Description
Playthrough with Jo. Released in 1994, ADK decided to try something a bit different with this fighting game. It kind of combines a scrolling beat ‘em up with a one on one fighter, allowing you to move anywhere on the screen, pick up and use weapons and perform combos by mashing the A button.
And the results are not great. As usual, one thing that ruins the game is the difficulty, it’s simply too hard. The CPU tends to block everything, input read everything and always end up throwing you when you try to throw them. The controls for this game are also bad. I don’t know why ADK were so afraid of the D button, this game doesn’t use it when it could have been used to grab the opponent. Instead, you have to press the A and B buttons together. Another issue is that the game struggles to accept inputs for special moves, which gets incredibly frustrating with the CPU as hard as it is.
However there is a way to beat this: playing the waiting game. When a fight starts, back away from your opponent. Eventually they’ll do something you can punish, and that’s it -that’s the entire strat to beat the game. Jo has got a choice of three good punishers, his standard A, A, A, A punch combo, his HCF+A move or his QCB+B move. The latter is probably the worst one to use as it’s the only one that doesn’t knock the opponent down.
Each character has several life bars. Once you’ve got your opponent down to their last bar, if you have a full power gauge, you can perform a Gan Gan attack, which is guaranteed to defeat the opponent if it connects. You only have a limited time to use the move as the power gauge will deplete after a certain amount of time has passed.
For some reason ADK thought it was a good idea to make you do two loops of this game. What I mean is, when you beat the game once, it then restarts and you have to do it again. I’ve read the difficulty is increased on the second loop but I can’t tell, mainly because it’s already too hard on the first loop. If you manage to beat it again you get the same ending and credits as before, but with an extra congratulations message at the end. The idea anyone would willingly want to do two loops of this garbage is ludicrous. The arcade/MVS version didn’t make you do two loops, it was something specifically added for the AES and CD versions.
Unusually for a fighting game, character’s names aren’t shown on the character select screen. They aren’t shown under the life bars either. ADK were weird like that. Another oddity is that at the how to play screen, the USA version’s title -Aggressors of Dark Kombat -is displayed.