Many Capcom franchises have, over the years, fallen to the wayside. It’s unavoidable I think when you have so many. For every Resident Evil, there’s a Dino Crisis. For every Devil May Cry, there’s a Maximo. And for every Street Fighter, there’s a Final Fight.
Final Fight is far from the most suffering Capcom franchise of course, and there is one that has more greatly suffered and famously been more mismanaged across the years. It used to be one of their flagships, having started all the way back on the NES, and carried the company into the gaming mainstream. It was a beloved platformer, and was one of the first that captured the minds of gamers through its inventive mechanics. Now it’s reduced to only ashes of its former self, relegated to only appearing in fighting game crossovers whenever they drag its protagonist out of the grave Capcom themselves put him into, a wretched corpse of a gaming icon. It had a divisive 3D reboot, sure, but it still has potential dammit. The elder gods of Capcom look upon it with such contempt now, for reasons that are incomprehensible to our mortal minds. It’s a sad, weary tale, and I long for the day we see its protagonist's iconic arm weapon in his own game once again. Everyone should know what I’m talking about; it’s Bionic Commando, what else could I have been referring to?
I’m sorry, Mega Man fans; I couldn’t resist.
Jokes aside, Final Fight has had it rough. It arguably created the whole arcade beat ‘em up as we know it today, and without it we would never have had Street Fighter 2. It had two perfectly acceptable SNES-only sequels, and I often cite Final Fight 3 as an underrated classic. It was when it attempted to jump into the 3D world that it fell off the wagon; even before the subject of this article, there was the entirely forgotten early 3D Final Fight: Revenge, which was a very rough early attempt at making a 3D fighter.
Oof, my polygons.
A little bit ago, I did a review on Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance (behold) which was a game only published by Capcom (developed by Cavia), eerily similar to the one we’re going to talk about here. Both games share a lot of similarities, to the extent that I really feel like there had to have been some cross-influence with them, but playing that game led me here to this other much maligned Capcom entry; Final Fight: Streetwise.
The game was developed by Studio 8, an American-based subsidiary of Capcom. They created both the “interesting” Final Fight: Revenge you see above you right now, as well as the Maximo series of cult classic hack and slashes, based in the Ghost and Goblin’s universe.
The development of the game was pretty troubled, filled with typical Capcom mismanagement and tight deadlines. Originally this was a game to be called Final Fight: Seven Sons, and from what we know was going to be radically different. It was set to have multiple playable characters including one who seemed to use electricity somehow (some have speculated it was Final Fight 3 character Dean with a new design), and was even going to have cel-shaded style graphics to make it similar to the original iconic sprite work of the series. Its camera system was to be on a rail so that it would scroll left and right and mimic a 2D sidescroller while being a 3D game in graphics and implementation. What happened to this version? Some usual Capcom nonsense and Japanese/American communication errors. When Studio 8 was told during an internal showcase of Seven Sons that it ‘visually wasn't suited for its core audience’ by the bigwigs of Capcom Japan, the team misinterpreted this to mean that they didn't like the entire prototype, and not just the visual design. They were left with maybe 2 or so years to try and throw together something using the recycled assets of Seven Sons, as there was definitely not enough time to create something truly new. The fact that Streetwise is a game made of recycled, thrown together parts is very obvious.
The mandate to change the game had ultimately come from Capcom Japan, who once again were trying to tap into the Western gritty action crime game market. It’s so weird how this and Beat Down, again very eerily similar games, were under simultaneous development within Capcom. They were really angling for that GTA style hit, clearly. I stumbled onto a new fact when researching this game, relating Capcom to GTA; they actually published some of the GTA games in Japan. They saw the success of the games they were publishing and wanted in on that pie, perhaps, which led to the development of two infamous games.
Did this adversity pay off, and produce a diamond in the rough? Well, judging from the game's reception, absolutely not. This game was panned across the board, both in its Western homeland and in Japan. Also, Studio 8 was closed by Capcom within literally three weeks of Streetwise’s release, so…
It’s sitting at an averaged critic review of 43% according to Metacritic, and I mean, damn, that’s lower than Beat Down. It’s gone on to be a famous misfire, a classic entry in many ‘worst-of’ PS2 lists. Is it deserved? Let’s get into it.
In Final Fight: Streetwise you are Kyle Travers, brother to the original game’s playable character of Cody. Both brothers are of course really into street fighting and aggravated assault, and they also both have no discernable other characterizations, at least in Streetwise. Kyle, or KT as he’s frequently catcalled on the streets, is a pit fighter as well, being trained I think by Cody? It’s a little unclear. After the first opening fight, Cody asks to meet you in your girlfriend Vanessa’s bar, The Bar Fly, where you’re accosted by some suits who are seemingly out to take Cody somewhere. You get pistol whipped, and wake up to your beloved brother seemingly kidnapped; this starts the whole shebang off, seeing you battle a man named only ‘The Stiff’ (no comment), discover a new ‘superdrug’ hitting the streets that’s I guess some form of super steroid, encounter zombies created by this drug, battle for and against an Italian mobster stereotype, drop so many F-bombs, encover some shenanigans in a church, encounter quite a few Final Fight references sprinkled around, as well as a surprising number of Slipknot billboards.
