Use any means necessary, except weapons

  • Developer: Arc System Works
  • Publisher(s): Tomy Company (Japan), Midas Interactive (EU)
  • Release Dates: October 12th, 2000 (Japan), May 23rd, 2003 (EU)
  • Available On: Playstation 2
  • Genre: Fighting (3D graphics, 2D movement)
  • Also Known As: Grappler Baki: Baki Saidai no Tournament (Japan)

Have you ever read or seen Grappler Baki? If you haven’t, you really, really should! Seriously, go ahead, go watch/read some and come back, you have my permission! For those of you who choose not to heed my advice, well, I’ll go ahead and give you a little primer. At its core, Baki is a martial arts series about a guy (Baki Hanma) who’s determined to become strong enough to defeat his father (Yujiro Hanma), who just so happens to be the strongest man on the planet. Now, when I say “strongest man on the planet”, we’re not talking something as simple as “big muscles” or “really good at a martial art”. No, no, nooooo, I’m talking “so strong he makes people pee themselves or faint at his presence”, “makes every American president swear loyalty to him and promise not to bother him because he knows their army can’t stop him”, “has so many back muscles that they form the face of a demon”, “can tell if a person has cancer just by looking at them”, and “is the son of a guy who survived nukes targeted specifically at him in World War II”. And this is just the tip of the iceberg!

Throughout Baki’s journey in the pursuit of strength, pretty much everybody he meets is completely absurd in their own special way. You’ve got a guy who becomes stronger by imagining that he has more joints in his body, the feared Yakuza member who’s only 19 years old despite looking like this, the super strong caveman called Pickle that everybody wants to test their strength against even though doing so is likely to result in one or more limbs getting eaten, the strongest guy in a maximum security prison that willingly lives there because he’s treated like royalty, and Muhammad Ali’s son and a clone of Musashi Miyamoto show up at some point too because why not? Baki himself certainly isn’t exempt from ridiculous stunts, either; the guy jumps off a cliff to power up, kidnaps George W. Bush (sorry, “George Bosch”) to get into the aforementioned maximum security prison, and shadowboxes a giant praying mantis so hard that the fight becomes real!

Katsumi can’t use his joint imagining powers here!

The point is, simply put, Baki is something else. It’s truly special and nothing out there feels remotely as thrilling and comical at the same time. It has quickly become one of my favorite anime and I could see myself rewatching it all in a heartbeat. I don’t normally use Netflix, but I’m willing to do so for the sake of my Baki fix if that’s how it’s gotta be (helps that I don’t give them money!). I only got into it pretty recently, though, and you wanna know what got me in? This particular image, one that you may have seen before if you trawl the right places, shook me to my core. I had to know what the heck the context was behind this page:

Well, can you blame me? Oh, by the way, the guy in the tetrahedron is an alt-history version of Che Guevara and he knows ninjutsu now. You know, normal Baki things! Though this image alone inspired me to seek the series out, I also found that this video by Super Eyepatch Wolf does a great job of highlighting both the absurdity of Baki and the easy to miss, finer details that make it so special. The manga has some seriously phenomenal art and if you can get over how uniquely ridiculous the character designs are (I personally love how uncomfortable everybody looks all the time), you’ll find that the action is exceptionally well drawn and depicts the craft of martial arts like no other series.

Baki’s utterly hilarious, sure, but it does have storytelling and character development that ranges from genuinely sweet to unexpected and interesting. Baki’s relationship with his father in particular is something I think is an excellent take on the classic revenge tale. No need for a plot synopsis here (again, just go check it out!), but their relationship evolves from the standard revenge plot into a complex form of appreciation for each other that’s much more nuanced and surprising than the expected “revenge is bad, actually” conclusion we’ve come to expect from these types of stories. I also love that no matter how intense the fights get, all the characters end up having a mutual respect for each other that’s heartwarming and inspiring to see. Every character desires the same thing, so they grow by battling and learning from each other, and it’s because of this willingness to expand their horizons and learn about the world that Baki ends up becoming as strong as he does. It also veers into some vaguely homoerotic undertones at times, so if you like that about, say, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, I think you’ll dig that here too!

