#aorn

Rabbit

This article is part of our Japanese Obscurities feature. We put out a whole book about them, which is available as both a full color hardcover and a Kindle ebook from Amazon! If you’d like to see more of these features, please check out the book and if you enjoyed it, leave a five star review so we can do a follow up with even more interesting, offbeat, or historically important Japanese games!

Many publishers and developers attempted to cash in on the fighting game boom thanks to Street Fighter II. But generally, it’s titles from Capcom and SNK that have survived in public consciousness, at least as far as Japanese companies. And yet there were a few stragglers from unknown companies that went largely unnoticed – one such of these games is Rabbit, a solid 2D fighter developed by a company called Aorn, who seemed to have inherited a few staff members from SNK but otherwise didn’t stick around for very long.

OCTOBER 2017 UPDATE www.arcadequartermaster.com

Four more shrines are live in the site, continuing on the Far Eastern martial titles from the previous month!

OUTLAWS OF THE LOST DYNASTY: Also known as Suiko Enbu, Data East’s weapon fighting game based from one of China’s quintessential novels, Water Margin. While the game can be reminiscent of the first Samurai Shodown with no super moves, each character’s weapon works as the guard gauge, or as a one-time death-or-glory attack. While disarmed, a fighter gets limited to his bare-handed specials and his defensive strength also goes down. The game adapts Chao Gai (a benevolent character in the novel) as the final boss in a villainous light, much like SamSho adapted Shiro Amakusa into a magic-corrupted sorcerer.

RABBIT: EA/Aorn’s fighting game pits eight characters with various skills and powers with the animal signs of the Chinese Zodiac. As you fight and defeat each of the colorful cast, you gain the powers of his/her unique zodiac beast for your own use, reminiscent of Sunsoft’s Waku Waku 7. This title’s fighter-and-beast-sidekick even predates Capcom’s Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure CPS-3 games by a year!

GROOVE ON FIGHT: The conclusion for the site’s Power Instinct collection, a new Goketsuji tourney is held for the new generation, including the offspring of previous Goketsuji veterans. Oume and Otane decided to host the tournament together and adopts the tag-team rule. New faces enter and teeth-clenched alliances are made as a bigger evil lurks in the shadows of the tournament. Aside from the staple Stress Shots, take advantage of special tag attacks to inflict massive damage! Despite the new characters to be familiar with, Atlus threw a bunch of hidden cameos from previous Goketsuji titles and the bestiary from the Shin Megami Tensei games! 

MECHANIZED ATTACK: Released by SNK roughly on the same year but before Beast Busters, Mechanized Attack can be considered its direct predecessor in terms of game engine, HUDs and even the same recovery item icons. Taking cues from the science fiction craze of the 80s, the Terminator movie and Operation Wolf, the players are thrust in a hostile remote island where the army has been replaced with killer androids. Along with a limited supply of ordnance, the players must survive while destroying various enemy outposts and tech in the island and besiege the androids’ core CPU before they become a global threat.