Martial Champions
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Martial Champions is a hand-to-hand combat game similar to Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. Players can choose from ten selectable characters, each with special moves and weapons. A weapon can be knocked out of a character's hand and picked up by his/her opponent. Whoever wins the best of three falls advances to the next round and the next character. The characters in Martial Champions are diverse and come from many different countries. Typically, in one-player games, the challenger faces his/her opponent in the opponent's home land. In two-player games, the arena switches at random, usually meaning that neither character is on his/her home turf. ~ Anthony Baize, All Game Guide
Martial Champions is a low rent version of Street Fighter II. Konami was feeling a pinch in the early 1990s with the wild success of hand-to-hand combat games. They tried to get a game to market too quickly. The result was Martial Champions, a game that probably should have never been released.
The ten fighting characters in Martial Champions are flat and uninteresting. The story and background of each character is vague and contrived. Basically, gamers just do not care about the characters in Martial Champions. The only decent character is Titi, a bizarre zombie soldier with metal claws. Titi and his claw slash move may be the inspiration for Baraka who appeared in Mortal Kombat 2. Still it seems to be that the most charismatic character from the game is Racheal. She is a blonde woman from the United States who seems to be trained in Ninjutsu; and her uniform is similar to that of Aska from the SNES TMNT: Tournament Fighters game (also both share an obscure popularity), due to her rather small fan following she has to be the most popular character from the game specially among hentai aficionados.
Martial Champions is not challenging enough. Each character has one move which is nearly unbeatable by computer opponents. Thus, a quick march to the championship is not out of the question, even on one set of credits.
The scenes between fights are goofy and unfunny. They are supposed to reveal secrets about the characters, but are so boring that gamers do not take the time to watch. The backgrounds and fighting scenes are very low-tech, especially for a 1993 release.
To its credit, Martial Champions was the first hand-to-hand combat style game that allowed players to use weapons that could be dropped and picked up by characters and their opponents. Gamers can see a similar innovation in Mortal Kombat 4 which Midway released nearly five years after Martial Champions hit arcades.
