Move along people, nothing to see here.
Animation: The regular old-style animation, but a pretty good one.
I have checked the animation a couple of times afterwards, but so far it only helped me believing that the animation is probably the best part of this movie. I haven't seen any annoying reused frames at all, but hey - it's only 45 minutes after all and they have quite a lot to tell. I suppose they didn't want to take it up by the animation. And when you have a title like this, I suppose you also get the money to make sure your animation looks good. And like I said, the animation looks pretty good. That is, for a series made in the early 90s. Unfortunately, that is also the only positive aspect of this series.
Sound: Mild shouting, bad scripts.
I haven't found much really wrong with the voices, except that they sometimes have a bit of a bad script. Wait, who am I kidding? The entire anime suffers from a bad script, so do the character scripts. So while the voiceactors do a decent job, I doubt anyone except the younger people amongst us (under 15, I mean) will be able to enjoy hearing them speak. The shouting/yelling is a bit mild though, as if they were in a studio which wasn't isolated well enough and they had to keep their voices down to not wake up the neighbours. That and the fact that they didn't bother changing the voice for the girl. She sounds exactly the same when she's 20-30 as when she were 10. And really, girls of that age don't have such a deep voice …
Story[/u]: We have 45 minutes for introduction, plot and action. What shall we leave out?The plot seems to be left out, or rather, the parts which were made to connect the several parts together. Because of that, when they have seen a person for 3 minutes and then see them die, the remaining characters cry. I thought affection could be a good thing, but after just having met already? Or characters who fall from 3 meters and land on their heads are still able to talk. Realism is really far to find here.
Since it's martial arts, we also see a few super special techniques. But it is hard to believe that such techniques are mastered in only the first or second try, which left at least me flabbergasted with awe. I guess they also cut that out to cut back on the necessary time to finish the animation.
And indeed, they don't get any. Or rather, because of the events in the anime there are slight changes in the way the characters behave and if there were 20 more minutes to actually show those changes in a more subtle way, then they would be quite decent even. In the case of this movie though, those changes in the characters often happen between two keyframes and you should be careful to not miss it! Do not blink with your eyes. You can do it, it's only 45 minutes after all.
But it is really irritating to see a character who is immensely determined to kill off the murderer of his father wimp out just after the first hit. Of course I can imagine something why he suddenly loses his determination, but if I have to imagine everything the characters do, shouldn't I be better off imagining the entire anime instead?
I planned to name a ‘worst character’ here, but I am unable to name just one, actually. I think only the main character (Terry) had any substance and even that was pretty shallow.
I have played the Fatal Fury games back on the SNES and have enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately, when watching this movie, I couldn't really relate anything back to that. It was uninspiring, too hasty and the characters felt as if you wouldn't miss it if one of them had gotten sick somewhere along the road.
As a conclusion I think the best way of telling you is: ‘Walk along people, nothing to see here.’ Perhaps someone should actually hire something to tell people that before they actually watch this.