Such a premise of learning from others and experiencing the joys of mutual growth is a big part of the fighting game experience, so it’s only natural that Baki would be the perfect thing to adapt to the genre. Luckily for us, that’s exactly what we have here! Arc System Works has always been deep in the licensed fighter trenches and the PS2 was a particularly strong time for that kind of thing in general. You had a million Naruto and Dragon Ball Z games, obviously, and then you had Bleach games, Yu Yu Hakusho games, Inuyasha games, Gundam games, JoJo games, One Piece games, an Ultimate Muscle game, a Zatch Bell game, and way more than I could name here without boring you to tears. ASW obviously had and still has Guilty Gear, but they also did a fighting game based on Sengoku Basara that looks like it gets pretty wild in the right hands. Out of all their non-Guilty Gear efforts, though, Arc System Works’ Hokuto no Ken game is perhaps the one with the most enduring legacy. That game is one people affectionately call “Kusoge” because of its incredibly unbalanced nature. It’s not a bad game at all despite the typical meaning of the Kusoge moniker, but at high levels, it evolves into one of the most absurd video games ever created. No matter who you play, if you’re good enough at the game, you can infinitely combo your opponent into next week off of a single tap. You can corner carry all the way, bounce ’em around like a basketball, do what could be referred to as a new form of interpretive dance if you’re feeling creative, and send them flying all over the place in any direction. It’s an absolutely ridiculous game, but at the same time, it does manage to capture the energy of the source material in its own unique way.

ASW has continued on a path of taking licenses like Granblue Fantasy and Dragon Ball Z and recreating them in a fighting game context with a focus on authenticity through exceptional visuals and mechanics alike. Dragon Ball FighterZ has all the spectacle, aerial assaults, and energy blasts you’d expect, and Granblue Fantasy Versus finds interesting ways to sneak in mobile game things like cooldowns on moves and simplified control interfaces without diluting the best parts of a fighting game. This method certainly works great, but there’s something to be said about making it work with a smaller budget on a humbler platform and paying tribute to the source material in more subtle ways. If you can’t pump out graphics that look like they’re straight out of the anime, you’ve gotta find other ways to make a game feel “authentic”, which is a tricky problem that takes clever solutions and faith in the players to solve.

The box art and title screen don’t make a great impression, but the menus and loading screens are a definite improvement

One look at the cover of, ahem, “Fighting Fury” here doesn’t inspire much confidence. The European title had the Baki name scrubbed out and the fact it’s published by Midas Interactive, a publisher who has had their name on games of wildly varying quality, is a potential red flag to anyone in the UK! Booting it up and seeing the graphics would probably make most people nervous, too. It’s not a terrible looking game or anything, but the 3D models feel pretty basic, as if it was an early PS2 game, the colors are a bit muddy in general, and the environments match the source material but feel drab and hollow with their lack of details and fancy textures and whatnot. Nothing offensive, but indicative of a tight budget and certainly not up to the standards of the manga’s gorgeous artwork. I bet a lot of people tapped out of this one pretty quickly if they tried it, and I went in expecting something rough myself, but honestly? I think it’s a good time! If you can overlook the presentation and spend some time with the mechanics (also make sure to set it to 60hz in the settings), you might be surprised at how fun this game can be and how it captures the bone-crunching action of Baki in interesting ways. I don’t personally think it’s Kusoge, but if calling it that is what it takes to get people to try it, then so be it!

