In the distant past - well, from about 1989 to 1994-ish - the beat-'em-up reigned supreme.
You literally, not at all figuratively, genuinely couldn't swing a cat whether it alive or
dead without hitting a scrolling brawler.
It was the Golden Age of the beat-'em-up, and it was glorious.
First, dead quick: I have a Patreon, you'll find the link below and at the end of the
video, and it'd be superb - if you like the work I do - if you could contribute at
all.
Every dollar is sincerely appreciated.
Anyway, in part one, also linked below, I charted the rise of the genre and some of
its finest, outstanding moments.
Mainly Final Fight, pretty much.
And here, in part two, I want to talk more about a couple of publishers and their respective
output, the end of the Golden Age, and what the beat-'em-up has become.
Enough faff, let's go.
First, something that still surprises me to this day.
You'd think - you would naturally expect - SNK's output on the NEO GEO hardware to
include some stellar examples from the beat-'em-up genre.
And it had some okay ones, some decent ones - but it didn't have anything truly great.
Mutation Nation was alright, I guess, and while Sengoku 3 was a decent game, it released
in 2001 - the first two Sengoku games, ones that actually came out in the Golden Era I'm
on about here, were boring and a bit pap compared to others in the genre.
It was a struggle to get beyond 'yeah, it's pretty good' when praising the NEO GEO outings
- Robo Army was fun, Ninja Combat… well, it was imaginative and a distraction for a
bit, but ultimately forgettable.
But the less said about Eight Man and Final Fig...Burning Fight, the better.
It's not wrong to assume SNK did great work in the Golden Age of the beat-'em-up, because
it was knocking those arcade games out of the park.
It makes perfect logical sense to assume it'd be right in there crafting some fine brawlers.
But, in practice, it turned out to be very wrong indeed, and the NEO GEO ended up with
no truly great beat-'em-ups, which is genuinely a bizarre outcome.
Luckily, there was another publisher at hand to show the NEO GEO what it was missing out
on.
Ah, Capcom.
The Golden Child of the Golden Age.
The company that produced more instantly memorable games in the beat-'em-up genre than any
other, bar none.
The ollll' Cappy-com-a-reno.
The big Capple.
Com.
Capcom.
Yep.
Capcom, it's safe to say, is a company with many chunks of kudos floating in its great
games-flavoured cocktail, thanks in no small part to its arcade output of the early 90s.
Final Fight had popped its head up and changed the landscape, and the likes of Knights of
the Round in 1991 just carried on the wave of inventive, impressive, and fun scrolling
brawlers.
A sign of things to come, the game offered RPG-lite progression and lots of really big
swords.
That same year also saw the release of the King of Dragons, another fantasy realm brawler
offering RPG-lite progression, and lots of really big swords.
Okay, so it sounds like that's the same thing all over again, but both King of Dragons
and Knights of the Round were good games in their own right.
Some say great, but not me.
Nah, I save the 'great' compliment for the likes of Captain Commando: yet another
Capcom arcade release in 1991, this one seeing less dungeons and/or dragons, instead featuring
far more ninjas and robot babies.
Captain Commando was a logical progression from Final Fight, offering much the same style
of play - of wandering, of battering, of rooting through bins for food, just with additions
like ultraviolence… well, people getting sliced in half - and robo-suits to ride in.
It was a great sort-of follow up to Final Fight, and showed for the third time in a
single year that Capcom just got this stuff.
It wasn't all 1991 - the next year saw Warriors of Fate, which was a good game and really
focused on an equestrian approach to searching for bin-chickens to eat.
Really though the only reason I wanted to mention it is because its Hepburn romanisation-ed
up name is: The Devouring of Heaven and Earth II: Battle of Red Cliffs.
Frankly, that should be the subtitle of the next Halo.
While carrying the flag for the Golden Age in the arcade, Capcom wasn't forgetting
its home output - especially not when the words 'Fight' and 'Final' were involved.
A full-blown sequel to the original was made into a SNES exclusive as Final Fight 2 hit
in 1993 - being built specifically for the console, it ended up being surprisingly brilliant.
Even if you still couldn't be Guy.
Yes I know Final Fight Guy exists, it's a knowing aside, get over it.
The same year also saw some love for the original NES - nezzz - with Mighty Final Fight, another
game made specifically for the machine in question, and while not an all-time great,
it definitely ended up well received and gave a spurt of life to the console while it was
on its last legs.
It was the arcade, though, where Capcom was most comfortable - and impressive - with its
beat-'em-up output.
I mentioned the Punisher in the last video, and it was genuinely difficult not to just
make the whole video about that game and these: Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, from 1992, is the
stupidest name for a game and the most ridiculous setting for a comic or cartoon, but there
you go.
It was a great game, exhilarating, over the top, and thoroughly satisfying - just as a
good beat-'em-up should be.
And it kept getting better, as Capcom revisited the dungeony-dragony style with, well, Dungeons
& Dragons: Tower of Doom.
