A playthrough of Konami's 1993 arcade versus-fighting game Martial Champion.
I complete the game with two different characters in this playthrough - first with Jin, and then with Racheal (beginning at 10:05). Both were played on the game's default difficulty setting.
Martial Champion is one of a very select few arcade fighting games ever made by Konami, and while it might make a good first impression, it's not one of their classics.
The lion's share of the development seems to have been spent on Martial Champion's graphics and sound, and the presentation is thoroughly excellent. The characters are massive, the backgrounds all contain a ton of animation, and there is such an overuse of color that it almost becomes distracting to play at times. The sound quality is right up there, too: the voices are all impressively overdone, and the music's sample quality is a fair amount higher than even Konami is typically known for.
The character roster is nothing original, but the charactern designs are pretty good. You get the typical range of stereotypes to choose from here - if you're a fan of Ryu, Kyoshiro, Guile, girl ninja Ryu, or Chinese vampires, you'll find someone here. The cast actually feels similar to Art of Fighting or Breakers.
Of course, the whole game feels a lot like Art of Fighting, only without the zooming screen effect.
The gameplay is a bit underwhelming, unfortunately. It's not bad at all, but considering who made it, it's a disappointment. If this was meant to take on Street Fighter II... well, it's no surprise that Capcom lasted much longer in the arcades. There's really no combo system at all in Martial Champion, and each character only gets two special moves each. You get three attack buttons (each assigned to an attack height, not strength), a throw command, and that's about it. The inputs feel a bit kludgy, though they are reliable once you've gotten used to them, but the big problem is that there's very little variety or strategy to the gameplay. It's all very ho-hum. It's fun for a few games, but it has no staying power whatsoever.
I still wonder why Konami never made a serious, AAA-level TMNT fighter for arcades. The console games were great, and it seems odd that they'd ignore their success with the franchise if they wanted to maintain their relevance in the arcade market. Instead, they made Martial Champion.
Like I said before, Martial Champion isn't bad. It's just disappointingly lacklustre. Still, if you're looking for something to burn an hour, you could do far worse.
(Did anyone else notice just how much they wanted you to notice that Racheal isn't wearing a bra? How do her boobs get that cockeyed in certain poses? And her ending is quite... revealing. I think that's the right word for it.)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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