Arcade Archives Tecmo Knight (JP: “Wild Fang”) PS4
The arcade version was discussed briefly in the beat-em-ups thread:
Beat-em-up with unusual art and gameplay. The art is not bad but brutally janky
and I mostly kind of love how ridiculous it is.
The mechanics are surprisingly solid and you’ve really got to watch the enemy beast-men-and-women spacing because one baddy close enough to get to you while you’re hitting another baddy will equal a world of hurt; on the other hand, if you can get even a boss character alone you can beat them down easily (they have no wake-up attacks!)–so of course they come in pairs.
Secondarily you’re wondering the whole time if you can dodge enough on the ground to single one out for a safe ground combo or if you need to risk jumping onto their shoulders–your only form of aerial attack–to rip their head off, or at least do a bunch of damage;
but other baddies nearby can hit you while you’re doing that, or you may miss landing on them and instead land in somebody’s hit range.
Although by the end it was definitely seeming like juking around on the ground until you could separate one enemy from the pack for a quick combo was the safest way to go, so maybe it didn’t take quite as much decision making as all that all the time. Still, it felt more interesting and involving than crowd combat in the vast majority of beat-em-ups; and if you can get the enemy spacing right so that you do a head-grab combo against one, leap off their shoulders and directly onto another, and back and forth between two or three until multiple heads go flying, well, that’s just a ripping good time.
There are also bombs
that the enemies are hilariously dumb about hitting
–or you can kick barrels into them to set them off–with disastrous chain-reaction results.
It’s sort of weird–why are the bombs there and why do they almost always hit them–but keeps things moving.
Aside from attack and punch there’s a transform button that switches you from a little guy riding a big punching guy to a little guy riding a tiger and waving a flail; the flail has good range but only seems to do about half the damage, and seemed the much worse option in every situation in which I tried it–except against the last boss, where it appears to be more or less mandatory.
Despite the seeming uselessness of the game’s biggest gimmick, I’d been starting to think this was definitely one of those “overlooked gems,” but the last two fights are ridiculous; I finally got through the first by happening to get the random dragon transformation powerup whose electric breath kills anyone in a single hit,
but then the final boss kept killing me (well okay actually early on I somehow in flailing around managed to beat his first phase, but didn’t know what to do next and died instead) with his two independent semi-randomly timed aimed attack patterns that cover the entire area around the one place you can hit him, which is drawn to look like a giant flaccid penis. And he doesn’t have a visible health meter, inflicts huge knock-back, and his exact hit and hurt zones are not very clear.
It’s not great.
But after I’d had to continue about 20 times or something, midway through killing me yet again–and on the default settings you only have two lives before it’s back to the previous checkpoint–he just stopped attacking and I was free to bash him to death. I don’t know if it was a mercy rule or if I had happened to land on the magic pixel not covered by his AI routines, or what, but thank goodness. Almost blew the final button mash bit but not quite, and at last it was over.
Guess they decided to grab all your quarters at the end. Up to that last chunk it’s surprisingly good–probably better than 97% of the other beat 'em ups you’re trying to play.
Some of the non-final boss vocal effects are pretty annoying though. : P
And right now I don’t think I want to face those last fights ever again.
I suppose raising the lives per credit setting above the default 2 could help quite a bit with the checkpointing and get closer to letting you quarter-feed through the tough bits.
The rabbit leaning against the TECMO logo at the bottom of the high score screen is Jackey the Jack Rabbit, a mascot attempt. Had one self-titled console game. Jackey the Jack Rabbit | Video Games Fanon Wiki | Fandom (Fake game, thanks @thegodofpoverty for looking into it more than I did gargh)
