 Let's go back in time to when young SNES Drunk was in junior high in the mid 90s. Now back then there were of course rental stores, and when you rented a game certain places gave you a black and white Xeroxed copy of the manual. I remember Mr. Movies and Video Update doing this, but other stores like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video would actually take the time to type out the primary controls of the game right there on the insert that went in the store branded game case. This was always a nice bonus because certain games like Act Razor or King Arthur's World weren't always all that intuitive, so I appreciated the extra help. That brings me to the time I rented Weapon Lord. The world was still enveloped in a one-on-one fighting game craze spearheaded by games like Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, and Killer Instinct, so I had to try this latest game since it was featured on the cover of Nintendo Power. That is high praise. So my mom drove me to Hollywood Video and I picked out the game, but it wasn't until I got home that I realized that the case was blank and that there was no instruction book. Huh, oh well, it's a fighting game. How complicated could it be? And that's where I was dead wrong. It turns out Weapon Lord is pretty different from most other fighting games of the time for better and for worse. The thing is, yes, there's typical Street Fighter style special moves here, but they're implemented in a weird way. Instead of doing something with the D-pad then pressing an attack button, you first press and hold an attack button and then do the D-pad input. It is surprisingly goofy to try and get used to this method, and I wouldn't say it offers any particular advantage over the traditional method, but hey, it may agree with your sensibilities, so it's worth trying out. Personally, I can't help but feel like the developers are trying something different for the sake of trying something different. But what really makes Weapon Lord shine, however, is all the different ways you can block, parry, and create opportunities for combinations. As you can see, this is a weapon-based fighter, but you can actually damage your opponent's weapon in battle if your timing is right. You just have to hold down both weak attack buttons and then hit a direction on the D-pad, like up if it's a high attack, down if low, forward if mid-range, and back if it's a special move. There's similar combinations like that that allow you to overpower your opponent's attack, cancel out their block, or even stagger your opponent for a second. It is really advanced stuff, especially for the time. It just takes a lot of practice to get used to. While there may only be seven characters to choose from, each has between 10 or 12 special moves, and there's finishers here as well, but again, those are handled differently, just like everything else in the game. If you really want to play this one, you have to pull up a move list from Game Facts and read up first, because otherwise, you're essentially just gonna end up mashing buttons cluelessly. Now, one thing I have to mention is the speed of the game. It plays slowly compared to its contemporaries, but there is a reason for that. The development of Weapon Lord was led by two folks, Dave Winstead and James Goddard, who previously worked for Capcom with the Street Fighter 2 series. They had ambitious plans for a new fighting game series, so they left Capcom for Namco to join up with a fellow named Ken Lobb, who helped work on Killer Instinct. And believe it or not, one of their main goals with Weapon Lord was to create a one-on-one fighting game optimized for a home console online multiplayer service called X-Band, so the reason the sprite animation appears so wonky and why the gameplay so slowly is on the count of properly timing parry animations and character turnaround time to accommodate for any lag. And yeah, I guess it did work, but I mean, I don't remember the X-Band exactly becoming a huge success, so I can't really speak personally to how this game performed online at the time. But still, that just goes to show the kind of scope they were reaching for with this game. Let's take a second to point out a couple of Weapon Lord's obvious strengths. The art direction here is pretty dang cool and definitely something different for both the genre and for the time. Like I said, there's seven different playable characters which were hand-drawn and they're huge and impressively detailed. However, yeah, the sprite animation is not the greatest. The backgrounds here were actually painted by a freelance artist and scanned, and combine that with the hand-drawn sprites and the result here is a game that is visually unlike any other 16-bit game. The music also stands out as something unique with each character having a theme that sounds like something from the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack. There's three game modes here, arcade versus and story, where a child is born during the eclipse which signals the return of a warrior that will defeat the evil Overlord. Hey wait a minute, did they steal this from Romantic Saga 3 or is it the other way around? Anyway, there is a password system here for the story mode to help you out and I should mention that this game is ridiculously, laughably, brutally difficult. You need to have your timing down perfectly if you want to progress through this one because otherwise you have no chance, even in the first couple fights. I should also mention that there is a Sega Genesis version of this game as well, but the differences are about what you would expect. The SNES version looks and sounds better while the Genesis version plays a bit faster and smoother. Anyway, yeah, Weapon Lord is the opposite of a pick-up-and-play game. It's a pick-up, be confused, dive a whole bunch of times, and then go to Game Facts and look up the move list kind of a game, so it's definitely not for everyone. I'll give this game all the credit for doing something different with the genre though. The special moves are kind of a pain and it just seems kind of like a silly gimmick, but the blocking and parrying here that sets up those special moves is seriously really cool and implemented very well. So, if you're a fighting game aficionado, I'd recommend checking this one out, but if you're just passing by and you want to try this one as a curiosity, get ready for a lot of frustration. And I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.