Last Battle
System: Genesis
Release Date: August 14, 1989
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
Genre: Beat ‘em Up
We’ve got our third Fist of the North Star game today with Last Battle on Sega Genesis. Of course, the Fist of the North Star license is nowhere to be found and the blood and gore of the Japanese version has been removed to make things more palatable. You are Aarzak and it’s up to you to be a hero and save the world. The entire story of the game is shown to you in the opening scroll, with roughly each paragraph equating to one of the four chapters in the game.
Last Battle is a side scrolling beat ‘em up, just like Black Belt and Fist of the North Star. The A Button throws a punch. The B Button throws a high kick. The C Button jumps, where you can throw a punch or a kick. As you fight enemies in normal stages, you gain energy. When you gain enough to cross the white blip, Aarzak powers up and begins throwing rapid fire punches and kicks. You’d think this would be awesome, but a lot of times, it isn’t. You might need a high kick, but it takes a second to kick up high and you take a hit. In general, kicks were pretty useless to me, but powered up jump kicks were a necessity.
The first problem you run into is the hit boxes of the enemies and yourself. You can throw a strike, it seemingly connects, but nothing happens. This is frustrating because it inevitably leads to taking damage. And when you get stuck between two enemies getting ping ponged, you’ll roar in frustration. You don’t want to take damage, because it’s difficult to gain your health back. You can gain some back in labyrinth levels by defeating enemy soldiers in small rooms before time runs out. The labyrinths add in some vertical exploration and platforming, but they move slowly, until you realize you can jump and immediately change direction to gain speed. Finding an NPC at the end of these levels usually top off your health, which makes the rooms of soldiers superfluous.
You can choose which level to move to on the overworld map and you want to hit them all to maximize your attributes. Many levels end with a visit with an NPC who gives you one line of dialogue which was either poorly translated or written terribly in the first place. Meeting the NPCs can unlock levels and rarely an extra path. A third type of stage is a boss battle. These one on one fights require you to land a lot of hits while avoiding attacks. This is where the hit detection becomes infuriating. Your attacks go right through them sometimes and they hit you with no trouble. Once you fight them enough to figure out their attacks, you can bumble into a victory.
The biggest problem of Last Battle is that you only get one life and there are no continues. If you die, it’s back to the beginning. Levels, other than labyrinths, aren’t particularly long, but the boss battles can quickly kill you if you’re not perfect. Despite having this game since the end of 1989, I’d never beaten it before. After trying legitimately, I finally gave in to using save states at the beginning of each chapter, then I gave in to rewinding in order to see the ending after 30+ years. I wasn’t missing much.
Graphics: 2.5
The graphics are the best part of this game, even if they removed (almost) all of the head exploding from the Japanese version.
Sound: 2.0
The music is generally fine. I even like some of the tunes, despite their generic sounds.
Gameplay: 1.0
This is a big knock to the title. Gameplay is basically broken. Hit detection is awful and Aarzak moves at a snail’s pace.
Difficulty: 0.5
The game is short, but is artificially lengthened by only offering one life. The broken gameplay is what makes Last Battle so difficult.
Fun Factor: 1.0
I was happy for the first 15 minutes, and then I fell into the pattern of continuing on out of spite.
Overall Grade: 1.4
Last Battle earns a D+. It looks and sounds decent, but it plays like a tub of hot garbage. I was disappointed playing it.