This Week In Retro: Warriors of Fate (Patreon)

October 1992: More like Beatdown of the Three Kingdoms

by Diamond Feit

If your memories go back that far, I'd like you to recall April of 1993. New president Bill Clinton enjoyed a 60% approval rating. North Carolina won the Final Four after Michigan's Chris Webber called a timeout which his team did not have. Avant-garde metal band Tool released their first album, Undertow. And at the age of 16, I embarked on a two-week-long class trip to France, my first ever visit to that nation.

Now you may consider me a worldly, open-minded fellow today but teenage-me was a very different person. He seldom tried new things, happily settling for the familiar or the bland instead of experimenting with unfamiliar foods or experiences. He got decent grades in school but barely spoke any French. He didn't have many friends, and most of them elected to study Spanish, so he spent a lot of his time abroad feeling isolated and alone.

It wasn't all bad news, though. While in France, he drank his first ever cocktail (a screwdriver), took lots of photos at historical locations, and successfully navigated the Métropolitain de Paris to find the local branch of le Hard Rock Café without any adult assistance. And whenever he wasn't stuck in mandatory group activities or viewing scandalous material on French TV, he frequented an arcade in the seaside town of La Rochelle.

My younger self saw a lot of games in that arcade for the first time, from weird Japanese imports like Gals Panic to brand-new blockbusters like NBA Jam. Yet one game stood apart from all of those thanks to its vivid colors, striking characters, and completely inscrutable storyline. I recognized the art style and UI design as distinctly Capcom, but otherwise knew nothing about the game's origins or even made a note of its title. Today, I can tell you that Tenchi o Kurau II: Sekiheki no Tatakai, officially localized as Warriors of Fate, is one of Capcom's least-appreciated arcade games, for I never saw an English version until 2018.

Capcom's Final Fight, released in 1989, put a fresh spin on the beat-em-up genre by offering players a choice of three distinct heroes with unique moves. Haggar, Guy, and Cody not only dressed and fought differently, but each of these big, bold characters had their own motives for tackling street crime first-hand. Capcom developed Final Fight internally as an original concept, taking only the loosest of inspiration from American movies, as the company sought to move a lot of units in the United States. The strategy worked, as Final Fight became a worldwide hit, spawning its own side-series of sequels before eventually folding into the Street Fighter universe—ironic, since the now-iconic beat-em-up's working title had been "Street Fighter '89."

Yet that same year, Capcom released another beat-em-up, one that couldn't have strayed any farther from targeting American consumers if it had starred Lenin and Stalin bringing communism to the streets of Moscow. Adapted from a Japanese manga set during the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, Tenchi o Kurau offered players a choice of four distinct heroes, all based on real-life generals. While technically a beat-em-up, the game plays more like a shooter, as the protagonists all ride on horseback and slash their way through line after line of enemy troops. Capcom localized Tenchi o Kurau as Dynasty Wars outside of Japan, a title comically similar to Dynasty Warriors, a much more famous series also based on the same period in Chinese history which began in 1997.

The ending of Dynasty Wars announced its own sequel would be "coming soon," but I don't think it sold well because when Tenchi o Kurau II launched three years later in October of 1992, Capcom chose not to brand it as a sequel outside of Japan, titling it Warriors of Fate instead. Despite retaining the same setting as the first game and featuring many of the same playable characters, Warriors of Fate drops all historical references and makes no mention of any real-world nations or people. There's still a recognizable map of China in the opening attract mode, but the text speaks of "murder and violence" in a place called Shang-Lo. Both heroes and villains alike all sport new monikers which, while vaguely Asian, lack any distinct cultural cohesiveness. Perhaps Capcom assumed that a pan-Asian fantasy would hold more appeal than a tale of ancient Chinese unrest.

Speaking of changes, Warriors of Fate also switches focus from equestrian to melee combat, giving its now-expanded cast of five playable characters a variety of punches, kicks, and grapples. Every warrior has at least one Street Fighter II-style special move, such as rising uppercuts, dashing thrusts, or flying wrestling holds. Horses are still found throughout the game and serve as a power-up of sorts, giving players a height and reach advantage while sacrificing a portion of their martial arts maneuvers. Much as I wish it were true, you cannot perform a piledriver while riding a horse.