Building on previous experience, the game refined the lighter RPG mechanics we'd seen
before, character levelling, branching paths, technical combat including blocking, all of
that delicious brawl-y sauce was refined, added to, made better.
Armored Warriors started to make everyone think Capcom could do absolutely no wrong
in the genre du jour, and quite frankly why every game after this 1994 release didn't
feature the ability to pick up body parts of your vanquished foes and use them yourself
I will never understand.
Though admittedly it would be a bit gruesome if you're facing off against humans.
So that's probably why.
If I thought ahead, I would understand..
And that was everything from Capcom, ever.
Great days.
There's clearly nothing I'm missing here, nothing that will come up later and definitely
nothing that's showing on screen right now that is one of my all-time favourite games
on anything, ever.
No siree, I don't know what possible Alien vs Predator in the arcade you could possibly
be talking about, I don't know what possible pang of delight I got every time I saw it
in an arcade, and I don't know how you could possibly think I'd sell my liver to be able
to get a proper arcade cabinet of this game in my house.
By no means was it just a few publishers or a couple of development teams making beat-'em-ups
- as with anything that's popular, plenty of others were eager to stick their oar in,
to mixed results.
And certainly to mixed levels of popularity, whether it was deserved or not.
Sega gave arcade goers a treat in 1992 with the Revenge of Death Adder - easily the best
sequel in the Golden Axe series, with new characters, tweaks to magic, and a four-player
mode, it was rather oddly never actually released outside of arcades.
I mean, it's not like it would have caused the genre to live on forever, but it would
have been better than Golden Axe II and III, which despite feedback to the contrary in
the last video I still consider not-that-great.
Taito went back to the well to rebeginagain the Ninja Warriors, which was actually a bit
good even if for some reason there was no co-op.
And our silent farming friends who are sometimes turtles were exploited once more in Irem's
Ninja Baseball Bat Man, which, while a slab of fun will never actually get past the fact
it was the first ever example of SEO clickbait.
And, I'm sure you were all worried, but don't worry Winkysoft's Denjin Makai and
Guardians both get a mention.
Yes, they're hardly more than fine as games, but need to be talked about because Winkysoft
is a name that will never not make me laugh.
I am apparently an adult.
Nevertheless, the saturation of the genre was absolute - the beat-'em-up was everywhere,
everyone was making them... and something had to give.
By the mid-90s, the beat-'em-up was old hat.
It was seen as a lazy option for developers, and immediately turned off a lot of players
as soon as they heard an upcoming title was to reside within the genre.
Basically, it was the Battle Royale of the day.
The drain began to be circled, and it was the licensed games leading the charge… of
water… in the drain.
While there was a good level of success with Batman's previous foray into battering goons
in game form, we saw a couple of less distinguished do-overs in the shape of Batman Forever, and
Batman Forever.
I mean, the second one was subtitled 'the Arcade Game', but I just like acting as
if they're both the same thing as I'm so wacky.
The arcade version did have its fans, and was undeniably… unique, let's say, but
each of the Forevers was ultimately quick, dirty, and pointless.
Joining Bats and Backflip Boy in the race to obscurity were the Power Rangers, because
of course they were.
I mean, it made absolute sense for a 1994 SNES game based on those Mighty Morphin'
lot to be a scrolling beat-'em-up, it really did, but that doesn't mean it felt necessary.
When the Power Rangers Movie tie-in game came out and did the same thing again a year later…
well, you can see why people were jaded.
Jadocity intensified thanks to The Tick on Mega Drive, Marvel Super Heroes in War of
the Gems on SNES, Bebe's Kids, which is one of the more egregious examples of the
pointless, me-too licensed beat-'em-up, and the attempt to continue the genre onto
the PlayStation generation with the likes of the Fantastic Four and the Crow: City of
Angels.
All were examples of games - at their very best - banal, at worst, actually quite sickening
yes I'm looking at you Bebe and the Crow.
It was this along with the ongoing, protracted death of the arcades that signalled the end
for a genre that had been, just a couple of years prior, so beloved.
You'll look through the history of the beat-'em-up genre, though, and you'll realise something…
something actually quite fitting: it went down, but it didn't go down without a fight.
In the last couple of years of the genre's fading relevance, that being from around 1995
onwards, we actually saw some of the very best games in the traditional brawling genus.
The old guard was still trying out new things in the home - see Final Fight 3's SNES-only
outing that attempted to make it more Street Fighter than button-bashing-brawler - while
over on the Mega Drive we got the more visually inventive spin on things, Comix Zone.
Just to clarify here: neither game was 'one of the very best', it's just showing some
developers were trying to do something different with the genre, more than just slapping a
license on it and pushing it out there.
But in the arcades - oh! the arcades - we saw some real gems, and it surprised nobody
they came from the two very best at making punching people simulators.
Die Hard Arcade hit in 1996 and showed itself to be one of the few successful takes on a
3D brawler, as well as introducing the world at large to the concept of the quick-time
event - something lamented these days, but a minor revelation back then.
