A playthrough of SNK's 1992 versus-fighting game for the Neo Geo AES, Art of Fighting.
Played through the story mode on the normal difficulty level as Ryo.
Art of Fighting might not be regarded as one of SNK's best fighters ever, but it certainly was an important one early on. As their second fighting game franchise, preceded only by Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting had a fair few unique innovations, and it pioneered a number of concepts that would go on to influence the genre throughout the 90s.
The game plays like a standard SF2-era 2D fighter with buttons assigned to punch, kick, and throw. The D button introduced taunts, which would allow you to drain your opponent's "spirit," represented by the bar beneath the fighter's health. This bar drives special moves - if it is drained, you can't perform anything but basic moves unless you hold an attack button to generate more, though this leaves you wide open to attack. Art of Fighting was also the first fighting game to have decisive, "super" special moves driven by a power gauge - something that would see almost universal adoption in 2D fighters in the years following, especially once Capcom popularized the mechanic with Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo.
The game also pioneered the famous "zoom" effect, used more famously by Samurai Shodown. Leveraging the Neo Geo's sprite-scaling power, the screen zooms in and out as the distance shifts between the characters, making for a much more dramatic spectacle.
Innovations aside, Art of Fighting is still a solid 2D fighter. The controls aren't as sharp as they could be, and the single-player mode is let down a bit by limited choice of characters (a hold-over from the first Fatal Fury), but it still makes for an entertaining, albeit simplistic, arcade experience that still manages to impress with its huge sprites, cutscenes, and its amusingly melodramatic and obvious cliffhanger thanks to wonky translation work.
Taken on its merits as a 26 year old arcade fighter, Art of Fighting is still worth goofing around with, and is fun to play just to see what influence it still holds over today's games.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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