Fighting Fury is a (very condensed) retelling of the Maximum Tournament arc, which is a fitting arc for a game to adapt for multiple reasons. Aside from the premise being obviously perfect for a fighting game, it’s also where I would say Baki really hits its stride and establishes what it wants to be going forward. This arc introduces a bunch of major players who become recurring characters throughout the story and gives them more interesting identities than just big guys for Baki to fight. Later arcs focus even more heavily on dramatic 1v1 battles with these members of the cast against new threats as well as the ways they train themselves outside of said battles, so much so that Baki sometimes barely shows up in a given season! The only real downside to it being all about this arc is that this was part of the original anime adaptation of the series. This doesn’t matter if you read the series, but if you prefer to watch it, you’re gonna have to dig around for it since it’s not on Netflix nor did it ever get anything beyond a DVD release. Really seems like something the fine folks at Discotek Media should re-release if they can! Anyway, all of the essential characters are here, including Chinese martial artist Retsu Kaiou, both Doppo and Katsumi Orochi, Kaoru Hanayama, the unassuming but defensively nigh-impenetrable Gouki Shibukawa, the Shinogi brothers, and Jack Hanma, Baki’s brother from another mother who chows down on performance enhancing drugs like they’re candy. They even made room for Kanji Igari and Mount Toba, who I would say are the least interesting characters of the arc and the only ones that come off as remotely grounded. There are two secret characters too, Yujiro Hanma (it’d be a big mistake to not have him in here somewhere!) and Yashazaru Jr., the child of the giant ape Baki fought early on in the series. All of these words probably don’t mean much to the uninitiated, but if you want the short of it, the roster picks are spot on considering that the game is based on an early arc before things really get turned up a notch, so that’s certainly a good thing!

The mechanics, at first glance, or rather, at first tap, come off as simple and straightforward. You’ve got your punch and kick buttons as well as a “special attack” button that’s different for everyone, though it usually translates to a heavy attack of some kind. Where the surprises start coming in are when you hit that last face button, which is a “perfect block” button. Fighting Fury uses back to block by default, but not every attack can be blocked normally, which is where the perfect block comes into play. It’s not the only game to have two block buttons, but it’s still something I think is an interesting, perhaps even underutilized idea. Things get even spicier from there because should you manage to nail a perfect block, you can do a command for a counter attack, and if you perfectly time a perfect block, you can do a different command to do what this guide by Gamefaqs user Salman calls a “Golden Counter”. Since the AI in this isn’t terribly difficult, I admittedly made little use of these parrying mechanics, but I really like what they represent. Witness the fights in the Baki series long enough and you begin to realize that offense isn’t everything. Sure, that’s how you close out matches, but to get to that point, you need to wait for the right opportunity and learn how to manage your opponent’s offensive pressure. Baki might be the protagonist, but he takes a ton of beatings to reach the heights that he does! I imagine when this game is played by two high level players, perfect blocking is something that changes the tide of battle. I’ll go into more detail, but offense in this game can get pretty wild, so having a way to create ebbs and flows in a match like the anime is something that’s both fitting and important for balance. Just like in the source material, all it takes is one predicted move, one proper countermeasure to swing the match in a different direction, and these mechanics make me dream of a world where I chase glory and recreate one of Baki’s many triumphs as I figure out my opponent right as I’m on the verge of defeat. The crowd’s watching, and as soon as they see those tables turn, they go absolutely rabid! A guy can dream, right?

Now THIS is footsies!

Hits in the series often carry tremendous impact. Blood shoots out everywhere, bones break, agonizing screams reach the arena walls, characters start seeing lengthy flashbacks in their head, it’s usually serious business whenever someone gets hit! That should be obvious when you look at any of these guys, but it bears repeating. When a character is on a roll in the anime, it’s usually depicted through a fast and furious assault that leaves the opponent unable to react and at the aggressor’s mercy. These beatdowns are so severe that you start to feel bad for the victim, even if you know they’ll be fine afterwards. Fighting Fury recreates that energy through its combo mechanics and I actually think it does a great job of capturing that Baki magic. Through a combination of juicy sound design, high damage output, and sufficiently smooth animation, every hit in this game feels pretty dang good! Hits have that nice crunch to them and the combo system is intuitive enough that you can naturally figure out 2-3 hit combos to start, at a minimum. Regular hits can go into command normals, which then lead into special moves and supers. It’s apparently a lot like Rival Schools, at least according to multiple descriptions I found, but since I haven’t played that in ages (a personal failing, I know!), The King of Fighters was my immediate point of comparison for this. Combos are fun normally, but what really makes this game’s offense so fun is how dangerous and game-changing the corner is. Seriously, this is not a game where you want to be cornered!

