Publisher: Sega Deep Water
Developer: Sega Interactive Development Division
Release: 1995
Mankind is doomed. These are the end times.
The downfall of mankind can be directly traced to the untimely deaths of a few key individuals. In an effort to rectify this situation, the Eternal Champion – a god-like, time traveling entity who is the protector of the balance of good – has snatched these individuals at the moment of their deaths. They are to be entered into a tournament, the winner of which will have the chance to go back to their lives and affect changes that will ultimately reverse mankind’s end.
Challenge From the Dark Side is the first and only sequel to 1993’s Eternal Champions, which was a US-developed fighting game exclusive to the Genesis – Sega’s way to cash in on the fighting game craze at the time.
Challenge From the Dark Side features all nine combatants from the original game, as well as four new faces: Dawson, Ramses III, Raven and Riptide. As an added ripple, players are introduced to the Dark Champion, who is the protector of the balance of evil. He has been hiding four combatants of his own, and has decided that now is the time to reveal them. Like the original group, these four have a part to play in the reversal of mankind’s fate.
Eternal Champions was a pretty successful game, all things considered. The fighting game arena was dominated by Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat back in the day, and while Sega managed to get the latter on their system in a timely manner, the former was a SNES exclusive for quite a while. So you could kind of consider Eternal Champions their answer to Street Fighter II in the same way that the Streets of Rage series was an answer to the SNES exclusivity of Final Fight.
The time-travelling storyline allowed for some pretty fantastic characters in the Eternal Champions universe. You’ve got everything from a cave man to an Atlantean to an Egyptian Pharoah facing off against a coporate assassin, Russian acrobat, cybernetically enhanced kickboxer and a 1920’s era mobster.
Most of the fighting styles in Eternal Champions were based on real-life martial arts, much like Street Fighter II. There were still a lot of fantastical moves, but overall the combat feels very grounded in realism.
And yet the game also features moves akin to Mortal Kombat’s infamous Fatalities. The original Eternal Champions featured location-based Overkills, where taking down an opponent at a specific spot in the stage would set them up for a gruesome death, such as getting knocked into a lion’s cage or electrocuted by a neon sign.
Challenge From the Dark Side took it a bit further, though. The game introduced Sudden Deaths, where a character with 15% or less life left could suddenly die under specific circumstances – in Larcen’s stage the ticket lady at the theatre will bust out a gun and shoot the loser to death.
Vendettas are pretty much like Fatalities, in that a character could perform a specific button combination in front of a dizzied opponent in order to take them out in a suitably grizzly fashion.
Finally, there were the Cinekills. Here the Dark Champion appears in a pre-rendered video and kills the losing character in a way which supposedly represents their worst fears.
Anyway, enough talk about death. Eternal Champions was a fun, inspired fighter. The Genesis game was a bit too difficult for my tastes, but Challenge From the Dark Side introduced a difficulty setting that somewhat alleviated the problem.
And, of course, the game played a thousand times better when using Sega’s fantastic 6-button controller. Those stuck with the standard 3-button pad had to use the start button to toggle between punches and kicks. This was pretty standard on most fighting games for the system.
Eternal Champions has been pretty much forgotten by those were weren’t into the game back in the day, but has a real cult following as well. Probably none so much as the unreleased Eternal Champions for the Sega Saturn.
Advertised on the back of the Saturn’s box, this final game in the trilogy never made it out of pre-production. According to Executive Producer and Designer Michael Latham, the game was to have introduced a third being that represented Chaos, and the dark and light combatants from the previous games were to have worked together to restore time and space. Latham claims that the game was canceled because Sega of Japan felt that the series would draw too much attention from the Virtua Fighter series, which had become a flagship franchise for them.
There were a couple of Eternal Champions spin-offs, though. X-Perts on the Genesis chronicled the exploits of assassin Shadow Yamamoto. In this alternate timeline she survives the attempt on her life (perhaps she won the tournament?) and puts together a team of assassins tasked with ending the corporate corruption that lead to the assassination attempt in the first place.
The second game is Chicago Syndicate. This side-scrolling beat-em-up for the Game Gear follows the story of Larcen Tyler – the mobster originally murdered in the 1920s. Like Shadow, in his spin-off he has survived the attempt on his life and it has turned him into an anti-mob crusader.
Challenge From the Dark Side also represents the first use of Sega’s Deep Water publishing label. The label was meant to signify games that featured adult content (obviously we’re talking about violence, here). This is the first of only three games ever to use the label, the other two being the aforementioned X-Perts and 1997’s Duke Nukem 3D on the Sega Saturn.
Eternal Champions: Challenge From the Dark Side is one of the true gems of the Sega CD’s library. It represents not only what was great about the system, but about Sega in general.
