 S-n-n-s-drunk. A couple weeks ago I looked at a crappy licensed game, The Page Master. Now let's take a look at a better licensed game that was never released outside of Japan. Natsuki Crisis Battle, a one-on-one fighting game based on a manga and later made into an anime. This one was made in April 1995 by Tosei, who also had a hand in making games like Super Tennis, Bazooka Blitzkrieg, and the Dragon Ball Z fighting games. As you might expect, this game follows the typical Street Fighter 2 style formula with a story mode that has you fighting every other character in sequence, plus a two-player versus mode, a practice mode, and an edit mode I'll get into a bit later. There's quite a bit of story here, but there's no English patch available for this one, and it's not needed to play the game, but you'll have to fill in the blanks yourself, like how this guy creeps in on your main character, and it makes these girls in the background so upset that they can't stop sobbing, so you challenge Mr. Purple Pants here to a fight. After beating the crap out of him, some other girl starts shouting at you about how she actually liked that guy's purple pants or something. Then you celebrate your victories by going to a dance club and fighting a guy in purple shorts. There's ten fights in total in story mode, although you face the same opponent a couple different times, so there's really only eight fighters you have to defeat. In story mode, you can only play as one character, but in versus mode you can choose between any of the eight fighters available. The Y and B buttons are weak punch and weak kick, respectively, with X and A being strong punch and kick. The L and R buttons also attack and dodge, depending on which direction you're facing your opponent. One button will quickly move you backward to help you get out of trouble, and the other is just a standard, strong attack that will vary based on which character you're using. There's universal moves that work for every character, but there's also three or four special moves for each character, as well as counter attacks that are unique to each fighter. For example, if you combine that strong attack using the L or R button with a direction on the D pad, they'll execute something like a roll, or a flying chest attack, or whatever this is, like what this guy is doing here. The special attacks are laid out in a really simple way, again not that different from a game like Street Fighter II, just quarter rolls forward or back on the D pad along with a strong punch or strong kick. They even work in the dragon punch mechanic, which allows this dude to do a strong fire punch or something, and your main character does something that not so coincidentally looks exactly like a Hadoken Fireball. This is all well and good, these moves are all easy to execute early on, but once you run into some tougher fighters later in the game, you really start to feel how this game just doesn't measure up to better fighting games. The inputs are not quite as polished as some of the better 16-bit fighting games of the era, and you might find yourself tearing your hair out trying to get even the simplest moves to work consistently. I mean, I'm not asking for a simple licensed fighting game to be on the same standard as Street Fighter II, but from a control standpoint, Natsuke Crisis Fighter falls a little short of even titles like Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighters or any of the SNK ports like Fatal Fury or Art of Fighting, or even something like Fighter's History. Thankfully, one thing this game does well is enable you to take a more defensive approach to your fights by providing counter moves unique to each fighter. You can parry or guard against your opponent's special moves if your time your counter just right, and it's usually something as simple as back-forward kick or a half-roll on the D-pad plus an attack button. Some are kind of ridiculous to try, like where you have to hold a button down for five seconds and just hope you let go of the button at the exact right time, but I appreciate that for such a simple fighting game, it at least gives you a choice of fighting aggressively or defensively, or even a blend of both, so that's cool. Another nice thing this game has going for it is the edit feature, which allows you to edit the names of each character, as well as the effectiveness of each move. This unfortunately takes some trial and error to figure out, since there's not much English here to go by, but you can increase or decrease the thrust and destructive power of each move for each character. So if you want more destructive power out of this dude's purple pants, you can do that. Or are those lilac pants, or orchid, or amethyst? So yeah, it's clear that Natsuki Crisis Battle was made with one clear purpose in mind. It's just a decent fighting game made to represent its source material. I can't really speak to how well the game does that, since I'm not familiar with the manga or the anime, but the game certainly looks nice, and there's a good amount of story here for a fighting game. Unfortunately, this one doesn't feel polished enough to join the ranks of other great licensed fighting games like Gundam Wing Endless Dual. It can be a bit frustrating as you fight stronger opponents later in the game, like where it feels like your controller just isn't working. Still, I appreciate the effort that went into this one, and I still had fun going back and forth between countering my opponent's attacks before launching into a reckless offensive barrage. Once again, this game has never been released anywhere else, so this is another game you gotta play any way you can. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day!