There is no other way to describe it! This is a story where the featured characters are all idiots that always choose the single stupidest move possible. Well, bad news, folks, Final Fight: Streetwise is an aggressively stupid game. It has happened before, right? It doesn’t have to be bad! This is a Capcom game! They know what they’re doing! You can read a game summary, Final Fight wiki article, or even the previous paragraph and think to yourself, “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.” You may be like me, and imagine a game that indulges in that “grim ‘n gritty” style, but, even if it’s not your thing, it can still be good. This is a real story about real people in a real mean neighborhood.Īnd, unfortunately, you are not at all prepared for how this game is blitheringly, rock stupid from top to bottom. And the new characters are all either morally compromised, or clearly too good to survive the whole of this adventure.
Our current hero is battling in an underground fight club to make ends meet, and all the previous protagonists are all suffering from various states of decay and corruption.
The central problem of this story is not a princess kidnapping, but a new drug on the streets. And, while Final Fight has always been a “street” franchise that included mature themes (the boss of Level 3 is a corrupt cop! You can eat his gum!) and roaming, malevolent gangs, the decision was clearly made at some point to make Final Fight: Streetwise feature characters that could be immediately described as “hardcore”. There are quests, both required and optional, that allow for the player to experience an escalation of regular gameplay, or more “minigame”-like fare. There is the main plot, and a variety of “side quests” that can be distributed by assorted townsfolk/drug dealers.
#LETS PLAY FINAL FIGHT STREETWISE PS2#
FF:S takes place in a largeish (by PS2 standards) world with distinct neighborhoods, shops, and citizenry. Maybe we should shoehorn some cusses into our games, too…įinal Fight: Streetwise decided to chase the gameplay concepts and maturity of Grand Theft Auto 3 like a Japanophile running down a katana collection. Apparently, the lesson so many game designers took from GTA3 was not that it had a fun, varied world where you were constantly learning you could do new things (God, I could write an article just about the exhilaration of finding a car jump ramp for the first time in GTA3), but simply that it was “big”, and you could walk around at your leisure. And now you were forced to putter around for hours between missions and maybe the best you could hope for was some kind of collectible scavenger hunt. And thus did we play through a number of games that would have been simple, progress from level to level affairs a few years earlier, but now had to have “hub cities” that were about as densely populated as Lost Springs, Wyoming (look it up!). But, on the other end of the spectrum, we had any number of titles that wanted to make a claim at “gigantic, open worlds” without putting in the effort to actually design said worlds. Spider-Man went from having “ levels” to gaining the sprawling cities he always needed, and we likely would have never seen something like Fable without it being pitched as a “medieval GTA”. Some of these copies were net goods, though. This was the epoch when “sandbox gameplay” became a bullet point on every game cover from Final Fantasy to Hitman. And, to be clear, “influential” in this case absolutely means “there were 10,000 games all trying to get a piece of that sweet, sweet GTA3 pie”. Grand Theft Auto 3 was possibly the most popular and influential videogame of the era. The blitheringly obvious greatest influence on Final Fight: Streetwise? Grand Theft Auto 3. Fight weirdos in strange costumes across a generally grungy city? Tale as old as time! And, while Final Fight: Streetwise maintained the concept of “beat ‘em all up”, it went a little off the rails when it decided to start aping the wrong crowd.
And, given Final Fight was always a handful of baseball bats away from just being The Warriors, this could have worked out well. As many people know, this was Final Fight’s attempt to enter the 21st Century with a Playstation 2 game that upgraded/marginally rebooted the original arcade classic.
Where is your videogame uncanny valley threshold? Probably nothing you haven’t seen before, but, ya know, it bothered me, which brings us to today’s topic… The image is basically the point of this essay, but if you are squeamish around such a thing, please be aware of its presence beyond the “read more” link du jour. Today’s article contains one (arguably) graphic GIF of Playstation 2 quality.
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