The Masters Fighter

Obviously too many 2D fighting games are undeservingly called knock offs by less than discerning individuals.

Well, I recently found out about a game that truly deserves that knock off title.


Most of the sprites appear to be directly ripped from multiple Neo Geo titles.

Sure, I understand that things were a little different for Korean arcade developers back then, but jeez, woof.

The strangest part of it all though, is that it received a Japanese playstation port in 1997 of all years.

I want to play it.

I like the character name "Long Way"

Nice find, it's pretty surprising that it received a PS1 port.

I like the name Mishell and the female Guile, J.

What an obscure little game. I'm surprised there wasn't any legal action over its Japanese release.

yours on eBay for the low low price of $65 + ship from Japan

lantus360 said:

yours on eBay for the low low price of $65 + ship from Japan

Click to expand...

Yeah, I was thinking about it.

I bet it'll go for $100 + next time I look.

Me making promotional threads for the game probably won't help the cause...

Can't tell if the game is truly ugly, or it's the video capture.

I was thinking this game would be $6.00 shipped, but i'm not surprised its 10x that.

I like how KO'd characters stand right back up and start kicking people again.

Nice find, I had never seen or heard about this one before.

Man, those sprite rips... looks like the crappiest Mugen job. So here I'm seeing Kang is Tung Fue Rue, Long Way is Dragon from World Heroes, Kain is Young Geese form AOF2 and Bill is Jack from AOF... also Mischell looks like Yuri. What about the others?

Blows my mind this could get away with a Jap PS1 release without a sue from SNK.

I'd love to play it!

[OCEAN] said:

Nice find, I had never seen or heard about this one before.

Man, those sprite rips... looks like the crappiest Mugen job. So here I'm seeing Kang is Tung Fue Rue, Long Way is Dragon from World Heroes, Kain is Young Geese form AOF2 and Bill is Jack from AOF... also Mischell looks like Yuri. What about the others?

Blows my mind this could get away with a Jap PS1 release without a sue from SNK.

I'd love to play it!

Click to expand...

Seriously, if there was ever a game worth going to court over...


Anyways it looks like Sakamoto is Jubei from Sam Sho. Azarl I can't tell. I think he's John Crawley, but it seems as if he has some of Eiji's animations too.

Takuya may be Fatal Fury Special Ryo with coat of Kim paint.

I recently picked this up for Playstation having never heard of it before even though I was heavily into importing 2D fighters at the time. As a fan of unlicensed trash I can definitely say I was floored they managed to actually get an official home release for this thing.

One thing that really stuck out to me was the Bill character that's based on Jack from AOF2. Bill is just Jack with a poorly drawn black beard and ponytail. The fucked up thing is that the artwork shows him as being completely bald with only the beard, and his character sprite has a bald head. However, he's got a ponytail. A flesh colored ponytail. It's the same color as his bald head skintone, which when I first picked him I thought it was maybe just a problem with the color scheme I chose... but it wasn't. Every color palette assigned to him has a flesh colored bald head along with a ponytail made of human skin. The more I'd see it the more it reminded me of that guy in Revenge of the Jedi in Jabba's lair.

On a similar note of Korean games blatantly stealing Neo Geo assets, there's a game from 2001 on the Pandora's Box 4 called SWAT. It's a cursor-driven Cabal clone shooter. All 10 of the stages in the game are made from backgrounds directly ripped from Neo Geo games. World Heroes 2, Burning Fight, Art of Fighting 2; the between-stage map is even a direct rip of Fatal Fury 3's map that still has Sound Beach and other locations listed on it. The human sprites look stupid enough to be original but it has a lot of robot/mech enemies along with some flying ships that are a totally different art style from the humans. Don't know if those are stolen from NG games too, but they're definitely stolen.

I still can't believe they ported it to PS1.

Azathoth said:

I recently picked this up for Playstation having never heard of it before even though I was heavily into importing 2D fighters at the time. As a fan of unlicensed trash I can definitely say I was floored they managed to actually get an official home release for this thing.

One thing that really stuck out to me was the Bill character that's based on Jack from AOF2. Bill is just Jack with a poorly drawn black beard and ponytail. The fucked up thing is that the artwork shows him as being completely bald with only the beard, and his character sprite has a bald head. However, he's got a ponytail. A flesh colored ponytail. It's the same color as his bald head skintone, which when I first picked him I thought it was maybe just a problem with the color scheme I chose... but it wasn't. Every color palette assigned to him has a flesh colored bald head along with a ponytail made of human skin. The more I'd see it the more it reminded me of that guy in Revenge of the Jedi in Jabba's lair.

Click to expand...

Ha. Cool.

I've still yet to try it.