OK so the game I am going to be talking about today is called Hiryu no Ken S: Golden Fighter and it is the first game in a series of games often refereed to as either the Hiryu no Ken or Flying Dragon series to be released on the Super Nintendo. I guess your probably imagining that given the fact this game is on the Super Nintendo that the S stands for Super? Well actually I will put you out of your misery with a little bit of trivia here and tell you that the S in the title actually stands for Special.
The Flying Dragon series started in 1985 with an arcade fighting game called Shanghai Kid, when I say fighting game this might put images of Street Fighter 2 in to your head but this game actually predated the original Street Fighter by around 2 years. Flying Dragon Secret of the Scroll is the sequel to this arcade game and it was on the NES. The NES game was less of a one on one fighter and more of a sort of walk along fighting platformer. After the first NES game there were about 4 more NES games and then a GameBoy game (which was a one on one fighter again) and then this which as I said earlier is the first gamer from this series on the SNES. So basically this is the first SNES game in a massive series, a series which most likely hardly anyone in the UK has even heard of after all this game never came out here and the only one of the series up to this point which made it over here was the GameBoy game which was called Fighting Simulator: 2-in-1: Flying Warriors which is a heck of a mouthful, and in all honesty I had never even heard of it until doing research for this review (Until now my only experience of this series was playing the N64 game). This game I am reviewing didn't make it out over here it did make it out in America two years latter with the name Ultimate Fighter. OK so that's enough of a history lesson lets get onto talking about the game itself.
So I guess the first question to answer is well what kind of game is it? Given the fact that the series seems to have swapped its play style around from game to game it leaves you wondering what type of game this will be, well I think its probably best described as a Walk along beat em up. Unlike games like Final Fight or Streets of Rage you can only move forwards and backwards you cant move up and down, so its a walk along beat em up which is on a fixed level much like one on one fighters like the aforementioned street fighter. This in itself is a little bit strange as you cant really avoid enemies and they cant try to flank you like they would in other games, they will be coming at you either from the left or the right and that's it.OK this is not the only game to work like that in fact if your a MegaDrive/Genesis gamer and have played either Altered Beast or Last Battle then yeah its sort of like those. You would think that this would have its advantages that maybe if the SNES's processor only has to think about one plain then its got less grunt work to do but when you play this game you will soon find that it is well the best word I can come up for it is janky. the game moves quiet slow, suffers from a sort of stuttering slowdown at times and just feels like its always in a low gear. There is no choice of fighter your simply the bloke it gives you, there is a punch button, a kick button and this sort of flip forward button and you jump by pressing up, some of the kicks and punches you can do also involve pressing up or down so although it feels like there is a decent range of moves but that there not quiet as easy to use as they could be.
OK so what do I actually like about this game? Well it does have nice big sprites which I think gives the game a good look, there is also quiet a few different enemy sprites which should help keep the game from getting repetitive but unfortunately it doesn't. The games levels just seem to be really long and slow. The game also has pretty decent music and effects. To me this game just feels like a giant vat of missed opportunity. When you are playing it you just get this overwhelming sense that there is a nugget of goodness in there somewhere, that if they had just tweaked a few things here and there increased the speed and made a few alterations that they could have had something worthwhile here but alas I am not here to review what could have been I am here to review what was and is.
I would give this game 3 out of 10, I think if you picked this up and played it then for the first 10 minutes you would think hey this game is not bad at all and think I was being harsh but if you gave it another 10 minutes you would start to see why I feel the way that I do. If you really wanted to own this then Japanese versions pop up on eBay from time to time cart only between £5 to £10 but I have never seen the altered American version being sold here, if your willing to import it from America then it seems to go for around £25 to £30 after postage but it is in no way worth anything near this. I strongly recommend that you ignore this game.
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