Ranma 1/2: Chōnai Gekitōhen
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A rough way to start making Ranma 1/2 video games.
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Ranma 1/2: Chōnai Gekitōhen (らんま1/2 町内激闘篇, Ranma ½: Chōnai Gekitōhen?) is a 2-D fighting game released by Masaya and Irem for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The game holds the distinction of not only being the first Ranma 1/2 game for the SNES, but also the first ever Ranma 1/2 game released. The title roughly translates to Ranma 1/2: Neighborhood Combat Chapter and is also the only game in which Cologne appears.
Since its release the Chōnai Gekitōhen has become quite well known for how, when it was released in America, the game was renamed "Street Combat" and westernised extensively; with every Ranma 1/2 character replaced by a more "typical" Western Superhero.
Plot
Ranma learns of a martial arts tournament in which the grand prize is a invitation to see China. Desperate to rid himself of his Jusenkyo curse, Ranma decides to enter the tournament, but the other characters also hear of the tournament and decide to enter as well to either hope to rid themselves of their own curses, or to simply cause Ranma trouble.
Why It Cannot Fight
- The biggest problem about this game is the controls, which are absolutely horrible to the point of being nothing more than unplayable and making the game atrocious to play, thanks to so much flaws that will be talked about in the next pointers.
- The graphics on both versions are terrible :
- For the Ranma version, the sprites are just extremely bad due to feeling like it could have been on a really good looking Master System game due to how undetailled they are overall and the terrible color palette that feel like a drawing that got in the water and having less vibrant colors.
- As for the Street Combat version, it had the same problem except that the characters had horrible designs in-game and that the sprites are way worse than the Ranma 1/2 game, due to being even more undetailled and having a poor color palette, this is surprising considering that Irem worked on the game, when they are know for having good graphics in their games, some games that they released before such as Super R-Type or even Hammerin Harry look better than this, even though the latter was an Arcade/NES game and not an SNES game.
- The game only had 6 opponents to fight, which make the game extremely short, and is beatable around 15 to 20 minutes, which is even shorter than Ranma 1/2: Hard Battle, which was beatable around 25 minutes due to having more opponents (though this is because that game came out later).
- This is inexcusable because there's way more characters that could have been opponents, such as Happosai, Genma (in his penda form) or even Akane, those would later appear in Hard Battle.
- The controls are just garbage, as mentionned in WICF#1, and for a lot of reasons:
- First off, they are incredibly unresponsive and delayed, especially the jump, which take half a second to even work, this is annoying and can cause lot of cheap deaths, and while they are fast, they are fast but definitely not in a good way, and it show.
- They are completely clunky, as moving your characters is just plain horrible, and considering that due to how unresponsive they are, it make the situation even worse, even the jump is clunky, making the jump 100 times worse when you know that it is unresponsive and delayed.
- There's a double jump but it is useless due to being just as bad as the rest of the controls, and not to mention that it never make you land on the opponents to attack them, making it way more useless and it is just something for that the opponents hit you, not to mention that obviously it is unresponsive and clunky.
- The soundtrack in Street Combat is just bland and isn't as good as the Ranma 1/2 version soundtrack, which was decent.
- Only Ranma along with his female form are playable, and even then, you had to press select to play as the female form, in which it isn't even tell in any part of the game, and first time players will not know that you can play as the female form, thank to bad game design.
- Atrocious hit-detection that is very unresponsive and inconsistent, since sometime you will not hit your opponents when it clearly look like that it touch him/her, and sometime your opponents hit you when it is easy to see that they didn't even touched you in the first place, making the game extremely frustrating.
- The title of the NA version should have been Street Combats. In addition the title is extremely laughable because it did take the "Street" from Street Fighters and "Combat" from the Mortal Kombat franchise with only the K being remplaced by a C, which is really not original.
- The AI is just atrocious for every opponents, to the point of being a game that is hard for frustrating reasons, and because of that, the opponents range from brain dead easy to just incredibly annoying and painful to beat.
- Kodachi is probably the second worst exemple as she attack way too much and considering that the controls and hit-detection are terrible, it is a huge problem and thus Kodachi had a horrible difficulty spike but howewer she somehow not the worst case of all the opponents.
- The worst case is easily Ryoga, since he dodge and block your attacks so often to the point of being incredibly annoying, hard and is overall an unfair boss, not to mention that he always attack much like Kodachi but in an even worse manner, his AI is also the absolute worst in the game and even if you manage to do special attacks, he will dodge it really easily, which could even give the bosses from South Park: Snow Day! a run for their money.
- The game is extremely frustrating due to how much problems it had with the godawful Al and the terrible hit-detection, it doesn't help that the special moves are very hard to do if not impossible, and this along with the PS1 Ranma 1/2 game (which is as bad, if not worst than this game by the way) make it one of the most frustrating game of the Ranma franchise.
Redeeming Qualities
- At least the soundtrack of the Japanese version is decent.
- The cutscenes in the Ranma 1/2 version had really good graphics due to having detailled portraits of the characters, same goes for the vs screen where we can see the characters in them.
- At least it still better than Ranma 1/2: Battle Renaissance, which was so bad that it manage to be the worst Ranma game ever made.
- The characters designs in Street Combat are still decent and cool, though not in-game.
- You can finally beat up Happosai (if you add him in debug mode) due to him being annoying.
Reception
The game received mixed to negative reviews in Japan but when the game came out in the US as Street Combat, it was universally panned by critics and players and was considered to be one of the worst fighting game on the system, due to the awful controls, terrible hit-detection and the short length.
On Gamefaqs, it received a score of 2.33[1]
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