And now I'm going to do the most sacrilegious thing I can after my 2.5/5 review of Power Rangers: The Movie and give Final Fight, the game that all but defined the brawler genre as we know it, a whopping two stars. Stick around to the end of the review for my home address so you can come settle your grievances with me in person.

I mostly just find Final Fight to be boring, and this is perhaps a consequence of it being so foundational as a beat-em-up. You can see the framework Final Fight laid out in the DNA of every brawler that's come since, only the advantage those games have is that they've polished everything Final Fight did and made it a hell of a lot more playable. Everything moves so slow here, the enemy variety is lacking (you'll encounter pretty much every enemy type very early), and the bosses are downright cheap. At least through emulation I can mash a button to endlessly feed quarters, but in the context of an arcade, Final Fight is the definition of a quarter muncher.

Don't get me wrong, I respect what Final Fight did for the genre. However, I think my appreciation is somewhat dependent on the time and place this game occupied. In 1989 I would've been, like, two-years-old. There's no way I could have an appreciation for what it did that was contemporary with the arcade scene at the time. My first exposure to beat-em-ups was TMNT: The Arcade Game, which came out fairly close to Final Fight, only it had the benefit of being tied to a franchise I was obsessed with as a child. In the early 90s, you also only got to play arcade games if they were, you know, actually in an arcade near you. Final Fight, to my knowledge, never was.

This is all to say that having played it for the first time in 2019, Final Fight just doesn't really impress me, and I don't find it to be particularly fun because I've been spoiled on other games in the genre, whether those are tied to IPs I have a stronger affinity for or are just more refined and engaging.

If you have any complaints about this review you can find me at