In between the first and second Street Fighters, a potential sequel to the first game was conceived as a beat-em-up in the vein of Double Dragon. Originally titled "Street Fighter '89," it would go on to be known as "Final Fight" and rode the wave that DD started to considerable success. It took the basic thrust of DD but was a lot grander in scale, with larger sprites, more enemy variety, a much faster pace, and three different characters who had their own moves and strengths. It's also well-known for introducing the "get off me" attack where your character does an invincible move in exchange for a bit of health. And just like DD, while good enough solo, the chaos really shines with a second player. It would stand out as a shining example of the genre during its heyday, which I'd say lasted from '87 when DD was made up to about '93, where the increased prominence of one-on-one fighting games made companies phase out their own BEU series in favor of fighters instead. Ironically, Capcom gave the genre a boost before they started its ruin with SF2. Nevertheless, they went on to create many awesome beat-em-ups throughout the nineties that iterated on FF's formula (with Alien vs. Predator being my personal favorite), but there'd be no Knights of the Round or Warriors of Fate without FF getting the snowball rolling. It's a time-honored tale of a bunch of assholes, the Mad Gear gang, kidnapping the mayor's daughter Jessica. Considering the mayor is former pro wrestling champion Mike Haggar, who's also good friends with boxing prodigy Cody Travers and expert ninja Guy (no last name given), this turned out to be a surprisingly bad move on their part, even if they're only three guys and the Mad Gears are many. The heroes clean up crime one punch at a time throughout six stages of mayhem, and it ends with the MGs' boss Belger getting punched through his executive suite's window to his death, something which doesn't happen nearly enough to incredibly rich businessmen/criminals.
There would only ever be one other FF game for the arcade, the infamously panned fighter Final Fight Revenge, but the series would get more legs on consoles. The original would get a myriad of console and home computer ports, including a notoriously shitty SNES port which cut out Guy, the Industrial Area and didn't even allow two-player (it then got into the Blockbuster-only "Final Fight Guy" edition, but then THAT cut Cody), an awesome Sega CD port which cut nothing and had enhanced music, and a Game Boy Advance port years later with some interesting additions. Its next several games would be exclusive to Nintendo systems, starting with the chibi spinoff Mighty Final Fight, which would be as if FF took a few notes from Konami a la Parodius or Kid Dracula. It's a great, overlooked game from the twilight days of the NES, even if it doesn't allow for two-player carnage. Then there was Final Fight 2 on the SNES, where Haggar recruits two more of his friends, Maki and Carlos, to beat down the Mad Gears again, which had somehow reconstituted itself to be an international crime organization. FF2 is generally considered somewhat mid, but I still like it, and I feel it was at least made as a mea culpa for the infamous SNES port of the first, especially since it now has two player and Rolento, who didn't make it into that port. Afterward would be Final Fight 3, where the Skull Cross gang takes over the power vacuum left by the Mad Gears, and Haggar and Guy team up with no-nonsense officer Lucia and grudge-bearing vagabond Dean to crush this terrible new threat. Considered much more engaging and dynamic than FF2, I think you could even make a case it's better than the original! Characters now have expanded movesets that include dash attacks, specials with motion inputs not unlike fighting games, and even super moves done with a full power meter. These new powers bring FF3 more up to par with its most prominent rival at the time, the Streets of Rage series, but it was sadly overlooked for its time, as BEUs just were not the draw in 1995 that they were a few years back.
While all ranging from good to great, the FF sequels sadly stopped after 3 amidst the unrelenting tide of versus fighters, but as a mea culpa, the series began to be represented in the Street Fighter series starting with Alpha, which included Guy and boss character Sodom in its roster. Several more FF characters would be added in the following Alpha games and with at least one more added to each numbered sequel as well. To fans' frustration, Haggar himself, arguably the main character of the FF series, has never been playable in SF proper. However, he was a character in the fantastic Capcom wrestling game, Saturday Night Slam Masters, and its more fighterized sequel, Ring of Destruction, not to mention also being in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Infinite. It's somewhat unfortunate that Final Fight ended up being almost entirely subsumed by SF, but considering how FF Revenge turned out, this was maybe for the best. Not to mention... Streetwise. Yeah, FF got ONE more game to its name, released on the border of the sixth and seventh console generations, and boy fucking howdy, was Streetwise ever a goddamn product of its time. A textbook-ass example of "darker and edgier" reboots if ever there was one, you have to play as Cody's never-before-mentioned brother Kyle who busts heads while looking into a disturbing drug epidemic sweeping Metro City. It also has a fight in a porn theater and licensed songs by Fear Factory and Slipknot, so take that as you will. Streetwise bombed hard for its day, and while some are re-evaluating its worth now in hindsight, it's still a bizarre anomaly put up alongside most of Capcom's work.
While the charms of the original game are probably lost on most modern audiences, and to be real, Capcom has done much better beat-em-ups since its debut, Final Fight still has a dedicated fanbase to this day and it seems Capcom still holds reverence for the series too... to an extent. Street Fighter 6's major single-player campaign, the World Tour, chiefly takes place in Metro City and has most of its random enemies represented by box-headed Mad Gears. You even get to fight FF's first boss Damnd and can also take on FF2's Carlos as an optional battle, and a rather tough one at that. This is all great, but the irony of not having any FF characters in the starting playable roster is rather a drag. I hope that gets fixed as soon as season 2, but we'll see if the matter is addressed. Nevertheless, I'm quite an FF fan and SF's evolution owes a lot to it in turn, so I'm glad I could shine a light on it before covering Alpha's additions. On that note, allow me to leave you with a brief Japanese commercial where Damnd and Sodom menace some poor kid just doing doodley-squat in an elevator while some guy says "FINAL FIGHT" five times in a row.
