Red Earth playthrough (Nintendo Switch, 1CC)

Описание: Playthrough with Mai Ling, using the version of the game included in Capcom Fighting Collection. This marked the first time the game was ported to consoles -the arcade version was released in 1996, whilst the collection was released in 2022, meaning people had to wait around 26 years for this!

Red Earth, known as War Zard in Japan, was the first game available for Capcom CPS III hardware. The game boasts incredibly detailed sprites, which are beautifully animated. From what I've read the game was fairly popular in Japan, but didn't make much of an impact in America, due to it barely being distributed to arcades there.

I had never played this game before and didn't know what to expect. And after playing it... I don't know what to make of it. This game's single player feels like an original mode you'd see for a console port. It features level up elements where by attacking and defeating opponents you can gain experience points, getting enough will level your character up and in some cases, unlock new moves or other powers.

This is where the problem lies: the game features a password system, so you can start at a certain level. If you start without using a password, like I did in this run, your character has just two special moves and one super move. As seen in this video, playing through the game once doesn't actually level you up that much, but there are many more levels to achieve, and more moves to unlock. So this is a bit of a weird game to do a one credit clear of, I guess the real way to do it is to start from level 1 like I did, but it means your character have a very limited move set and you miss out on seeing a lot.

The other problem is the difficulty. I picked Mai Ling because she was the only character I could get anywhere in the game with, the other three characters I was struggling to get past the second or third stage. You have got to take as little damage as possible when fighting opponents, as you do not get full life refills between fights. Fights are also only single rounds, so there's no second chances in this game.

What makes Mai Ling so good is that she has chain combos, and most of her game plan involves using a super jump to move in, then doing a low kick chain combo. Her enryuu kyaku is her best special move, there are a few opponents who you can just use this on over and over again.

Her first two opponents are not that difficult to defeat, for Lavia you can keep using the enryuu kyaku. For Hauzer, do a super jump and use the medium kick, then follow it up with a crouching medium to strong kick chain combo. For Ravange, keep doing the super jump to crouching chain combos. Kongou's strats are similar to Hauzer's, if he uses his super armor where he turns orange, just wait for him to use his butt slam attack and then do a low crouching kick chain combo. Hydron is fairly easy to beat, in the past I've beaten him doing nothing but enryuu kyakus.

Gi Gi is where I got stuck for a while. Trying to jump in wasn't working, he has some moves that can swat you away. The best strategy I could find is to just try and get right next to him, then do a enryuu kyaku. If you can hit him with one of these, you should be set for the rest of the fight. What you need to then do is move up to him and as he gets up, do the enryuu kyaku again, then keep repeating this until he's down.

To me Blade is the hardest opponent in the game. He tends to block a lot, his moves do a lot of damage when blocked, and he has one move where he can trap you in a mirror and then take around a quarter of your life off with one strike. All I could find to beat this guy was the super jump to low chain combo strat, but he tends to jump around a lot too.

The final boss has two forms, the strategy for each of them is the usual one: super jump in, low chain combo, repeat. He's protected by some dragons but these things are slow to attack. He has got a projectile beam that can do a lot of damage, but he didn't use it much here. His second form does have an annoying move where he can turn your character into a monkey, leaving them helpless for several seconds, but he didn't use it here.

One mistake Capcom made with this game is not letting you use the bosses in versus mode. The game is limited to just four playable characters in single player or versus matches, which is just way too low for a 1996 fighting game. I guess Capcom wanted to start a new franchise with Red Earth -as the "coming next?" shown at the end of the credits hints at -but this never happened. Some of the characters would later get to be in other games, such as Capcom Fighting Jam.