Survival Arts (Scarab, 1993)

So let's start off with a fairly obvious one. A fighting game seemingly developed by Sammy, most known for publishing Guilty Gear, was actually developed by Scarab, a sub-company within Sammy, strangely without credit. Scarab was a very obscure group of Japanese developers who had a knack for making just....weird shit. But it was cool weird shit. Not that they were greatly made games, mind you, but they were never boring things to play at any rate. Battle Monsters is the second fighting game these fellows have created, but we'll get to that soon.

And one of them was a digitized fighting game that went under the name Survival Arts.

Now, this is going to go into a debate that I'm gonna try not to incite with every review of a digitized fighting game ever, but it needs to be addressed since it plagues the mention of this game strongly.

Let's just go with a random blog post here:

"I watched a full gameplay video of it and it's obviously just a Mortal Kombat ripoff."

Obviously because Mortal Kombat was the first game to ever feature live-action sprites and deaths. Oh wait. It actually fucking wasn't. Then again the same guy complains that Dantel doesn't know actual martial arts but breathes fire. Gimme a goddamn break, like Mortal Kombat actually knew anything about martial arts. Don't even try to tell me those later 3D clunkfests prove otherwise, because they just don't work like that. Regardless, it's an absolutely dumb thing to complain about when the comparative game gets away with the same shit. Anyway.

Reikai Doushi, a....I guess beat-em-up from 1988 (a full 4 years before MK would even come out) was a game featuring digitized claymation models depicting this Chinese exorcist beating up a bunch of jiang-shi vampires. Whoever won got their heads popped clean off, which I feel like I have to clarify kills them. I've actually seen people denying this but it's just fact. I dunno what's there to argue about. Reikai Doushi was the first game to feature live action and moves to kill the opponent. Simple as that. But I'm gonna guess that obviously ripped off Mortal Kombat too...somehow.

And before I go into my actual overview of this game, I've seen a few people criticizing this game for 'bad animations'. Well, I guess it might be as terrible as they say, so I suppose I'll present SA and MK animations side by side.

Mmmhmm. Survival Arts is clearly inferior to MK in that regard...?

Well anyhoo, random faux-AVGN reviewers complaining about stuff and not actually backing their opinions up with any sort of explanation aside, it's...an interesting game at any rate. Let's start off slow and look at the characters, whose photos I just lazily swapped from ZanyVGquotes.

That is Grammy-movie-script backstory material right there. Viper, a guy who reminds me of Crispin Glover for some bizarre reason, is, I suppose, the 'main character' of the game, and is essentially what you'd call a shotoclone, but not really at the same time. Instead of a standard hadouken, it's not a projectile at all. Instead of a standard hurricane kick, his is more grounded and actually has a slow cooldown, so spamming it ain't exactly going to work. He doesn't have an uppercut at all, but an elbow dash (while yelling HEYHEYHEYHEYHEY! for style points). He also randomly has a Kenshiro's Hundred Crack Fist as a repeated press move. For a basic shoto he's one of the more interesting characters who follow the structure.

This guy, however, isn't very interesting. He has a gunshot. He has an air gunshot. That's about it. He pretty much can get by with his hilarious 'CAM ON' and 'HAAAY' soundbytes though. That and me and a circle of friends mockingly reference this goddamn horrible review of the game whenever we mention him, so now he's just The Janitor (Who Dropped His Mop), because he specifically looks like one who dropped his mop as opposed to one that never had one, apparently.

Eh. Not much to say really, although her backstory (and ending) are noticably heavily depressing. Which is the odd thing about Scarab. No matter how unintentionally amusing their results may be, both of their games play themselves off deathly seriously. It's kinda strange. But yeah. Other than her time-skipping-karate-palm move which has one of the most ear-grating noises I've ever heard, I can't say much about her. For whatever reason though, there's countless people drooling over this chick on the internet. Stay away from these people.

