Why do I have a feeling this one’s gonna be…brutal. Ugh, I hate myself just for writing that.
The year was 1994, and Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat had ruined everything – everyone was going bat-crap crazy for fighting games, and every company under the sun was trying to dole out one of their own to capitalize on the craze. This led to some pretty cool things (Killer Instinct), some incredibly bad things (Ultra Vortek, Way of the Warrior, other Jaguar nonsense), and some incredibly weird things, like this week’s game, Brutal: Paws of Fury.
Brutal was developed by GameTek, a company whose earlier output was largely game adaptations of game shows, including Jeopardy!, Hollywood Squares, and Family Feud, meaning we have them to thank for the greatest tool-assisted speed run of all time:
In all seriousness, if you’ve never seen this, stop reading this blog for a few minutes and watch it. It’s chaos. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Anyway, this week’s game began its life, as all good things do, as a Sega CD exclusive. After it sold poorly due to being a Sega CD exclusive, it was ported to some real consoles, including the SNES and Genesis. In short, it’s Street Fighter but with anthropomorphic animals.
As with similar games of the era, Brutal has all of the standard fighting game characters, including Kung Fu User, Overweight Strong Person, and Girl. It is also easily the most lazily named character roster of all time. From our friends at Wikipedia:
I will say, for what it’s worth, that I’m a big fan of the phrase “A coyote who is motivated by greed.” That’s good stuff. I was hoping that “Dali Llama” was a llama who resembles a Salvador Dali painting, but it turns out he just sucks.
First, the good news – this game isn’t terrible, and has a few innovations I really enjoy. When playing through the game’s regular arcade/story mode, you begin with no special moves. As you progress through the game, you receive more, providing a feel of “leveling up” your character – this is a really neat idea, and I’m mildly surprised I’ve never seen another fighting game do it (or at least, not until an intrepid reader explains how I’m wrong about this). It even puts you in a little dojo to learn your cool new skill:
In addition to the level up mechanic, the game gives you a truly impressive amount of statistics at the end of each fight – what attacks you used most, your accuracy, and so forth. There are definitely other games that do this, but it’s always cool to see this sort of thing, even if it’s relatively meaningless – your Brutal: Paws of Fury stats aren’t going on your resume, and you know it.
Having said all that, I really wish these features were part of a more enjoyable game. The fighting is competent and decently fun, but it feels a bit clunky – after unlocking some special moves I had a surprising amount of difficulty executing them at times. Additionally, the only single-player mode is the main ‘quest’ (i.e., you can’t play a one-off match against the A.I.), and the enemies in it are always fought in the same order. That’s a definite bummer and takes a lot away from the replay value.
I’m also really not into the aesthetic…it’s just very odd to me. I imagine some other folks will be into it, though, while others still are really, *really* into it – needless to say, this game has an entry on a furry enthusiasts wiki, which I will not be linking here or anywhere, ever.
Brutal feels like it was largely made to appeal to the “Mortal Kombat is too violent, why can’t it just be cute” crowd, and to that end I suppose it sort of succeeded. It’s not an especially great game, but it’s still an okay curiosity if you’re into old fighting games. I’m not a big fan of assigning point scores to games for a bunch of reasons, but the best way I can explain this game is that it’s the embodiment of a “6/10.” I don’t have a better descriptor than that.
Because this series evidently wasn’t weird enough already, it received a quasi-sequel with more characters that was exclusive to…MS-DOS and the 32X. The mind boggles. I’m honestly a tad surprised it hasn’t shown up again in some fashion in the intervening 20+ years, though perhaps the Bloody Roar series just superseded it.
Ugh. There are mercifully fewer weird animal characters in next week’s game, which is one of Capcom’s lesser known NES releases.