They actually paid money to get Roadrunner Records branding, apparently. Man, Vol.3 was a great album.
There’s many things that gave me great ironic entertainment in the game’s story. One is the fact that Cody, who has been released from Metro City prison after the events of the first legendary game (and after breaking out of prison to keep fighting in the Street Fighter: Alpha series) still insists on wearing his prison work shirt apparently.
It’s a hell of a fashion statement, honestly. But it’s not the iconic blue-and-white striped jumpsuit from the Alpha series;
“Bingo”!
Another is just how one-note KT is as a protagonist. The first thing he says when entering a room, almost every single time, is always garbling out some variation of “I need to find my brother”, or “where’s Cody”. It’s a streak that’s hardly broken, and it became a running gag that always made me laugh. After every new story development he always calls up his girl Vanessa who then essentially explains what just happened and what he should do next, like she’s his mother telling him to stop for butter on the way home. It’s some good entertainment, man. Even better is that whenever you meet a new important character they get this zoom in name drop followed by KT monologuing about who they are, and the writing of them is so deliciously silly.
There’s some attempts at characterization or emotional hook. Cody wants to get back into the fighting business, his apparently bad knees be damned (how old is he? He was still fightin’ age in the Alpha games), because it’s all he knows, Kyle. There’s this weird thing they repeat a few times about KT having the potential to be the greatest fighter in the city if he ‘only applied his untapped potential fully’ or something despite him being pretty damn applied already, considering how many opponents you inflict severe internal bleeding on. I guess they’re trying to make him out to be a slacker? He has a pretty ‘slacker’ coded apartment.
Street fighters have an apartment like this, and think there's nothing wrong with it.
There’s not much else going on in the story, but I will say there’s some nice callbacks to previous games in it. You do meet the other members of the OG lineup, and even the identity of the main villain is tied into the very deep and nuanced Final Fight lore. It’s not much, but it’s there.
KT is just honed in on that lucious Haggar man-chest. I would be too; just look at those glorious things.
Something else; KT’s voice actor sounds so similar to Steve Blum that it bothered me throughout the game. It’s a gritty smokers drawl that sounds almost identical to Blum’s ‘any character that’s not Spike Spiegel’ voice, and it sometimes even veered into a little bit of David Hayter’s Old Snake MGS4 fry that I was convinced that it had to be one of them. The potential of David Hayter having one of his only non-Metal Gear voice credits be Final Fight: Streetwise filled me with such curiosity that I had to look it up before I got to the credits; it’s totally not either of them. It’s actually the senior concept artist of the game, Trent Kaniuga, who had a decent career at Capcom beforehand as an artist in various roles. He’s also an amazing comic artist; here’s some of his work. His earnest attempt at trying his hand at voice acting was adorable, and I’m not being ironic here; I miss the days when voice acting in video games was done by either the devs themselves, or at least one of their friends who took an improv class once. It also just conveys how thrown together Streetwise really was.
Enough about the game’s unimportant story; let’s talk about some other stuff before we get to the actual brawling gameplay.
If I thought Beat Down was filled with ‘tude, Streetwise is a new level. It's even more in your face, edgy and profane and makes Beat Down look like a silly little preschooler. There are constant F-bombs, innuendos or flat out sex references, some frankly hilarious insults thrown around and the whole thing just feels so sleazy. One of the first objectives you find yourself doing is going into a porn theater to interrogate its pimp owner, Weasel, who's in the middle of having a nice lady accountant ‘balance his checkbook’.
When Weasel says here, “Oh yeah baby, don't forget about those too” to the female accountant under the desk he's referring to his investment interest returns of course. He has a very diverse portfolio across both government bonds and public stocks, and needs to know if his TFSA can cover all his market gains.
This turns into you beating him up, of course, as that's the Metro City equivalent of exchanging pleasantries. Then the game decides to suddenly turn into THQ’s The Punisher and have you do an interrogation minigame to smash a door into his head; the only time this ever appears in the game. Streetwise is a little confused, I think.
I’m not saying it wasn’t fun, just confused. Weasel totally deserves it; everyone knows TFSA’s only cover capital gains up to your market cap.
Speaking of minigames, there are some. A pretty big complaint I had with Beat Down was that there wasn’t anything to break up the fighting and it could have used some minigames, so here we are in Streetwise solving sliding block puzzles, playing darts and three-card monte.
The game even has multiple instances of the famous car smashing stage, the Metro City classic.