WHAT THIS ISN'T STRIDER HIRYU 0/10 - everyone on the internet

Although he looks pretty frail, Hiryu is by far the best character in the game. He has options for just about everything, it's absolutely ridiculous. Let's lay it out in a list:

• Ninja star projectile which has varying speeds, and he is able to manually change the trajectory of it if he wants to
• Dashing motion basically gives him a KOF-esque dodge, which none of the other characters do
• Down+right allows him to roll under projectiles
• He has quadruple jump. Eat your heart out, Chipp Zanuff.
• Wall latch (amusingly, similar to how Strider Hiryu can do it in the MVC games)

Combined with how massively damaging everything in Survival Arts is and the fact that everything is easy to combo into, this guy is a monster. Even more so to the characters who don't even have much to work with.

Like this poor soul who only has about one move, and it sucks. She somewhat has Hiryu's ducking walk  thing except it's way slower and I can't imagine it actually works out too well. I can't say much about her either other than the announcer calling her 'Erika' when you select her. The hell..?

Also to bat down the accusations of her ripping off of Kitana/Mileena in their MK2 debuts; Survival Arts was released only a short bit after MK2. Do you really think they would spend that time making a character just to mimick another one right before they were done with the game? That isn't how making video games works, people.

This guy, though. Hoo boy. This guy.

He has maybe a few moves more than Hiryu who already had far too many, and has an almost insta-kill carpet bombing move, among many, many, many others. All while yelling 'YOU DIE' and 'KILL YOU' (more like KIRYU really) in a voice that was obviously dropped 20 octaves through the use of an audio editor. I think the most jarring thing about him is that he seems like he was filmed by a completely different crew. The rest of the cast is somewhat grainy but smooth looking enough, but when Mongo animates he just looks horrible. As opposed to the rest of the cast again, his palettes look awful because they don't mesh with the changed colors well at all. Also you can see that in his portrait he's...like...all orange and stuff. Mongo is by far the reason why this game gets mocked a lot, and deservingly so in this case, namely he's sometimes hailed as a classic case of firearm-centric characters being incredibly irritating in fighting games. Well, aside from Dantel anyway....

Random tidbit: the actor for Mongo, known as Kanda David, was also credited with dialogue translation in Scarab's side scrolling game, Dyna Gear. With lines like 'do you have umbrella?' and 'this takes bitter', I'm not entirely sure he was the best pick for that job. Or, sadly, maybe he was.

Just Scarab being their weird as hell selves. A completely pale alien that fights for his two children (revealed in his ending), but other than that I can't really place what his moveset was going for. He's got Viper's Hundred Crack Fist thing but he has a dashing grapple of some sort at the same time. Oddly enough, he's the only character who dies no matter what if he loses. If he dies by a basic attack, he melts. Aliens must be really fragile in the Survival Arts universe.

Then this guy. I don't care for him much. He has only two moves but they both practically do like 50% damage anyway. His theme is unfittingly melancholy though, but it's also my favorite piece of music in the game, dull-sounding instrument samples be damned.

Lastly, I feel the boss needs no introduction:

He's been called a ripoff of many things, but come on. That is obviously Michael Bolton.

Dantel is an absolutely ludicrous boss to fight, having options for practically everything. But I'll shoot down that intimidating front by revealing something. Fight him with Gunner. Spam the gunshots. Dantel's reaction time is far too long to escape from them. Easy victory. I suppose Scarab didn't have many playtesters on their side.

Yeah yeah the characters, how about the gameplay? Well first off, I'll say this; whoever says Survival Arts is an MK ripoff clearly never played the fucking thing. It's a pretty responsive and smooth-feeling 6 button fighter which has a nice combo system going for it. At the same time, that's what kills it. Damage in this game is far FAR too high, and most combos can net you about 58% on average if you know what chains to do. There's also the weapon pick-up system, but I never bother with it, although I suppose it's an interesting idea at any rate. Interestingly there's no chip damage in the game unless you use the obtainable weapons, so I guess there's that. All in all, if you're looking for a fighter that for all it's flaws is fairly and campily fun with some neat ideas and want something amusing to play with your friends, I totally recommend getting yourself a 'copy' of this. Just don't let any of your friends know the command for Mongo's bomb move.

I might have left out a lot of essential content out of this overview, but I'm exhausted at the moment. I do plan on adding a second part, describing the stages and gameplay in more depth.