The N64 has yet to have a really good fighting game. A few have been passable, but everything to date has been flawed in some fundamental way. Enter Fighters Destiny, a surprisingly original-feeling game, considering how much of it has been "borrowed" from other fighting games. It isn't perfect, but it still blows away the competition by a long shot.
Scoring in Fighters Destiny is done very differently than in other games. Instead of the typical two-out-of-three system, FD uses a point-based system, with each type of takedown giving a different number of points. The first fighter to seven points wins the fight and continues onward. Since points are awarded for takedowns, throws are a higher priority than in most other games. Throws are very easy to break, so don't expect to win all of your fights with a quick hip-toss.
The characters in the game vary from Ryuji, the game's token Ryu-alike, to a happy-go-lucky clown. Most of the standard fighting game types are represented, including a ninja character, a wrestler, and more. The design isn't original by any means, but it works very well.
The game has a few unique modes to it. Besides the standard "beat everybody else up real bad" mode, there is a survival mode, a time attack mode, and a rodeo mode, which pits your character against a fighting cow, and your chore is to remain in the ring for as long as possible. Since tossing the cow out of the ring also stops the fight, you have to keep the cow at bay but can't beat it so badly that it loses. It's quite a challenge. The master challenge mode allows you to earn extra moves by fighting the master to gain skills. But if you pick a joker's card, you must beat the joker or lose all of your built-up skills. These pumped-up characters can be taken into the other modes and saved to a controller pack.
Graphically, Fighters Destiny comes across pretty well, although the entire game has a strangely blurry look to it. The sound is tolerable, but the speech is sampled at a very low quality, resulting in muffled, hard-to-understand effects.
The unique scoring system and variety of modes make Fighters Destiny a winner. It may not have the best characters or the best graphics, but it's a well-rounded game, which is more than I can say about any other N64 fighting game. Until someone finally gets it right, Fighters Destiny stands alone as the best N64 fighter on the market. --Jeff Gerstmann
--Copyright ©1999 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited. GameSpot and the GameSpot logo are trademarks of GameSpot Inc.