What all this means, and why I fell in love with this title at first sight, is that Warriors of Fate acts as a long-lost Final Fight sequel that happens to take place on the other side of the world. The game supports up to three players at once, and given its wartime setting, enemies, weapons, and pickups often litter the screen. This amounts to utter chaos the likes of which Metro City never saw, especially since every boss battle includes swarms of underlings, making each of these encounters a frantic rush to topple the primary threat else the supporting foes will never stop coming.

Should players manage to overcome the odds and reach the final boss, the battle plays out unlike any other. The evil Akkila-Orkhan initially flees as his right-hand man and a trio of acrobatic women attempt to secure their leader's escape. Eliminating them leads players to a showdown against Akkila-Orkhan, alone on a cliff with a waterfall behind him; he has nowhere to run to. However, he still has one last trick, as players have just 15 seconds to slay him before he leaps to his apparent death. Whether the heroes kill the villain or he eludes their grasp, they return home to celebrate as the credits roll. Yet if Akkila-Orkhan makes his desperate dive, he will survive and immediately re-conquer the land in a scripted bad ending that sees the protagonists beaten nearly to death.

Interestingly, a third ending exists only in the Japanese version of the game, allowing players a choice to fight the final overlord or show him mercy. If they elect to kill him, it leads to the above situation, but letting him leave on his own terms results in a quasi-good ending where peace returns to the land but ongoing tension eventually leads to the nation splintering into three regions known as Wèi 魏, Shǔ 蜀, and Wú 吳—the so-called "Three Kingdoms" that remain the namesake of the era to this day.

Naturally, I knew none of these facts in 1993, having studied no Chinese history whatsoever outside of their relationship with the British (if I recall correctly, it involved opium and boxing). To my ignorant teenage self, Warriors of Fate was a non-stop fantasy of fisticuffs, an orgy of violence where I stood tall as the maestro and hundreds of hapless soldiers involuntarily served as my symphony. I couldn't tell you how many francs I pumped into the coinslot of that cabinet—mostly because that currency is no longer in use—but I'm positive I spent enough money in that arcade to buy a mighty fine bottle of liquor which my parents would have appreciated. Instead, I came home with a few measly travel-size cognacs in my suitcase but plenty of happy memories of Shang-Lo.

Capcom never ported Warriors of Fate to any contemporary home consoles, but did bring Tenchi o Kurau II to both the PlayStation and Saturn in 1996. Decades later, recalling only vague remnants of my time in France, I would often stare at used copies of Tenchi o Kurau II in retro Japanese game stores like Super Potato, eager to relive the game but reluctant to drop thousands of yen on a disc I might only play once or twice. Happily, someone inside Capcom must have read my mind, because Warriors of Fate would eventually join Final Fight, Captain Commando, and an assortment of other '90s arcade brawlers in the Capcom Beat 'Em Up Bundle in 2018. Capcom Arcade Stadium users may also purchase Warriors of Fate à la carte.

Today, 30 years after its initial release, and 29 years since I discovered it out of context in a French arcade, much has changed. Stories of the Three Kingdoms have saturated not just games but films and television as well, and thanks to the spread of the internet and streaming video, many of these works are available worldwide with their cultural origins intact. If Capcom opted to produce a third game in the Tenchi o Kurau series, it would likely sport a new English title but remain a Chinese tale—if the enthusiasm over Like a Dragon Isshin's localization is any indication, global audiences want more stories from Asian history.

As for me, sadly, I remain largely ignorant of Wèishǔwú, but I'd like to think I've learned a thing or two about expanding my horizons and taking chances on new experiences. My French hasn't improved, but I can throw down at least four screwdrivers before my head starts to spin (take that, teenage me). One thing hasn't changed at all though: Any video games with spinning piledrivers and a legion of jabronies to squash will put a smile on my face.

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