You can’t really play many of them whenever you want, as they are usually only one-off sidequests, and it’s obvious that they were really hastily made to fill gaps when Seven Sons became Streetwise, but at least there’s something. I’m not adding any points for their inclusion, but at least there’s something.
“I’m going to ram this up your pisshole!” I admit, I laughed. I laughed even harder after at how easy the boss fight was.
There’s also something to be said of the soundtrack. It's actually licensed music which you can control at any time using the d-pad, and there’s four general genres; you got some hardcore, a little bit of some metal, you got a whole lot of rap, and there’s the occasional drum-and-bass or club electronic song. It adds to the atmosphere, and I genuinely started grooving out many a time in the middle of many a street fight.
Is there any CCR on this thing?
There is something more I have to bring up about the musical choices; it feels so bizarre to be beating down punks to some rap music only to hear a whole lot of N-bombs dropping around you, depending on your choice of rap artist of course. There’s no music censorship in Streetwise, I can confirm. The first time I overheard one I did an auditory double take, as I was like “no way I just gave a guys’ crotch a handshake with the sharp point of my elbow to the N-word”. I don’t mean to sound like I’m clutching at my cephalopod pearls because of some ‘urbane musical stylings’ like I’m a middle-aged rich white woman (I am only one of those things; I’ll let you figure out which one), but I just never thought I’d be playing as Cody from Final Fight beating up various ne'er-do-wells to some N-bombs, you know? It’s so bizarre to hear them from an official Capcom game. Props to them for not censoring the songs, I suppose, and keeping them authentic. No points are being deducted or anything for this, of course, it’s just something I had to bring up.
But how does it all play, Octopus? Well, here it is; it plays just fine. I said it.
The combat system isn’t terrible by any means. It’s maybe a little ‘cookie cutter’, maybe a little simple, but it’s competent. It controls pretty fluid, which was a complaint with Beat Down’s at times unresponsive feel, and there are some hidden moves to discover and new spicy moves to learn. You can hit up gyms scattered around Metro City to learn new moves for a fee as you progress, and they have a good range of things to buy. You can learn to do a parry that you can follow up with either an elbow to the crotch or a huge side kick, Bruce Lee style; there’s also classic ‘hit both attack buttons at once’ invincible drop kick, a decent number of grabs and reversals, and numerous additional combo strings.
I wasn’t joking earlier about handshaking dudes’ crotches with my elbow, why would I joke about that?
Andore, member of the prestigious bloodline of Final Fight opponent’s? More like ‘Ando-get-kicked-in-the-gut-re’, got ‘im. He’s really the weakest link of the family, it should have been Hugo.
You have a fast attack, and a heavy attack, and can combine them for various combos. The moves all feel pretty ‘crunchy’ as well, and use a tasteful amount of screen shake and beefy sounding impact noises on the big ones to convey some real pain. As you deal damage to opponents, you also fill the blue ‘instinct’ bar below your health which fuels a lot of your bigger moves. You can also hold down L2 to use instinct to power up any of your other moves, and after a few upgrades I felt like a truly terrifying street marauder. There’s also weapons to pick up and use of course, as well as the Final Fight classic such as hamburgers and hotdogs that fall out of your enemies pockets.
It's entirely boilerplate, but at least the combat system by itself isn't terrible. There could have been more to it, for sure, but it isn’t bad enough for me to overly complain about.
You may be asking yourself now; wait, that sounds like Octopus liked the gameplay of Final Fight: Streetwise. And you’d be right. The actual fighting and brawling is perfectly playable and good, honestly. It’s a little simple as I said and it does get repetitive after awhile, but I’d actually say overall I like purely the fighting system. Let’s use this to segue into what I don’t like about the game as there is a lot.
The AI is atrociously bad, to the point where it is almost comedic. They often just stand around and watch you commit aggravated assault that will turn into a second degree murder charge hours from now when their buddies’ finally die of their injuries in the hospital, and don’t do anything about it. They run into one another pretty frequently, temporarily forming into one super thug before you split them in half again with a wicked axle kick, and they really aren’t overly aggressive for the most part. The bosses are also incredibly stupid. Many have some attack they do as they get up from the ground, and I quickly devised a seemingly foolproof strategy early on in the game; knock them down, get close to them on the ground then run away. They will like 95% of the time do whatever their wake-up move is, then after you dodge it will be open to getting smacked around again and the strategy repeats itself. I got through many a boss fight with this strategy. All this means that what little enjoyment you get out of the actual fightin’ is marred by the AI as they are of course inseparable from one another; every fight, I was really just hoping for some actually challenging enemies.
