It's been a while since I played the "play a MAME ROM and report on its contents" game, so what the hell. I was tipped off to this game when Colony Drop bro Jeff linked me to this tournament video from the lovely folks at Mikado arcade, who seem to go out of their way to have tourneys for obscure, unusual and usually broken old fighting games. Behold their Jackie Chan In Fists of Fire tournament!
I'm a fighting game buff, but I did not know about Tecmo's Touki Denshou: Angel Eyes prior to today. This was with good reason: it's not terribly good. In the mid-90s, most of these games were collections of ideas flung at the wall, with a bare minimum of play testing and little thought as to how they would come together. It's hard enough to get a game done at all, you know?
This brings us to another major point: in this 2D fighting game, most of the characters are normally drawn 2D sprites, and four are hideous CG-rendered monstrosities. Lina in particular is among the ugliest videogame characters I have ever seen, not only because of the lack of detail in the character, but because she clashes so badly with her surroundings.
I'm speculating here, but 2D sprites these days are usually made by tracing over 3D models. Perhaps Angel Eyes wasn't getting done in time, so the developers decided to toss their raw materials up on the screen as a gimmick? The later PS1 version of the game apparently features conventionally drawn version of the CG characters, so that might just be what happened.
Anyway, let's put the eyesores aside and get to the game. It's one of those all-girl fighting games that came out in this era and weren't really expected to be good anyway. The sole unusual element is a flying air-dash mechanic that Arcana Heart would later directly lift over ten years later. Because the air dash is faster than running, all kinds of attacks can be chained one after the other (as in Darkstalkers or Guilty Gear), and finally, because the system opens up more combo possibilities than the designers had accounted for, matches in Angel Eyes are fast, aggressive, and finished in seconds. Matches even begin with the players being flung at each other in mid-air, rather than standing at a short distance from each other.
It's at the combos where this game gets kind of crazy. If you watch this video, you'll notice that every character has multiple combos that kill the opponent after a single hit connects: many of the tournament videos are over as soon as they start. They're not particularly complicated, as this genre goes: they just do that much damage. It's clear that nobody really gave the combo system a ton of thought, as I will demonstrate when I teach you, dear reader, how to do the game's simplest 100% damage combo.
I want you to actually take a close look at this picture. This is Raiya's light punch: it's very fast, reaches an unusually long distance, and it stuns the enemy for just a moment. The combo operates on those three points. It's very simple: just stand right next to your opponent-- as close as you can get-- hold forward, and press light punch repeatedly. You don't want to do this fast: allow a brief moment in between punches for your character to make the tiniest possible step forward. The idea is that as the jabs push your opponent back, you're counteracting that by moving yourself forward. Your opponent is still moving away from you, but it's happening very, very slowly, and you can continue to attack for a long time. Because the jab stuns for such a long time, there is nothing your opponent can do about this until they are pushed back out of range. If you start right next to them, as we did in this example, they are guaranteed to be KOed before that happens. This is not Raiya's best combo.
This kind of combo is actually rather common in the genre, but Raiya's is so simple, dumb, and potent that I have to imagine nobody playtested this game. Not that it particularly matters if somebody had found it, of course: everybody else has combos just as ridiculous. This is why the tourney matches are typically over in five seconds: it's like somebody edited Fate: Unlimited Codes down for time considerations.
In conclusion, this game has a character named Mysterious Power. She's an Anime American who says "OH MY GOD!" with a heavy accent when she loses. This is what Tecmo was up to in fighting games before Dead or Alive.