As long as you ignore the Dragon's Lair connotations.
The same year saw Capcom releasing what it had been building to with its fantasy-themed
games - Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara.
Not only was this arcade masterpiece home to the sort of refined thwocking people mechanics
you'd expect from the team behind so many titles in the genre, it had those RPG-like
features Capcom had become so good at integrating in your usual throwaway coin-op titles: different
weapons to equip, gear, XP, branching paths, and multiple endings.
It was probably a bit much for the arcade, to be honest, and seems like something that
would have been perfect at home - they didn't figure out how to squeeze it onto the Saturn
until 1999, though, and by then nobody really cared that much.
Capcom's final arcade beat-'em-up arrived in 1997, in the shape of Battle Circuit.
21 years later and still hardly anybody knows it.
The arcade scene was beginning to flounder, the genre it was a part of was boring people
to death, and Battle Circuit didn't even come out in the States, so hasn't been included
in the Official Gaming History our American friends write that seems to think the PS3
was hugely outsold by the Xbox 360 and ignores the European bedroom coding scene of the 80s,
among other outstanding examples of overlooking the facts because they happened in other countries.
Ahem.
Anyway, Battle Circuit was a superb last hurrah - beautiful and campy, with refined mechanics,
upgradeable characters, and a general feeling that this was the Captain Commando sequel
we never actually got.
It was a great game, and while it deserved all the praise and attention in the world,
it was quite nicely fitting that it just quietly released and saw the beat-'em-up's Golden
Age off into the sunset.
Meanwhile, there was a specific beat-'em-up that did get the attention, that did go down
in history as one of the greatest of all time, and did release exclusively in the home: Guardian
Heroes.
As a PlayStation-owning child, I had to wait over a decade before I could get proper time
with this one - and even 15 years after its original release, when it arrived on Xbox
Live in 2011, it was still phenomenally good fun.
Gorgeous, inventive, deeper than you'd expect, and endlessly replayable, it was - and still
is - one of the best beat-'em-ups ever made.
The genre was on its last legs, sure, but it had burned incredibly brightly as a last
hurrah.
Sheer willpower couldn't see it through, though, and the following years weren't
a pretty sight, being 'memorable' for all the wrong reasons.
The Golden Age was over.
Post-Golden Era, the beat-'em-up flapped about and failed to find its footing in this
new world of 3D games.
To make something 2D was seen as commercial suicide, and the bold indie scene we have
today would have been laughed off as the ramblings of a waking fever dream.
And yet, things continued.
We saw an homage to the classics in Tekken 3's Force Mode, which was a fine side attraction
- though nothing more than just that - while the likes of Mortal Kombat: Special Forces,
Fighting Force, the Bouncer and Final Fight: Streetwise tried to bring the classic mechanics
into this new world of 3D gaming.
They failed, and they failed with style.
Niche greats like God Hand and Viewtiful Joe turned up eventually, and gave us a Mikami/Kamiya
one-two of what the genre could have - or should have - become in the modern era.
But even with more traditional titles like Castle Crashers and Scott Pilgrim Versus the
World, it wasn't to be.
The world had changed, and the games we wanted with it.
It's hard to say the beat-'em-up is completely dead, but the genre as we know it is either
in comfortable retirement... or on rather less-comfortable life support.
Maybe one day it'll return in full force, and we'll once again be able to indiscriminately
batter unsuspecting petty crooks before eating bin-chicken.
But for now we'll just have to accept the original genre has evolved beyond recognition,
amalgamating with other styles into the likes of Devil May Cry, Monster Hunter, and Bayonetta.
And that's not a bad thing!
Games have to change, they have to grow, they have to evolve.
But there's always that empty space.
There are some efforts - Raging Justice tickles the nostalgia gland, even if it's rubbish,
and I'm sure other indies have and will make games harking back to the Golden Era
- I didn't even mention Dragon's Crown, for example, but that's mainly because the
art style is fundamentally embarrassing.
I'd just… really like a Final Fight 4, you know?
Still, that, friends, is that.
The golden age of the beat-'em-up was a grand old few years, and gave us all some
superb memories of punching people in the face repeatedly before depriving a homeless
person of a cooked meal from a trashcan.
Things are different now, but the spirit lives on.
The spirit… of punching.
Thanks for watching, please do like, share, subscribe, spread the word, and play all of
Capcom's beat-'em-ups because really they are that damn good.
Especially the Dungeons and Dragons games.
I would like to thank my five-dollar-or-more tier supporters from the world of Patreon,
because they are nice and kind and I love them very much:
And the higher-tier supporters, the mighty few, get all the love I have to give:
Videobrains - or Jake Tucker
Takara Hoshi
Lola Osman
Thanks for your support, and thanks for watching.
There are still too many beat-'em-ups from this era, I still don't ever want to play
any of them again after making this video.
BYE!
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