Review by: Eastman

Rating: 20 (of 100)

Fist is the polygonal sequel to Pretty Fighter X, a Japanimation-style 2D fighting game with digitized backgrounds. Unfortunately, anything good in Pretty Fighter is absent in its sequel.

Let's start with the gameplay... It has gone from Street Fighter 2 style control to Virtua fighter style control. I could appreciate that, but the characters in Fist have no more than 5 moves, unlike VF2, in which the characters all have over 20. Plus the control is slow and stiff anyway,so you couldn't possibly enjoy playing this with another person.

What about the story mode? No intro of any kind, unlike its predecessor which had a unique animation segment for each character. There are only 8 characters to choose, unlike the first which had 12. These include two males (which a Pretty fighter sequel does not need), three returning Pretty Fighters, and some really dumb character designs, like a girl in a raccoon suit. She must be a Mario fan. The computer is pretty tough, throwing you all the time. No end boss, and no story ending, just a few hand drawn pics.

So you couldn't play Fist for fun, what about the graphics? Ridiculously bad. This game came out after Fighting Vipers yet the characters are FLAT-SHADED. That means Virtua Fighter ONE quality graphics. These girls are just ugly bunches of blocks, even if there is a cool option to view them from any angle. I wish MegaMix had something like that! Oh, and the replays are super-boring, from an angle just slightly different than the normal gameplay angle. Why?

Sound is where Fist tries to catch up. The game music may be totally generic, but you get a free mini-CD with the Fist theme song, along with two voice tracks which I assume are the introduction and ending the programmers forgot to put in the game. Imagineer did hire top-quality voice actresses, though. You actually have a mode where you can view any of the female actors and hear her say lots of neat things. I think that was supposed to be the game's selling point, but I'm not sure.

Imagineer has actually made the worst fighting game of all time. It is worse than Way of the Warrior, Sailormoon Super S, and even Street Combat on SNES. There is no excuse to buy this game. If anyone you know owns it, feel free to beat them up. The cover has a poorly-written English song printed on it, and that's just what Fist is, poor.