Even moreso than usual in fighting games, the wall is a death sentence

The corner is a devastating thing in fighting games normally because it limits the amount of space you have and puts you in a position where it’s easier for the opponent to predict your next move. You want to get out, obviously, and there are (usually) only two ways to do that, which are jumping over your opponent or hitting/throwing them to force them backwards and give yourself space. A smart player will bide their time, blocking and waiting for an opportunity to escape, but everybody inevitably has games where they just make bad calls, get stuck there, and are subsequently trounced upon. It’s humbling, even befuddling, but that’s fighting games, baby! Fighting Fury is bold enough to ask a question I’m not sure everybody will like the answer to: “what if the corner was even worse for the victim?” Well, the answer is that it’s really bad for the victim, sure, but also that it’s extremely fun! If you’re the type who thinks fighting games are all about “honorable footsies” and not about repeatedly doing the dirtiest thing you can think of to make your opponent question their life choices, this is gonna be where you tap out!

This is how every fight goes in the single player once you figure out a reliable way to get them on the wall

You see, certain attacks will send a character flying, and if they hit a wall, they’ll splat against the wall and hang out for several seconds before falling to the ground. During this time, the splattee is completely at the mercy of the splatterer, who can combo them with impunity. It’s only a brief moment, but if you’re the victim, it’s going to feel like an eternity as you kiss goodbye to most of your current health bar! Rather than rounds, matches here end once a player’s health bar is drained, but they get two of them to compensate. Considering that wall splat combos can easily take off almost all of a health bar if not an entire one, this is not as much health as it sounds! Even if you’re new to the game and haven’t optimized your combos, you’ll still get a ton of mileage out of this mechanic because of how lenient in general it is. Some characters like Retsu and Shibukawa have thrusting moves that are guaranteed to wall splat from any distance, which makes practicing and implementing these combos easy even if you’re new to the genre, and thanks to a nice little double tap input that cancels the ending frames of your launcher, you can instantly dash across the entire screen after a successful splat to start your wall combo no matter where you land that launcher. Pretty funny how this game essentially combined Street Fighter 6’s Drive Rush cancels with Guilty Gear Strive’s wall splat combos (without the wall breaks) over a decade before either of those games existed, eh? I’m not gonna dare to claim either game was influenced by this, but it’s always fascinating to see forgotten games stumble upon good ideas before bigger ones use their inherent positions in the zeitgeist to get the credit for ’em whether they mean to or not. It ain’t easy being an obscure, seemingly low budget fighter that wasn’t released in the US!

Here’s a fun fact: if a player gets knocked out with 3 full bars of meter, they can actually revive themselves for a short amount of time using a specific button combo and attempt a comeback with rapidly draining health. A neat idea that’s absolutely fitting when you witness how resilient these characters are!

To me, this wall splatting mechanic is the crown jewel of Fighting Fury, the thing that makes it stand out and also makes me think it could be a wonderful side event at Combo Breaker or something. Because of the existence of this single mechanic, the neutral game is an absolutely terrifying prospect because both players know that one mistake is going to be devastating. Marvel vs Capcom and Hokuto no Ken are super exciting to watch because everybody knows this fact going in, spectators and players alike. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are touch of death combos in this game, and if there are, that’s fine; it just adds yet another thing for both players to be afraid of and another reason to master the perfect blocking system. It’s not “balanced” in the conventional sense, but sometimes, the layman’s idea of balance is worth throwing out the window if it makes for a dang good show. The world of Baki is not always home to fighters of equivalent strength. The series has plenty of fights where a character gets absolutely crushed by the competition and a character you once thought was a beast is instantly proven to be out of their depth. Capturing this essence, that the road to strength is never ending, is yet another way Baki and its themes feel so in tune with fighting games and the culture surrounding them.

