My friend, Haro Kid, took a trip to Japan recently to visit Mr. Gundam, and was kind enough to pick me up a bundle of old video games for pennies on the dollar of what you'd pay in US aftermarket prices. Among them was Ranma 1/2: Chounai Gekitou-hen - meaning: Ranma 1/2: Neighborhood Combat Chapter - and boy am I glad she only paid about 7.25$ for this, because it sucks ass!

To be fair, I knew it was a bad game before I demanded Haro consume valuable luggage space and transport it all the way back to the United States. I've played Street Combat before, and a bunch of dire sprite swaps do little to cover up how messy of a fighting game this is, even if throwing out Rumiko Takahashi's immaculate character designs for generic, westernized heroes might make it more palatable to American 90's kids prior to Anime hitting the mainstream. They mapped jump to a button. Unforgivable.

All the hallmarks of a bad fighting game are here: AI that spams the same move over and over again, hit and hurt boxes that make no sense, bizarre attack priorities, sluggish animations, crummy controls... I'm not the kind of person who likes to toss around the phrase "bad game feel," but the game feels bad. Story mode is about five fights long and locked to Ranma, though you can play through it with other characters if you cheat. Not that it matters, because the cutscenes are the same no matter who you play as. Not to be entirely negative, Chounai Gekitou-hen being short is a mercy.

Still, having a copy of Street Combat in its original form is novel both as a Ranma 1/2 fan and someone who finds Anime's early history in the west fascinating. It's not good and I can't picture myself playing it again, but I don't regret it occupying shelf space, and frankly, having it in a nice protective cover and out of UV light is probably the greatest kindness anybody has done Chounai Gekitou-hen.

Utterly piss poor introduction for the SNES series of fighting games based on the Ranma license. Jumping is bound to a button, graphics and animation are at minimum passable, but the biggest crime is the story mode (if you can even call it that), with only Ranma being made properly playable. You can select other characters with the use of a cheat, but it's worthless as there's no cutscenes or endings for them. Two additional difficulty modes can be accessed using another cheat, a harder 'Red' mode, and an easier 'Yokoe' one, which I guess is named in honour of Irem staff member Y. Yokoe. If the game's shortfalls aren't enough for you, you could always check out Street Combat, the Western release which was so gutted it became something of a parody, a game so bad it makes Captain Novolin preferable.