Battle Fighters Garou Densetsu

It's the Fatal Fury gang you know and love. If you played the games, you'll appreciate seeing all the cast from the first Fatal Fury game represented here.

The plot is standard martial arts tripe. There's a secret technique and old martial arts rivalries in a fictional place where people prefer to settle rivalries with their fists than with other sorts of weapons. It's a bit of deviation for a norm, however, that guns play a major role in this film, harrowing and hampering the protagonists as they make their way to the final fight.

Everything is too short and not very well-developed. The music is great, especially the maudlin song "Fly Away" from the empty credits song, but most tracks are but a few seconds long. Some of the fights are good, but again, they last mere seconds; also, when mentioning the fights we should also note how most of the moves are nothing like their in-game counterparts. The rising tackle seems to be a bizarre kneeing crack shot, Andy Bogard uses his head rather than his feet to attack, and Geese Howard's reppuken looks more like a Proton Cannon.

It gets the job done. If you like the games, you'll like the style and presentation of your favourites from the game. If you don't, I wouldn't say it's worth hunting down, but a fan of action movies would probably find it a satisfying, if short, casual watch.

Honourable Mentions: Super Mario Bros (1993). Geese looks very much like the humanoid version of Bowser from this movie. His personality is more threatening here, however.

The Fatal Fury franchise is full of promises and this first animated feature takes the characters beyond the video game boundaries. It's cool how the fighters (Terry Bogard especially) are written as being normal and sensitive rather than always butch, evil and trying to start a fight. The characters in the Street Fighter series were too much like this but Terry Bogard always appears innocent and his adult form still looks like the child he was at the beginning.

But my fave character in Fatal Fury was always Geese Howard. He is such a cool bad guy and live action bad guys should be more like him. Andy Bogard and Joe Higashi are amusing supporting characters and make great sidekicks for Terry.

The ending is a little too quick but when you consider that there is a follow up and a great animated movie it ain't so bad. If you like this one then the others should give you a good fix.