Final Fight review: the brawler with the big sprites and a mayor

A gang has kidnapped the mayor's daughter, and the mayor, a former pro wrestler, is going to handle it personally. Final Fight opens like the dumbest action movie of the eighties and plays like one of the best-built games of the decade.

Why do the hits feel so heavy?

The first thing anyone noticed was size. The characters are huge, and every enemy has weight when he hits the ground. Players choose Mike Haggar, a former pro wrestler turned mayor, his daughter's boyfriend Cody, or the ninja Guy, and up to two players walk the streets of Metro City together hitting everything in the Mad Gear Gang.

The move set is small and satisfying. Walk into an enemy and you grab him, then choose to strike or throw. Haggar can perform a spinning piledriver, the most powerful attack without a weapon, and Guy can jump off walls. Barrels, trash cans and oil drums break open to reveal pipes, knives and food that restores health, which is how a generation learned that dinner lives inside garbage cans.

A beat 'em up is only as good as the moment your hit lands, and in Final Fight every one of them lands.

The move that costs you

The best design decision is the spinning attack. It knocks down every enemy around you, and it drains a portion of your own health. So it is not a panic button, it is a trade. Surrounded with a full bar, you use it freely. Surrounded at the edge of death, you have to decide whether to spend health you do not have. That single rule gives a simple brawler real tension.

Even the continue screen had personality: your fighter tied to a chair in front of lit dynamite, waiting for your quarter.

What it meant back then

Final Fight began as a Street Fighter sequel under the working title Street Fighter '89, and the name changed after operators said it was nothing like Street Fighter. They were right, and nobody minded. Metro City is a fictional city on the Atlantic coast, analogous with New York City, and to American kids it looked like every tough city from every cop show on television.

In the United States it became the highest-grossing arcade conversion kit of 1990, which meant it often lived inside a repurposed cabinet at the pizza place, the laundromat or the bowling alley. You could spot it from the doorway by the size of the characters, and there was usually a second kid waiting to press the other start button.

Playing it today

It is still one of the most satisfying brawlers ever made, and still unfair in the way arcade games were meant to be. Play as Haggar at least once. Every piledriver is its own small reward.