This Week In Retro: Art of Fighting (Patreon)

September 24, 1992: You can call it the Art of Fighting with storytelling

by Diamond Feit

In pondering this week's topic, a query occurred to me in the shower that I had no immediate answer to: When did fighting games have their "golden age"? Arcade games had their golden age in the 1970s and 80s, and the beat-em-up genre arrived at the tail end of that time period. The debut of Street Fighter II in 1991 triggered an arcade revival around the globe, and the subsequent fighting game boom fueled what I would call the silver age of arcade games.

But what about fighting games specifically? When did they have their own golden age? Do we begin with the earliest titles like Karate Champ and Yie Ar Kung Fu? How about the original Street Fighter? Does it overlap with beat-em-ups, the genre that most directly informed the development of fighting games as we know them today? These questions are ultimately rhetorical, since these "ages" only exist in our heads as a means to categorize history for our own amusement, but they certainly gave me a lot to think about while I washed my hair.

I'd argue that the golden age of fighting games includes the aforementioned progenitors and Street Fighter II represents its zenith, for Capcom's success drove many companies to flood arcades with their own interpretations of The World Warrior, with some of their takes being quite literal. So while fans of the nascent genre like myself had plenty of options for the remainder of the 90s, I  consider that wave of derivative titles to be the genre's silver age.

By these metrics, this week we remember the 30th anniversary of Art of Fighting, one of the final examples of a golden age fighting game. While it debuted long after Street Fighter II achieved worldwide fame, it drew more influence from the first Street Fighter than the second. Specifically, Art of Fighting came to us from Hiroshi Matsumoto, a former Capcom staffer who helped design the original Street Fighter back in 1987 before joining SNK in 1988. Art of Fighting represented Matsumoto's take on the genre as a story-driven experience rather than a competitive one.

Art of Fighting emphasizes its narrative from the moment the game boots up; as soon as the familiar NEO•GEO logo disappears, the game shows a photo of two men and a young girl, all of them happy and smiling. Suddenly the frame cracks, and as the screen fades to black, the girl vanishes from the picture. A voiceover delivers the facts: Yuri Sakazaki has been kidnapped, and her brother Ryo along with his "friend and rival" Robert Garcia go to South Town in order to rescue her. Ryo and Robert thus share the spotlight as the protagonists of Art of Fighting, with all other characters serving as antagonists who wish to keep them from their goal.

When a player inserts a coin and begins a game of Art of Fighting, they get a choice of Story Mode or VS. Mode. The latter exclusively offers player-vs-player combat, which means two coins are required. Story Mode is the default single-player option, and while both modes open with the same character select screen, Story Mode only allows Ryo or Robert to be chosen. A fighting game with just two playable characters looked dreadfully behind the times when contrasted with Street Fighter II, but when compared to the first Street Fighter or Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting's Story Mode doesn't seem strange or restrictive at all.

In a departure from similar titles at that time, Art of Fighting's Story Mode always presents players with exactly the same foes in exactly the same order. As Ryo or Robert fights their way across South Town in search of Yuri, each adversary offers a clue concerning where to go next, and the battles gradually increase in difficulty so long as Ryo or Robert keep winning.

VS Mode remains an option as players make their way through Story Mode, as another player can always insert a coin and interrupt for a chance at rescuing Yuri themselves. Any buy-in switches the game to VS. Mode, allowing both players to select from any character in the game—including bosses, provided they have already been encountered in Story Mode. Yet whenever one player defeats another and the bested party opts not to continue, the game reverts to Story Mode and the player must select Ryo or Robert. Above all else, Art of Fighting is their story, and not any of their opponents'.

Story Mode offers one more twist to the usual fighting game experience with bonus games that offer character enhancements, not just extra points. Players encounter three bonus games during a Story Mode campaign, and each one offers a choice of three activities, all of which impart permanent upgrades for the remainder of the story. Smashing ice pillars grants extra health, slicing beer bottles imparts extra spirit energy, and visiting a dojo gives Ryo or Robert access to a new, powerful technique (more on that later). In a mode that never fundamentally changes, Art of Fighting's bonus games give players a degree of flexibility and customization of their character, allowing them to shape their playthrough in ways few fighting games ever dare to do.

Moment-to-moment gameplay in Art of Fighting certainly resembles Street Fighter II in that both games feature two fighters who punch and kick one another to deplete the other's bright yellow lifebar. It can't be a coincidence that SNK's Ryo and Capcom's Ryu have similar-sounding names, and both characters don a karate gi when facing their opponents. They also share a few moves like projectiles and soaring uppercuts, using the same joystick motions for these commands that Capcom established years earlier.

However, Art of Fighting adds an important twist to the fighting genre with its spirit meter. Every special move in the game reduces a character's spirit, which starts off green at full power, turns yellow after a few uses, then turns red when it nears empty. The less meter a character has, the weaker their special attacks become. The best example is the classic "fireball" projectile. In Street Fighter II, Ryu and Ken can throw them all day long without penalty. In Art of Fighting, only a green-level projectile will travel the length of the screen at full size. With spirit in the yellow range, their size diminishes, and when in the red, a projectile has zero range, bursting immediately upon use—though it still deals damage if it connects.