The whole ‘open world-ish’ design of the game, like Beat Down, is very half baked and mediocre only more so in Streetwise. The city is broken up into small maps that you start travelling between as you go through the story (repurposed stages from Seven Sons of course), and there is very little to do in them. If the minigames were things you could do whenever by going to specific areas or something, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. There are some side quests, like I previously said, but hardly anything that brings it all together. They do have slightly more to them than Beat Down at least; sometimes they’re escort quests, sometimes you solve some block puzzles, but again; the side quests are not enough to carry the open world.
There are also entirely zero elements of the usual open world crime game, being vehicles or even a ‘wanted level’. You cannot commit any crime other than the beatdowns, and you can’t even interact with the few cops you see standing around; at least Beat Down had some form of having to avoid police, and you could rob people, even if it was pretty terribly implemented. As it is, Streetwise is simply a linear action game with some set dressing around it. Again, maybe if this stuff was more fleshed out then the rest of the games' mediocrity wouldn't be so apparent.
The biggest issue; the game’s atrocious camera. It barely functions most of the time. It’s a combination of the terrible speed at which it moves, feeling like it’s not moving at all most of the time, and the amount of times it gets stuck behind something while you’re trying to knee someone in the crotch. It’s truly abysmal, and I think stands as one of the worst camera’s in a 3D action game I’ve encountered so far.
The game does have a few little goodies packed into it. You can unlock the original Final Fight to play; it’s weirdly kinda choppy for some reason in a way I don’t remember the original game being, but it’s still there. There’s also an ‘arcade mode’ that sees the game play much more like the earlier ones, complete with arcade style health bar, lives and a side-scrolling camera angle. You can also unlock the original cast to play through it with.
This is my final summation of Final Fight: Streetwise; it’s not that offensively bad. I said it. People talk like this game has personally insulted their honour, and killed their brother in ritualistic combat bloodsport. This game was voted 6th worst ‘2D to 3D’ translation by ScrewAttack (remember them? That’s a time capsule statement) beating out Altered goddamn Beast on the PS2. That game is offensively terrible; I should know, I’ve been playing it alongside Streetwise for an article (spoilers). You frequently read about people kicking Streetwise’s brutalized corpse even all these years later, but I just honestly don’t get why it’s so hated after having played Streetwise. It’s not good by any stretch of the imagination, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone as you could just play something good instead, but come on it’s not Altered Beast. That game is a comparative quality benchmark, honestly.
A major complaint, at least at the time of the games launch, was just how radical of a departure the game was from the previous Final Fight games. It’s true, the previous games had that zany, almost cartoonish arcade beat ‘em up energy to them while this is trying to be a more brutal and somewhat more realistic depiction of violence. Somewhat, as you’re still throwing dudes around with flip kicks and pile-driving them into the pavement. I can agree with the sentiment though; this game's character designs are so bland and lifeless compared to the vibrancy of the original's iconic characters. The city doesn’t have that same energy that the backgrounds of those games had either, and the whole thing just feels a little soulless in the end which it ultimately was, being a game made to chase a trend created within 2 years using recycled assets.
The combat is perfectly acceptable, and controls well. The open world stuff around that is a missed opportunity and really mediocre again, and the AI is bad enough to take points off for. The storyline I actually almost liked through sheer ironic entertainment, but I’m not adding or subtracting points for its story; it’s an action game, who really cares. A good story can add to an action game, for sure, but I’m not going to detract points for a game having a bad one when it’s in no way a ‘story game’ or anything like that. This leaves the game being lifted up by its gameplay ultimately, and unfortunately for Streetwise it’s gameplay isn’t so powerful or impressive that it’s going to get a good score. Like I said, it’s at best ‘okay’, but simplistic and barebones. Ultimately I feel that the game is a notch below Beat Down; Beat Down had some serious vibes and earnest attempts at new things, while Streetwise just has some entirely ironic story entertainment and only okay combat. You can put down the pitchforks, now.
Seriously, this isn’t Altered Beast bad, so prepare yourselves for that article; it’s been a horrid slog to get through that game, and numerous times I’ve almost just given up entirely. But I preserve for you, the good people, and because I’m a complete masochist for terrible games.
Did you know this game actually inspired Godhand? Allegedly, Shinji Mikami was so pissed about how bad Streetwise was that he decided to make a Western targeted action game himself; Godhand was the result. Octopus lore; I actually do not like Godhand that much. Just some info there, I guess.
Until next time.
Pros
- + Competent brawling combat that feels chunky and meaty.
- + There's some attempt to break up the repetitive gameplay with minigames.
- + A potentially entertaining story if you just want to laugh at something.
Cons
- - Eveything else.
- - Bland level design and open world mechanics.
- - Terrible AI.
- - Atrocious camera to an award-wining degree.
5.5
out of 10
Overall
Final Fight: Streetwise may not be the worst thing ever like some frequently cite it as, but it sure isn't good. A competent combat system is destroyed by what has to be one of the worst cameras I've tangled with, and the horrible AI will make what could have at least been a fine brawler feel lifeless.
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