Game #967: Final Fight Streetwise

  This one actually was THE final fight.

 Final Fight Streetwise is yet another victim of Capcom's mid 00's westernization attempts. It tried too hard to be edgy, like Beatdown: Fists of Vengeance, and lost all the colorful charm of the original series, to the point that it was lambasted at release. But was the criticism more than skin deep? Maybe not.

 The story is dumb. You play as Kyle, Cody's brother, and you're set out in a piece of Metro City. A new drug is making the rounds turning people into fighting zombies and since Cody gets embroiled in it... it's up to Kyle to find his brother, meeting Guy and Haggar along the way. There's not a single likeable character in the game, Cody, Guy and Haggar might as well be new characters. I like their redesigns though, as well as Cammy's who makes a cameo as an optional fight. The dialogue is putrid and the story is forgettable. The main game plays like a beat'em up set in a very small open world, you can roam around searching for sidequests or just go from objective to objective, but sidequests reward you with money that you can spend on upgrades.

 The are two extras, one is Arcade Mode that turns the game into a linear beat'em up, lets you play as Kyle, Cody, Guy or Haggar, the latter two must be unlocked, and with up to two players. Not a bad extra. The other extra is the original Final Fight, which would've been a neat extra but it's very poorly emulated. Plays at what feels half the speed of the original and the sound is terrible, I don't understand who thought that it was anywhere near acceptable. Back to the main game, there are all sort of dumb minigames, like shooting galleries, puzzles, memory matching and... kicking rats and cockroaches. Some of the minigames are mandatory, others are optional and... why? Why are these here? How do they fit in a game that's trying so hard to be edgy and gritty?

 Thankfully, the gameplay is kinda fun. You have a weak and a strong attack, a grab button and a block button. Landing attacks feels pretty good as the animations are pretty decent, despite how stocky the character models are. There are various weapons you can pick up, from shotguns and pistols to bats and katanas. You have a gauge, called instinct, that you can use by holding down L2 which will power up your attacks, and said gauge is filled by landing attacks. It's also used for a few special moves. If you target an enemy, you can use the triangle button to perform sidesteps. Lastly, a pretty neat technique is parrying, if you press the guard button right before getting hit you'll counterattack without receiving any damage. Risk and reward.

 As far as core gameplay goes, my two main gripes lie in the lack of a map, which is pretty dumb considering how important some facilities are, and in how cheap the final bosses are. The combat engine works well when fighting basic enemies or even on the optional one on one fights, but the final four bosses are all manners of cheap, heck, some of the basic enemies at the end of the game have super armor ALL the time, thus being able to interrupt your attacks at any time, something that holds true for these four final bosses. What's more, you can't cancel an attack animation with a sidestep, so once you start a combo you are commiting to it. Either that or punch-and-dash.

 There's another flaw with the game, a HUGE flaw if you ask me... the save system. This system is NEVER explained in-game, so either look it up on the instruction booklet, if you have it, or look it up online. You can only save if you select 'Quit' while in the pause menu, and the game will then ask you if you want to save. Doesn't sound too bad... except that it only saves up to the checkpoint. I had done a lot of progress on side activities before I decided to save, and after I reloaded... ton of progress lost. Well, a few minutes, but still, it wasn't fun.

 Final Fight Streetwise gets a bad rep, but it's not awful y'know? I've always loved the beat'em up genre, and I've always loved Final Fight, but I can look beyond the bastardization of the characters I liked, heck, Street Fighter Alpha did it first locking up Cody in jail! Regardless, it's a halfway decent beat'em up, but nothing worth writing home about.

 6.0