Kizuna Encounter: Tag Battle

 It's back to the Neo Geo this week, I've been in a fighting game mood and it's quickly become the first console I turn to when that happens. 

I've always found it weird how often I remember some of these games I come across from when I was a kid. Don't get me wrong, I had never played Kizuna Encounter: Tag Battle, or its predecessor Savage Reign, in my life before I did it for this post. But from the second I booted it up, everything about it seemed so familiar. I guess that happens a lot with fighting games, they almost always feel some level of familiar to Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. I guess in the SNK universe, it's Fatal Fury that many of these fighters feel similar to. But that wasn't really the case with KETB. It took me a while, but I finally realized where I had seen this game before.

I've said this before, in fact I dedicated an entire post and podcast episode to it, but I was a huge connoisseur of video game magazines when I was a kid. Honestly, most gamers were, there was no internet back then and most of us relied on magazines and players guides to let us know which games were good and how to get good at them. I loved games and I loved reading, so I read every publication I could get my grubby little hands on. Nintendo Power, GamePro, EGM, you name it and I read it. It was also fairly common at the time for gaming mags to publish supplementary editions or extra editions or whatever you might call them that focused on either specific genres or aspects of the industry. One of those supplements that was always required reading for me was EGMs annual "Ultimate Guide to Fighting Games." I looked forward to these things every year, almost as much for the insight into the games I didn't have. Of course, the focus of these would be the big-name fighting games, your Killer Instincts and Street Fighter Alphas and MK 3s and whatever other big name games were coming out at the time. But they would also dedicate a page or two to some of the more obscure fighting games of the time (and believe me, there were a lot of them). I don't know why a one-page entry on a game I had never played before, from a magazine I read almost 30 years ago is still lodged in my memory, but that was the first time I had heard of KETB. All these years later, I finally got a chance to play it.

I really wish I could say KETB was as memorable to play as those screen shots made it seem all those years ago. Unfortunately, while it wasn't bad by any stretch of the imagination, KETB felt like just another 90's fighting game. It didn't have anything particularly wrong with it, it just didn't do anything to stand out, especially on a console whose library consists almost entirely of really good fighting games. It had the excellent graphics, pristine animation and excellent soundtracks that I'm finding most Neo Geo games have. It had solid controls that required fairly precise inputs but were very responsive. It had some interesting characters with fun move sets and all the crazy, hard to pull off super moves that SNK loves to include in their games. It came together well, but it just all felt very formulaic, especially for a title released in 1996. The Neo Geo had already seen several Fatal Fury, Samurai Showdown and King of Fighters games by this point in its life cycle. The 5th generation was in full swing and the console no longer held the massive hardware advantage it did over the competition, as the PlayStation and Saturn were starting to turn out close to perfect arcade ports. I don't think those consoles could quite match the Neo Geo's arcade precision, but they got a lot closer than the SNES or Genesis.

Of course, KESTB is still a well-made game that offered some fun combat and even a little bit of story. We pick up one year after the events of Savage Reign, where the mighty King Leo is still fuming from his defeat in the Battle of the Beast God Tournament at the hands of Sho Hayato. He wants another shot at Hayato, so he decides to host a new iteration of the tournament with a twist. This time, the fighters must compete in pairs. Hayato, along with the other competitors of the previous tournament, are unphased by this and all jump at the chance to hop in the ring again. And...that's really it. Fighting games don't really need to have great stories, although I guess it's nice they tried to include something here. You select from one of ten fighters, including the defending champion Hayato, the claw wielding ninjas Gozu and Mezu, the portly police officer Gordon and the All-American Max Eagle. There are definitely some interesting designs here, some of my favorites include Chung Paifu, an old man that dresses like a teenager, and Kim Sue, a bo staff wielding detective that can put together some crazy combos. I'm not a fan of the fighters not having unique stages, but the few they do have are all pretty nicely done.

If you've played a Neo Geo fighting game, then the controls here will be right at home. You have a light attack, heavy attack and slash attack, as well as a button for tagging out. This is probably the most unique aspect of KESTB, as two on two fighters weren't especially common at the time. As you might have gleaned from the name, you choose two fighters to team up, with one fighting and the other staying in the background. Each team will have their own tag zone and pressing the tag button while standing in this zone will allow you to switch characters. There are no assists or double team attacks, though you can occasionally set some things up by tagging at the right time. However, tagging becomes critically important because if either of your fighters are defeated, you lose the round. This kind of impacts the way you want to play, as both fighters really want to control neutral space to ensure they can tag out whenever they need. Getting backed into a corner is bad in most fighting games, but it's absolutely certain death here. Cutting your opponent off from the tag zone is the best way to victory and I will say it's kind of fun to do. I almost wish the tag zones were smaller, though I understand this would lead to some issues and make certain strategies impossible. I think it's a little difficult to get out of the corner, it feels almost impossible for some characters, but it kind of should be. Of course, KESTB has desperation attacks that require insane inputs to execute, it's an SNK fighter after all, but I was never able to successfully pull any of these off.

I do like the variety in how the characters play. Each character has a very unique skill set and they all feel very different to play. Most are hybrid characters, they have both rotation and charge moves, but all of their moves are very different in practice. There aren't a lot of really effective projectiles, which is a fairly big difference from what you would have seen at the time. Again, controlling distance is key and most characters have effective tools to either get in or keep opponents away. Combos are very important; they aren't very long or drawn out but a good four or five hit combo will drain quite a bit of health from your opponent. I will say that most of the technical stuff is done well, moves are responsive, hit detection makes sense, there isn't a whole lot of cheapness or unfair attacks, a lot of the stuff that makes these games frustrating isn't here. The final boss is a little unfair, but that was par for the course for 90's tournament fighters.

I feel like I'm going to wrap it up here because there honestly isn't that much to say here. KESTB felt like so many other fighting games of the era and didn't really differentiate itself from some of the better titles. It also didn't stoop to the level of many of the truly horrible fighters that were being pumped out at the time. A lot of games just feel lazy, or like they were created with a lack of effort and that wasn't the case here. KESTB is a well-made fighting game with great graphics, responsive control and excellent sound. But there also wasn't that effort to go the extra mile that it felt like a lot of fighting games, especially Neo Geo fighting games, were well known for. Believe me, you can do a lot worse than KESTB. But I can't say I would recommend it over most of the more popular fighting games that it competed with.

7/10