 Alright, it's 1993, you convince your parents to drag you to Blockbuster or Hollywood Video or Video Update or whatever, and all you're looking for is a Super Nintendo game to tide you over for a while. Of course, Mega Man X has checked out, Contra 3 is gone, you're sick of all the other classics because you've rented them over and over. So you're left with this game. Come on, anyone familiar with Super Nintendo stuff has seen this cover before. In fact, I'm willing to bet a number of you clicked on this video, think to yourself, oh yeah, hey, it's that game. Oh, what is this game? Oh, it's a very basic, average, run-of-the-mill, one-on-one fighting game made by Jallico. And when I say average, I don't mean bad. This game is perfectly okay, with the sprites in particular standing out as exceptional, especially since they're reminiscent of characters and other Jallico games that were around at the time, stuff like Rival Turf and Brawl Brothers, otherwise known as the Rushing Beat series in Japan. And speaking of Japanese titles, this one in particular has a pretty funny one. It was originally released as Dead Dance. Huh, so does that make her Lisa Gerrard and this guy Brendon Perry? Oh wait, that's Dead Can Dance, my mistake. But yeah, let's take a cool title like Dead Dance and turn it into tough enough, complete with the super cool spelling and everything. Another funny thing about this game is all the goofy names they gave the characters. There's 11 different fighters here, and I mean, come on, these aren't names. These are sound effects from the 1966 Batman TV show, Volts, Dolph, Kays, Beans. The thing is, though, this game kind of has an annoying structure. You only have four playable characters to play through the game's three game modes. There's a versus second player, versus the CPU and story mode. Thankfully, there's codes that can unlock the other seven characters and make them playable to make this game slightly more interesting, but rest assured, there's just not a whole lot here to be interested in. If you've played most 16-bit fighting games, then you've played this one. Up is jump, back is block, Y and B are normal punch and kick respectively, while X and A are the stronger slower attacks. Each character has at least three special moves in their all-executed Street Fighter style. And I mean, I'm gonna be blunt here, this is as blatant a Street Fighter rip-off as you're gonna find, even more so than the World Heroes games. Let's see, we've got the Ryu and Ken characters who fight the same, with Saio and Zazai, even down to the fact that the Hadouken Fireball is executed the same way. There's also a dragon punch, but hey, give the game credit. This game makes you press back and then down and forward before a punch button. It doesn't end there either, there's also Katono, who has a projectile that's done the same way as Giles' Sonic Boom. You've got a guy that does Ihan does 100 hands slap, I mean it's pretty dang ridiculous. The thing is though, is that the gameplay is totally fine, everything is responsive, the fighting is well paced, the backgrounds look nice, the music is good, and hey, some of the boss characters are actually kinda interesting, like this dude who rides up a rocket before his fight and he tries to take you out with a bazooka, and the later bosses are pretty tough. Like this Kay's guy here, you really gotta be defensive here because he's aggressive as hell with his long ass arms. Ah, does that remind you of anyone? The front cover mentions each character having 20 different moves, including quote unquote exotic technique, which are upgradeable to four levels. Well, there's two guides and move lists on gamefacts, and they don't mention anything like that, and I wasn't able to figure out anything on my own either, but I also haven't seen a scan of the manual. So maybe there's something in there, but then again I wouldn't be surprised if they're seriously counting each punch and kick as a move, so that's four right there. If you know anything about this so-called exotic technique, let me know in the comments. There are a couple other things that stand out here, one is a replay feature so you can play back the end of your fight in slow motion, and the other is the time limit. The time goes by surprisingly fast for each fight, I don't remember getting this many time limit wins in any other fighting game, so uh, at least this game has that going for it, I guess? There's also a password system where the screen says, here lies the loser. Heh, I like a game that mocks players for using shortcuts, that's always funny. So yeah, I'm not entirely sure what else to say about this one. Tough enough is a pretty shameless Street Fighter ripoff, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, it's a perfectly functional game, it looks nice, the music is cool, and it's definitely a big step above crap like Rise of the Robots. This game is one of those cases where the publisher needed a silly cover and a silly name to stand out among the hordes of one-on-one fighting games, kind of like how Phalanx used this old guy to stand out from all the other shoot-'em-ups. So yeah, tough enough isn't bad, but you're definitely not missing anything if you skip this one. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.