I know butt-fu
If you want to see what procrastination looks like, put 1998’s Fighter Maker in front of me. If you ever noticed me miss a week with these Kusoge articles, it’s probably because I planned to cover Fighter Maker that week and just couldn’t bring myself to play it. Never has a bad game asked me for so much commitment.
Blame The Industry’s Chris Moyse. It was his suggestion. Considering he’s the leading expert on all things fists, I trust him when he tells me a fighting game is going to be bad. And Fighter Maker is… Well, maybe not bad, but it’s extremely misguided.
Fighter Maker is part of the ASCII Entertainment “Maker” series. That kind of makes it sound like it covered a lot of genres, but really it was just rail shooter, fighting game, and RPG. The RPG Maker games had the most longevity, and we even got a bunch of them over here in the West. I even tinkered with RPG Maker 2000 on PC back in the day. It’s just funny that the fighting genre seems much simpler on the surface but is infinitely more difficult to do well.
Fist injection
I had big plans for Fighter Maker, and the moment I saw the creation system, I threw them all away. First of all, you can’t edit the look of the combatants. Secondly, my hopes for a butt-centric arsenal of attacks were dashed the moment I found out how much effort it takes to create a single move.
Backing up for a moment here, Fighter Maker is sort of a Virtua Fighter setup. It’s 3D, and you can move in and out of the background. It’s not a terrible-looking game. It also subscribes to Virtua Fighter’s more minimalistic control method. There are three attack buttons for high, mid, and low. That’s one more attack button than in Virtua Fighter. These can be partnered with the block button for grabs and fancier attacks.
If you just choose a fighter and try out the combat system, it’s a little shallow but not terrible. I’ve intentionally played enough bad fighting games to really appreciate when one isn’t horrifically bad. There’s a supreme dearth of personality, to say the least, but that’s where you come in.
The under you wear
The editing tools of Fighter Maker also fall into the category of “not bad.” However, note that this isn’t like the RPG Maker games, where you can go ham with the tools and come away with a top-to-bottom product that could be sold as a standalone. There’s a lot you can do here, but they’re very limited.
As I mentioned before, you can’t customize a fighter’s appearance. There’s a buffet of fight-people to choose from, but there’s no option to tweak the color of their costumes or the size of their nipples. This made me realize that there were other games on the N64 and PS1 that allowed you to make your own fighter. Does this mean that WWF: No Mercy is the best Fighter Maker of that era? Yes! By some metrics!
I think a more appropriate term for Fighter Maker would be “fighter animator,” as that’s essentially what this is. Everything your battle-person does can be defined by you in fine detail. Want their punch to be more of an open-hand slap? Totally possible. And I mean that, because there aren’t really any limits to what can be accomplished in the editor.
Sharing your butt-battler
It’s actually pretty intimidating. As I said, I had ambitions for a butt-centric fighting style, but I dialed it back for a few reasons. The biggest one is that I don’t see the point. Regardless of how much time I spend perfecting my fighter, they’re still going to be dropped into a middling fighter and then go nowhere else.
I have difficulty imagining the climate that would make Fighter Maker’s tools worthwhile. Maybe you’re someone who has a tight-knit group of friends who would spend a bunch of effort on a battle-artist and then bring their memory cards together for a tournament. That would be pretty cool. Today, this would be something that you’d upload to the internet like you would with custom wrestle-folks in WWE 2K23, but that wasn’t really an option for the PS1. So, you would need this very specific social group to make the hours you’d spend fine-tuning a creation pay off.
I don’t have that social group. I don’t really have A social group. So, I didn’t create a posterior pugilist. Instead, I created one (badly) bespoke victory animation and changed the block animation so my character just leaves themselves wide open. Then I edited the capoeira preset so my character’s arms just stay glued to their side.
It was honestly hilarious. My character, Captain Ketsu, would just kind of dance around while holding onto their butt. It looked like they were desperately trying to prevent a sudden and unwanted bowel torrent from erupting while also participating in a fight. I have to say that even though I put in the bare minimum of effort, I’m still quite proud of my accomplishment.
How much is weirdness worth?
That’s sort of another strength of Fighter Maker. It doesn’t put any barriers in front of expressing your weirdness. Well, I suppose aside from giving you any control over the visuals. You also can’t super-power your brawl-buddy. You aren’t able to pump up their spirit so they can throw fireballs. You’re very much stuck to just playing by some poorly defined rules.
And that’s what it all comes down to. How much is your weirdness worth? Do you actually want to spend your time tweaking the position of someone’s ankle and fine-tuning their frames of animation? I can’t answer that for you. For me, I’d rather just create another wrestler for my fictional promotion.
I suppose enough people were into Fighter Maker that it got a sequel. Fighter Maker 2 was released on PS2 in 2002, and it allegedly allows you to change the look of your fight-guy. I’ve actually seen it in the bin at my local kusoge dispensary, but I haven’t yet picked it up. Maybe I will, just for fun. I doubt I’ll actually put the effort into making a butt-boxer, but maybe I’ll spend the fifteen minutes required to desecrate the esteemed art of capoeira.
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