The Good
Final Fight is a classic arcade game in the beat 'em up genre.
It is not terrible complicated story and, it certainly doesn't waste time with ethics or philosophy. It is just you (and a friend) wandering through several urban locations, circa 1989, in order to beat the you-know-what out a dangerous criminals.
Simple? Yes, but still a heck of a lot of fun to play, especially if you are old enough to remember when the premiered at your local video arcade.
Several efforts were made to port the arcade game to the home console systems throughout the 1990s. In some ways the Sega CD edition is the best of the bunch.
Final Fight CD features all of the arcade's playable characters, and allows up to two people to place at the same time. Other cartridge editions of Final Fight had to eliminate some of the playable characters and only allowed for one player.
Final Fight CD also features some cool music, as well as the all of the arcade levels and bonus rounds. It is nice to see such some of the Sega CD's hardware potential being used.
The Bad
Final Fight CD does take a noticeable hit in the graphics department, as the designers had to work with the Sega CD's embarrassingly weak on-screen color and pallet capacities.
Like the Sega Genesis, the "Next Level" Sega CD hardware was limited to 64 colors on screen out of a pallet of 512. This was at a time in the industry, when must computers and even most cartridge and CD-ROM based game systems had better capabilities.
What does this mean for this game?
Basically, Final Fight CD cannot be a perfect port in terms of the graphics, and, arguably, has trouble matching the SNES (capable of 256 colors on screen from a pallet of over 32,000) of Final Fight in this respect.
Sega allowed the Sega CD port of Final Fight to retain the female (technicaly, they are transsexuals) enemies from the original arcade games, albeit with less provocative clothing. Although certain character names (I.e. "Sodom") were still modified.
Frankly, the censorship seems a bit silly, although I can appreciate why such changes were made, especially when this was before the ERSB was created in to rate games (in the U.S. and Canada) for possibly offensive, objectionable or questionable content.
I suppose the biggest complaint, aside from the censorship or hardware limitations, is that the genre that Final Fight helped to build, had since moved on.
None of the playable characters have nearly as many possible offensive and defensive moves as, say Streets Of Rage 2.
The Bottom Line
Final Fight CD is a solid port of the arcade game, with all of the playable characters, bonus leaves and ability to play the game without th a friend. It shows its age, as well as the hardware foilables of the Sega CD, but fans of beat 'em ups will still want to give this one a spin.
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