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.

Angel Eyes

Known in the 80s for their cinematic platforming and sports titles, Tecmo (now Koei Tecmo) unfortunately ran into financial issues in the early 90s and needed a strong title to keep themselves afloat; with a weak arcade presence and dwindling console presence limited to Tecmo Bowl and Captain Tsubasa titles, Tecmo looked to developing a few non-sports titles to solve the problem. At the forefront was an attempt at a sequel to the arcade Ninja Gaiden to be released for the Neo Geo in 1994 that was silently canned due to its difficulty and lack of positive feedback— in its stead, three fighting games were to be made using the leftover assets: a ninja-themed game (no, not the Tecmo ninja fighting game you may be imagining), a fairy tale-themed game, and a horseback-themed(!) game.

The ninja game became the only game of the three to be realized, although it was changed to Toukidenshou ~ Angel Eyes ~ (Toukidenshou roughly translating to “Legend of the Fighting Princess”), an all-female fighting game that was released in June 1996 for arcades and later for PlayStation in December 1997, both only in Japan (with a limited arcade release in Asia). However, the game went relatively unnoticed due to a fighting game juggernaut— Tecmo’s own Dead or Alive— being released a few months later for the Sega Model 2 hardware. Both games share credited team members, and the Angel Eyes team was responsible for creating home console ports of Dead or Alive as well as helping work on the arcade update Dead or Alive ++. With virtually all of Tecmo’s available assets being poured into the other fighter, Angel Eyes suffered a harsh development cycle, characterized by team members being reassigned and a lack of resources, especially time. The team even began receiving threats from higher-ups if the game performed poorly! However, despite all the trouble during production it stands as an interesting look into the fighting game genre that was, for all intents and purposes, well ahead of its time in a few areas.