PlayStation Basement #95 - Fatal Fury: Wild Ambition

This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on June 20th, 2020.

Another week, another PlayStation Basement! PlayStation Basement is a weekly review of games for the original PlayStation that are somewhat obscure, unusual, or unknown. Games are rated Good, Bad, or Neutral to emphasize the review itself. Now, let’s go!

So summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street, and what better way to start this season than with a fighting game? Today’s game is SNK’s attempt at a 3D fighter: Fatal Fury: Wild Ambition. Originally released to the arcade on January 28th, 1999, the game followed on Japanese and North American PlayStation consoles on June 24th and November 30th, respectively. In what seems to be SNK’s attempt at mimicking their rival Capcom’s Street Fighter EX, Wild Ambition re-tells the first Fatal Fury game with some of the mainstay characters from later games such as Mai Shiranui and Mr. Karate except this time they’re all in 3D. The real question is: is there room for another newly polygonal street-fighting man in this town?

The cover art is a fierce, almost homoerotic depiction of the villainous Geese Howard doing a menacing glare in newly handsome 3D. The cover art is basically the same in North America and Japan with the North American art increasing the contrast and using some different text. The image overall resembles the more abstract design of Japanese releases, so I am surprised that it made it across the ocean in almost the same format. Either way, I don’t think that this cover art is a great start to the game, with the composition being incredibly cramped and the edges of Geese’s shirt being very plain (it looks like they need more of an edge to stand out). Also, I’m not really sure what is going on in the background, and it almost looks like a backdrop that’s been placed for an oddly cropped photo op. The contrast on the North American version is pushed to the edge of reason. None of this sits well with my sense of design.

Graphically, the game does some things fine and some things quite poorly. Fatal Fury: Wild Ambition is a slow and rigid fighter. The characters lurch about and moon jump. Their attacks feel like there is a real weight to their bodies, but this also means that things don’t work as I expect them to. When I think of a 2D fighting game like Fatal Fury or Street Fighter, I imagine something fast and fluid. Here, we’ve lost fluidity and speed for an odd deliberateness and the awkward polygons of the pre-millennium era. It’s not as well-done as Tekken either. The models themselves aren’t particularly bad; they just don’t animate as well as the sprites from the main series. I do like the expressions that the developers were able to give the characters during win poses and the like. The level backgrounds also lack the life of the backgrounds featured in Rival Schools or Tekken 3. In addition to all of this, there are also a number of FMVs in the game that look pretty nice and excel at atmosphere, but the animation and lighting can’t compete with the same from Namco or Squaresoft. The menus and general presentation are pretty good with some nice text appearing to give the game a pop art style. Nothing about these graphics is gonna start a revolution, though.

The sound is a bit of a mixed bag. The musick is cleanly produced, but the various rock, metal, and more atmospheric tracks that sound like something you might find in Suikoden or Final Fantasy have an odd plastic-y quality to them. I can’t put my finger on what exactly is going on. They also don’t always seem to fit what I expect for a fighting game. You do get to choose between remixed or original versions of the songs, which is nice; I think I usually like the original versions better. Another problem is that the sound effects and voices sound muffled, especially compared with the quality of the musick. The announcer is an exception, but he isn’t exactly exciting either. The sound is just overall disjointed, too many pieces are off to make something really cohesive other than a disturbance.

Moving on to shout and scream and kill the king and all of that let’s talk about some serious disappointments with the gameplay. As I’ve touched upon, Fatal Fury: Wild Ambition is awkward. Though the game controls similarly enough to classic SNK fighters, the characters feel rooted in place. Certain things, like the range of some attacks, feel really unintuitive. I don’t love how the super bar works; it can be both overused (so that your character gets dizzy if they use more energy than they have) and decreases when you get hit. Therefore it becomes more of a “win-more” mechanic than in your usual fighting game. The new dodge button is different enough from the old style of dodging in other SNK games and works fine enough but doesn’t really do enough to change the style up either. Wild Ambition also retains the classic difficulty ramping that SNK is known for. Even with a number of modes (Training, Arcade, VS, etc.) Fatal Fury: Wild Ambition just doesn’t live up to its pedigree.

There was certainly some ambition at hand in rendering Terry and the gang in three dimensions, but the efforts here did not make something worthwhile. Wild Ambition feels sluggish and unrefined. I’m not sure that “wild” is the best term to use for such a game. The sound, graphics, and controls are all off enough to throw everything out of whack. Perhaps the most ambitious thing about this game is the addition of long cutscenes that appear, but I’m not sure that the game needs to present itself as a film when it’s just your standard arcade fighter at heart. At the end of the day, Fatal Fury: Wild Ambition is nothing more than a compromise solution between 3D and 2D fighters that doesn’t do much right compared with other games from either direction.

Fatal Fury: Wild Ambition receives a Bad.