The Master Fighter
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 The only thing this game is the master of is at ripping off other fighting games!
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The Masters Fighter is a fighting game for the PS1, developed by UNICO (later UNIANA). It is a port of a previous arcade game made by UNICO called Master's Fury, which was lost to the sands of time until a rom of the game surfaced in 2020, showing footage of said game.
Not many people know about this game, but it's infamous for those who know it due to its blatant plagiarism (mainly from SNK games) and generally poor quality.
Why It Sucks
- While Master's Fury also commits blatant plagiarism and not being good at all, the gameplay and graphics were a bit more polished at least. Saying Master's Fury had a rough transition to the PS1 is an understatement.
- The game is full of obvious plagiarism. All of the characters have animations stolen from SNK games (and also from Street Fighter II). In fact, the character sprites also heavily resemble characters from SNK games and Street Fighter. For example, the main character Takuya has his sprite ripped off from Kim Kaphwan and his moves are taken from Ryo Sakasaki, both from Fatal Fury Special. Another example would be the sub-boss Kain who is a copy in every way of Geese Howard from Art of Fighting 2. However, as said before, these aren't the only cases of plagiarism in this game.
- The controls are terrible and are reminiscent of the first Street Fighter. It will most likely be frustratingly hard to properly execute the special moves, let alone the supers.
- Some characters are broken.
- The game looks horrendous by 90s standards, with extremely pixelated graphics for both characters and stages. The characters also look like they were upscaled.
- The gameplay couldn't be any more basic and lame. There are no combos or any way to chain attacks together.
- The AI is dumb as hell, sometimes blocking but most of the time just eating all your attacks.
- No practice mode.
- The sound is unimpressive at best, and at worst utterly horrendous. In fact, the character select music sounds like it should be in an NES game.
- It doesnt have chip damage, which means that you can block without getting damaged.
The Only Redeeming Quality
- Despite being "Japan-only", it supports the English language. You can play the game and understand easily. It would be better to not play this game however.
Reception
Thanks for its poor quality, blatant rip-offs and general horrible game design, The Master's Fighter gained the title of "kusoge"(Shitty game) by fighting game fans and gaming fans in general. According to NintendoComplete, the quality of this game is so poor that Shaq Fu looks like Virtua Fighter 4 in comparision, and said that only Expect No Mercy(an obscure Windows 3.1 Mortal Kombat clone) is even slightly worse than this game.