Players must learn to manage their spirit gauge during the match or else their offensive options will suffer. Equally as important, though, they must keep an eye on their opponent's meter, so they can anticipate which attacks might come next. Characters can refill their spirit meter by standing still and charging their energy (players perform this act by holding down an attack button) but they can also decrease their opponent's meter by taunting. All this means that the spirit metagame seesaws throughout the fight, rewarding aggressive play but preventing players from repeating the same moves ad nauseum.

The spirit meter also plays a role in another of Art of Fighting's unique features, an innovation that would soon become standard for the genre across the board. One of the three aforementioned bonus games offers access to a "super death blow," an extremely powerful attack in the form of a giant energy wave which requires a nearly-full spirit meter to activate. In a training sequence, players must correctly execute the complex command six times in 30 seconds or less. Success unlocks the move for the remainder of the playthrough, but failure means no reward at all.

Yet Art of Fighting also features a second "super" move, one that isn't shared on screen or listed in the manual. When a character has less than 20% of their life remaining, their life bar will flash red. As a child, I assumed this visual cue served to draw my attention to their condition. However, the game is actually notifying players that a "super desperation blow" may be performed. Again, it requires a nearly-full spirit meter, but if Ryo or Robert manage to land this attack, they unleash a flurry of melee blows that can completely upend the entire match.

My strongest memories of Art of Fighting revolve around its use of narrative. Every match in Story Mode includes pre-fight banter via on-screen text, followed by a confession from your defeated opponent, which leads to Ryo or Robert talking to themselves out loud as they hurry to their next destination. Even though the two characters share a movelist, their personalities as seen during these moments are very different. Ryo rides a motorcycle around town, openly emoting about his mission. Robert drives a fancy sports car and, while concerned about Yuri, plays it cool. Years later, Japanese fans would turn the image of Ryo on his bike into a meme, editing him into other games or situations, and even recreating this very specific scene in real life.

Likewise, the rigidity of Story Mode helps define the personalities and backstories of every enemy fighter as it shapes the layout and feel of South Town as a whole. Art of Fighting has no free-roaming exploration; Ryo and Robert always take the same path through the city in pursuit of Yuri, but thanks to a city map between fights and the rich, detailed stages where each clash takes place, South Town has a tremendous amount of character all to its own. It helps that the fictional city also served as the location of SNK's Fatal Fury, which came out one year earlier.

While Art of Fighting makes no implicit references to Fatal Fury besides the two titles sharing a zip code, each series would begin to intertwine their characters with the other in their respective sequels. This would eventually lead to SNK's creation of The King of Fighters in 1994, a crossover game where a broad spectrum of the company's characters would face off in team-based combat. KoF would become its own franchise independent of the titles which birthed it, and the rest is history.

Three decades later, Art of Fighting's innovations and focus on narrative seem little more than superficial. Just about every fighting game released in the last 30 years has employed some kind of meter-driven system for super attacks, most of which dwarf Art of Fighting in complexity and flexibility. Heroes rescuing a kidnapped woman was already trite for a video game plot back in 1992, so I know how it sounds when I laud this game's storytelling. Yet the fact that Ryo and Robert strike their way through the South Town underworld with a purpose made them matter more to me than most fighting game characters. It helped that the game's robust soundscape, from its high-energy soundtrack to the gut-shaking noises that accompany every blow, had a direct channel to my ears thanks to the NEO•GEO arcade cabinet's built-in headphone jack.

No matter how much nostalgia I have for Art of Fighting, I know enough about the genre to state that it doesn't hold up nearly as well as Capcom's silver age fighting game output in the 1990s. DarkStalkers, Street Fighter Alpha, the Vs. series, all of these games can be enjoyed today with no lectures about how innovative they were "at the time." However, context matters, and Art of Fighting's unique features made it sufficiently distinct from the deluge of Street Fighter II derivatives seen in arcades and on home consoles in 1992.

Today, when I look at Art of Fighting, I see a host of concepts that didn't catch on, and I ponder what the silver age of fighting games might have looked like if more companies embraced a single-player campaign and treated the versus mode as a fun extra. Of course, that would have meant far fewer coins in the cashbox, so what we got went the other way around: Competitive, combo-driven combat between paying customers took center stage and "stories" were relegated to ending cinematics, a treat for the few players who bothered to fight the computer instead of other humans.

For me, Art of Fighting is the treat, a full course of in-your-face ideas and attention-grabbing decisions. It didn't have the stamina to last as a stand-alone franchise, but it delivered memorable characters and set the stage for SNK's eventual flagship series, The King of Fighters. At the very least, its legacy lives on in those games, with a number of Art of Fighting mainstays as regular KoF combatants who retain their basic movesets 30 years later. It's nice to see Ryo and Robert still kicking today, long after rescuing Yuri. A damsel in distress brought these rivals together, but their friendship was never in question.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.