There are a variety of dialogue exchanges between the combatants, some of which are exclusive to specific pairing and bring different art with them as well

When it comes to solo modes, you’ve got the typical arcade mode, which serves its purpose and does give each character an ending, as minimal as they may be, but the other mode is far more interesting. Dubbed “Underground Arena mode”, this mode is the one that retells the Maximum Tournament arc’s narrative as you’d expect. “Retells” is an incredibly generous way of putting it since there are only two cutscenes and they’re both of tournament host Mitsunari Tokugawa introducing the tournament/final match, but the mode does at least require you to play as Baki, so it cares about accuracy to that degree. It also requires you to finish the mode without continues, which, while uncharacteristically harsh for a fighting game single player mode, does capture the stakes of the source material. Baki had to win the tournament without losing once, so why shouldn’t you? Functionally, this mode is exactly the same as the arcade mode, but what makes it different is that you’re forced to use “Edit Baki” specifically. By no means was that the most elegant name for them to use for this, but I promise that their choice makes sense. Fighting Fury is just like Deadly Arts in that there’s an entire mode dedicated to learning the moves of other characters and combining them to create your dream character. In this case, you fight against any other character to learn their moves for use on Baki. Every time you beat an opponent, you get the first move on their command list, starting with throws, and can work your way down to their super moves. While this mode lacks some of the in-between charm of Deadly Arts’ take on the idea, it compensates with consistency and a shorter grind. Every fight you win is guaranteed to get Baki a new move and you always know which one you’re getting next, which takes the guesswork out of things. You also don’t have to sacrifice any moves to learn new ones, so you can swap them out as you please. Matches in Fighting Fury are very short, especially once you have a wall splat combo down, which makes the overall system easy to grind out to some podcasts or whatever. The game is easy enough to finish that you don’t have to spend much time at all (if any) on this mode if you don’t want to, but since Edit Baki is usable in any mode, doing so has its benefits if you’re sticking around.

Here’s another fun fact: you can’t actually knock Yujiro out in the literal sense. When he loses, he just gets right back up, says something, and then the game moves on as if it was a KO! Between this and the really good chant-heavy music that plays when you fight him, they did a great job depicting him as the monster he is!

Here’s an interesting aside for ya; as I mentioned, there are two unlockable characters, but their unlock conditions seem to vary depending on the version of the game you’re playing. According to the cheats section of GameFaqs, in the Japanese version, Yashazaru Jr requires you to beat arcade mode with every character and Yujiro simply requires winning Underground Arena mode with Edit Baki. This seems to have changed in the PAL release, which supposedly only requires you to beat the Underground Arena once to get both characters. This was only partially the case for me! Yashazaru Jr unlocked without a hitch after I finished it for the first time, but Yujiro didn’t. According to the information I could find that wasn’t just copied from Gamefaqs, what’s supposed to happen is that Yujiro will challenge you at the end after you beat Jack Hanma if you satisfy specific conditions and beating him then will unlock him for use. The problem is, nobody seems to know what exactly those conditions are! I tried everything I could think of; I beat the game on Normal, I beat it on Easy, I beat it with the default Edit Baki, I beat it with an Edit Baki that had new moves in every slot, I beat it on the 50hz mode, I beat it on the 60hz mode, I beat it after intentionally getting my health down low during the Jack Hanma fight, I beat it so many times without unlocking him that I lost count! The closest thing I could find to an answer was on the website Retroachivements, where a few users experimented and concluded that the condition has something to do with getting perfect victories on your way to the final battle. I definitely got some perfects during my many runs, so that didn’t work for me, but maybe the answer really is just more perfects than that. Regardless, the reason I bring this up is to let you know that you can find a save with Yujiro unlocked on Gamefaqs from this board post and save yourself the trouble, so, uh, just do that if you decide to give this one a spin!

