227. Fighting Road (Toei Animation, Famicom, 1988)

Fighting Road is a kind of 1-player fighting game where you have to fight a series of opponents in 2-round battles. Unlike modern fighting games, you have to beat the opponents 2 times to move on, but losing once will send you back to the title screen. Thankfully there is a password system, so progress is not really lost. 

While the actual fighting gameplay in Fighting Road is pretty basic, as we would expect from a publisher who mostly made anime tie-in games, there are actually a fair number of mechanics that other fighting games wouldn't pick up for a while. The first is a super jump that you can activate by pressing down before you press up to jump. The first time I remember seeing this was in Marvel vs. Capcom, but I think this may be one of the earliest instances of a super jump in a fighting game. Another feature that feels ahead of tis time is the super meter. As you take damage from enemy attacks, a blue meter fills up under your health bar, and once it passes a certain point it starts flashing, meaning your special attack can be used. 

Unfortunately, some forward thinking features don't stop Fighting Road from being a generally bland, difficult, tedious game. While it boasts a decent number of moves requiring special inputs, most of these are jumps or attacks that do the same amount of damage as your standard straight punch/kick. So the most reliable method of defeating an enemy is just hitting them, waiting for and dodging a counter attack, then hitting them again, which would be fine if the enemies had maybe a third of their massive health bars. But each battle becomes a war of concentration, as it's not that the moves are difficult to execute, it's that the repetition is so boring. 

Controlling your character also just doesn't feel great. I also was never able to activate my special fireball move, even after looking up the input and attempting it a good 30 times. Sometimes hitting the same button seems to initiate a combo with different animation, and sometimes it doesn't. Really my biggest disappointment with Fighting Road is the lack of a 2-player mode, which really robs the game of any longevity it might have had. 

2/5, a 1-player fighting game with some early neat ideas but awful execution