Crows: The Battle Action is a beat-'em-up for the Sega Saturn. It is a 2D beat-'em-up based on the Crows manga series, where characters have super-deformed heads. Published by Athena Co., it appears at first glance heavily inspired by Technos ' own hot-blooded Kunio/Nekketsu beat-'em-ups, going for River City Ransom 's fighting style and super-deformed looks in particular. As it turns out, it's no coincidence; a look at the credits reveals that quite a few former Technos employees worked on it, including executive producer Teruo Ishikawa, the composers, and about half the graphics team. Most notably, the person in charge of the visuals was Kouji Ogata.
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They should just make Kunio games for everything. Let me play Oppenheimer Rumble.
İt's a Crows game, that's why ı gave it 5 out of 5.
Will there ever be a good Crows game? No.
This is the first Crows game a year before the manga series was wrapping up. All while the Sega Dreamcast on the rise.
(btw Backloggd, it was released in '97)
So, Crows is about high schoolers and young gangsters beating each other to death, so why not a beat em up?
The game is your usual 2D-side scrolling brawler. That isn't a bad thing by itself but the problem lies in a lot of little annoyances especially when compared to other brawlers before it:
1 (MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL). The game's speed is slow as balls.
2. You can't move when picking up large objects.
3. You don't have pre-canned combos when pressing punch and kick per say. You get to customize special combos with a certain number of slots depending on the character. They require special inputs and act like your "get-off-me" special move in your usual beat em ups (health is lost after each successful hit) which leads me to...
4. No special move to hit surrounding enemies. The special combos are liable to miss and enemies can easily break you out of it. Not even a back-kick like the Kunio-Kun games.
5. You can't select Ryuushin and Tatsuya after finishing the game. You gotta play the sections where you unlocked them but they never stay unlocked before starting another new game.
While the game looks nice overall, I don't really get the decision to put it in the super deformed chibi style à la Kunio-Kun/River City. And not even Takahashi Hiroshi's chibi style. Sad! Especially when everything else other than the gameplay has the manga's original style.
Overall, below average. Meh even by generic brawler standards. It's not long at all but it sure feels like it when the game runs underwater.
This is the first Crows game a year before the manga series was wrapping up. All while the Sega Dreamcast on the rise.
(btw Backloggd, it was released in '97)
So, Crows is about high schoolers and young gangsters beating each other to death, so why not a beat em up?
The game is your usual 2D-side scrolling brawler. That isn't a bad thing by itself but the problem lies in a lot of little annoyances especially when compared to other brawlers before it:
1 (MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL). The game's speed is slow as balls.
2. You can't move when picking up large objects.
3. You don't have pre-canned combos when pressing punch and kick per say. You get to customize special combos with a certain number of slots depending on the character. They require special inputs and act like your "get-off-me" special move in your usual beat em ups (health is lost after each successful hit) which leads me to...
4. No special move to hit surrounding enemies. The special combos are liable to miss and enemies can easily break you out of it. Not even a back-kick like the Kunio-Kun games.
5. You can't select Ryuushin and Tatsuya after finishing the game. You gotta play the sections where you unlocked them but they never stay unlocked before starting another new game.
While the game looks nice overall, I don't really get the decision to put it in the super deformed chibi style à la Kunio-Kun/River City. And not even Takahashi Hiroshi's chibi style. Sad! Especially when everything else other than the gameplay has the manga's original style.
Overall, below average. Meh even by generic brawler standards. It's not long at all but it sure feels like it when the game runs underwater.