Edit Baki is actually an excellent way of capturing something specific about the source material. You see, Baki is an unusual guy who tends to learn lessons in unusual ways. These methods often involve observing an opponent, copying their mannerisms or trying to live in similar environments, or using his aforementioned shadowboxing abilities to imagine what it would be like to fight them and get a feel for their power level, even if doing so causes tremors that are felt across the entire city. While the modes in this game can’t possibly hope to capture all the fun and nuance that comes with those moments, the fact it captures the learning process at all is something that I think is a huge boon in its favor. Even though I didn’t have to train with the other characters to beat the game, doing so and using the moves I learned to win my fights was such a rewarding feeling. Watching myself go from figuring out what the buttons do to discovering wall splat combos that could remove entire health bars was a level of satisfaction that I’ve been chasing from other fighting to little avail. It was like I channeled the spirit of Baki, the author, and fighting games as a whole into my actions and play. I did my time, took my punches like a champ, and used everything I learned to prove to the world that I have what it takes. I came in knowing nothing and left with a greater understanding and appreciation of the Baki experience. Wouldn’t it be nice if all licensed games made us feel that way?

The ideals of the fighting game genre don’t require tons of money, ridiculously flashy graphics, or a bunch of modes and DLC in order to be experienced. All you really need to experience the fun of the genre is to find a game you like and play it! The growth you’ll experience, that learning process is something that can be really enjoyable if you’re the kind of person who prefers your skill level to grow organically and not when something tells you it has. Many people have and will dismiss Fighting Fury for being a janky looking, low budget game, but if you’re the curious type who likes to explore interesting fighting games that haven’t been figured out in their entirety, then I can easily recommend adding this one to your repertoire. It’s easy to get into, which allows you to get to the fun parts where you splat your opponent against the wall and blow them up for daring to press a button in no time flat. Even though you can get through the single player modes with minimal effort, there are a lot of unmentioned mechanics and nuances that allow for a solid degree of combo expression. As a fighting game, I seriously think this one would be great for a Combo Breaker side event! As a Baki game, I think Fighting Fury is a lot more successful than people give it credit for. Its mechanics tie into the way characters learn and interact in the source material, it successfully brings in all of the relevant characters of this particular arc and gives them varied movesets that showcase their chosen martial arts, it encourages you to put in the time to train and learn how each character fights, and it ensures that every single fight is full of brutally satisfying, crunchy, chunky, and juicy hits. Heck, it even has some nice looking manga-style art on its menus and loading screens! Baki fans don’t have many options when it comes to games that capture the appeal of the series, so if you count yourself among them, you should definitely check this one out.

The alternatives certainly aren’t slouches, though. Not only is Garouden Breakblow a super cool game based on a manga that had an adaptation written by Baki creator Keisuke Itagaki (it’s even better than Fighting Fury, if I’m being honest!), it actually has Yujiro Hanma in it too! Unlocking him doesn’t seem like an easy task, but it’s surely worth doing so. Arm Joe, the Les Miserables fighting game (yes, that’s apparently a thing) has a character called “Judgement” who’s pretty clearly supposed to be Yujiro Hanma, making it an honorary Baki game as well. I’m not a Les Miserables superfan by any means, but I’m pretty sure that’s not accurate to the source material! Don’t you worry – Arm Joe is officially on my list and all but guaranteed to show up here someday! Until then, do yourself a favor and check out some Baki, it’s what the kids call “kino”. Once you do that, consider giving ol’ Fighting Fury here a shot!

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