m not totally sure how similar the plot is, but the characters have all definitely had their names swiped. This doesn’t really evade the obviousness of the license to anyone familiar with it. The one thing this game has going for it are some pretty well designed sprites for some characters including Kenishiro who is now known as Aazark (?).

I didn’t know much about Fist of the North Star until just recently. One of the things I am going to be doing here with this blog is experiencing the licensed material that goes with licensed games. Whenever we run into a game based on a movie, series, book, or comic I would like to read or watch at least some of it, if I have experienced it before or not. While technically it has lost its license the one good thing to come out of Last Battle was that it gave me an excuse to finally watch some of Fist of the North Star, a series I have been aware of for a long time but never personally experienced. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s a cheesy, mad max like post-apocalyptic martial arts story with a bit of fantasy sprinkled in. It’s a real blast of an ultra-violent 80s anime and I plan to keep watching the series despite how bad this game is.

The worst part actually is that the anime had all the elements to make a really good game. I haven’t played the Taxan game for NES but I hope they made much better use of the license.

 So much wasted potential. This license could have made an amazing game.

So what exactly is wrong with Last Battle?

To put it simply it just isn’t fun.  The game kind of feels like it wanted to be a more complex version of Altered Beast but it isn’t even close, do not assume from that statement that if you like Altered Beast you will like Last Battle, they couldn’t be further apart. It’s a slow moving left to right oddball action game. When you punch or kick most enemies, they just go flying off the screen, which is pretty entertaining at first. The gimmicks with this one are an over world map in which you can pick which level you want to go to next and a sort of leveling system. The map is important mainly because it allows for repeating a level multiple times which is helpful for leveling up. Everyone loves built in grinding right?

 Pick your poison....again....and again...and again...

Leveling makes you beef up in a somewhat Altered Beast like fashion. You can then do some of the moves Ken does in the show like rapidly punching several times in a second. You also have no shirt which is good I guess, it looks like it might be hot out.

The basic left to right levels are just bland, not horrifying. It’s the boss fights- which consist of weird random button mashing and odd timing- that take you out of the spirit of the franchise that is the real problem. They just feel very poorly done, like a broken fighting game. When I beat the first boss I was very disappointed by the localization changes as well. He bubbled up all over. I had just finished watching the pilot episode for fist of the Northstar so I knew what was happening and was pretty excited. In the anime, Ken has a secret kung fu technique that causes his enemies flesh to bubble, and then their heads explode. All that was taken out of the western version and all we got was the bubbling followed by a cartoony cheap 16 bit shump style explosion. Not a good one either. No decapitation. I know I sound like a sick freak right now but the magic of these old anime franchises was how over the top they were. If they weren’t going to give us dynamic gameplay they at least could have spared us some franchise flavor.

 "Consider this and everything that follows it a warning shot!"

The labyrinth levels are even worse, with traps you really aren’t very well equipped to deal with given how slow and clunky Aazark moves. The other big problem is how difficult it is to gain life if you’ve lost it. The labyrinth levels allow you to do this by fighting enemies. This isn’t to tough but the labyrinths are dangerous, it’s easy to lose more than you gained and you only get one life- die and its back to the beginning of the game. A step penalty, considering how much of the game consist of grinding for levels that take too long to reach for a game of this type. While I’d have liked to see what could be done at the last upgrade I couldn’t find it in me to care enough to continue after reaching my two hour requirement. I decided to pass on mastering this one.

The dialogue though? The dialogue is spot on. 

Last Battle may be worth it for a Fist of the Northstar fan who has to have every related product but I don’t really think there is a market for it among people looking for a fun Genesis experience. Another bad launch game down the tubes.