Imagine the phone call: "Cody? It's Mike. Don't hang up - look, I know I said the first one was final. Yes, I know you thought we were stupid doing it again and went on holiday instead. Let me just - fine! Put Guy on. Guy? It's Mike. Don't hang up..."
And so it went; that aggro-mayor Haggar and nut-punching ninja Guy returned to the streets, now assisted in cracking the skulls of the Skull Cross gang with the help of Dean (an electro-punching Cody stand-in) and Lucia (the underdressed, bandy-legged special agent). And lo, there was much resisting.
Boom Bang-a-Gang
The second and third Final Fights were SNES console exclusives, giving Nintendo the chance to go a couple of rounds with Sega's Streets of Rage trilogy.
Haggar got back from his Final Fight 2 world tour (mopping up Mad Gear leftovers) to face a ruddy great riot and prison break: cue Final Fight 3 with its Street Fighter-esque special moves, dash attacks, branching levels and sprites seemingly bulkier than ever, some animations spanning the whole screen. A human or CPU second-player option was the cherry on top.
It may have been too easy and not enough to perform CPR on a dying genre, but Final Fight 3 did know how to deliver a rib-cracking good time. And with the chances of a traditional Final Fight 4 smaller than Guy's comedy pinhead noggin, at least there's the Wii Virtual Console letting us grapple with the first three all over again.
Comments
3 comments so far...
Agent75 on 13 Apr '13 said:
Final Fight was ace on the Mega CD, SNES version was okay. I played Final Fight 2 on the SF, but didn't know there was a Final Fight 3. There was a Final Fight on the Saturn, never played it, read it was crap. The arcade version is ace on the PS2 (one of those CAPCOM collections). Didn't the SNES version (Final Fight) have a level missing? Final Fight on the GBA was also good.
squiddly on 13 Apr '13 said:
Final Fight 3 on the SNES or is mega rare and sells for a fortune. It came out on NTSC and EUROPEAN PAL but not UK PAL.
sevvybgoode on 14 Apr '13 said:
The final fight game you're thinking of on the Saturn agent was a terrible 3d 1-on-1 fighter. It could have worked (after all double dragon had a few decent 1-on-1 beat m ups) but it really was bad.