Fightin' Spirit is essentially a clone of
Fatal Fury,
SNK's reaction to
Capcom's
Street Fighter
series. In spite of its lack of originality it is generally considered
the best fighter game for the Amiga, closely winning over the
second contender, Capital Punishment.
But while they share platform and release year, the two games are actually quite different. Capital Punishment is blood, gore and guts; Fightin' Spirit has no blood at all, and no horror elements. Instead of a dark castle with spooky sounds there are sceneries in bright and cheerful colors, to that in Japan ever so popular travel theme—though the game was not aimed at the Japanese market at all, which has no Amiga user base to speak of. Finally Capital Punishment wraps the fighting action into a story, with levels to overcome and an end boss to beat; Fightin' Spirit, again like Street Fighter, is just a series of duels, though there is a story of sorts.
Don't get me wrong, this is a great game, but for heaven's sake don't expect anything original, because you won't get it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing—the Street Fighter games were massively popular in their time, and playing this reminds me why. While 2D beat-'em-ups have never really been my thing, I found it easy to get hooked on this game. The format of pummeling your opponent until he's unconscious or until the clock runs out is simple, but mastering the technique is more of a challenge and fun to learn.
Fighting Spirit plays exactly like a console or arcade beat-em-up, it makes use of the two buttons on a joypad or more buttons if you use a CD32 joypad, no more stupidone-button-does-all-moves-in-a-weird-waykind of stuff like in every other Amiga beat-em-up. And Fighting Spirit is responsive, you can ‘feel’ the power of your punches (specially when playing with Rhajang, the tiger). The special moves (3 or 4 per character) are reasonably easy to achieve, and you can execute some combos after a bit of practice. Also, there is the usual options such asStory Mode,TournamentandVersus Battle. There are even 2 special characters in the game, they can be reached by a cheat. All these points are features of a true classic.
