58. Mighty Final Fight (Capcom, Famicom, 1993)

Mighty Final Fight is a beat-'em-up spinoff of Capcom's 1989 hit Final Fight, released late in the Famicom / NES's life. Coming out only a month before Final Fight 2 launched on the Super Famicom, Mighty Final Fight plays to the 8-bit system's strengths (or rather weaknesses), by using smaller chibi-style sprites. As a late-release Famicom game by Capcom, the game looks quite good, as one would expect. There are some decent colors and character sprites are nicely expressive.

Even with some clever use of the 2-button control scheme, though, the gameplay leaves a bit to be desired. You have a jump button and an attack button, and pressing both simultaneously allows to to execute a health-draining special move, which I've never particularly been a fan of, since in most belt scroller games health is much more precious of a resource than any damage you can do.

The attack button also gives you a standard combo, as well as a jump kick if you use it in the air. Abusing the jump kick is a viable strategy for most enemies, as is common in these games. I played as Haggar, (my go-to choice for any game he's featured in), and he did have some powerful and fun to use grappling moves.

Mighty Final Fight has a progression system similar to Double Dragon: After being a certain number of enemies, you eventually gain access to a new move, which is used by hitting attack and then quickly following it up with a left or right on the d-pad. While this move was fairly fun to use (and I'm always a proponent of cramming more moves into a 2-button control scheme), the fact that your progression is limited to one special attack makes the game feel a little emptier than Double Dragon. Bosses also are generally very difficult until you learn their patterns, though even with knowing what they were going to do and with the use of save states, I still had some trouble. It was cool that you can smack talk the first boss to reduce his health, I'm all about touches like that.

3/5, it sure is Final Fight on the Famicom