A playthrough of Sega's 1993 beat 'em up game for the Sega CD, Final Fight CD.

Played through on the hard difficulty level as Haggar. I also show each of the Time Attack stages after the ending.

This Segaproduced port of Capcom's 1989 arcade hit was the closest thing US gamers got to a home version of an arcade perfect port until emulation was able to capably do the job.

The western computer versions are worth only mentioning for how terrible they are, and the Super Nintendo port, while fun in its own right, was sorely lacking in several respects. Early on, only the x68000 port was virtually arcadeperfect, but that was a Japanonly release (not to mention the price of the computer would've been about the same as a CPS1 cabinet in the early 90s).

Sega had a good track record with porting Capcom's arcade hits to the Genesis platform: Strider, MERCS, Forgotten Worlds, Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and Mega Twins were all excellent, and it seems that this trend continued nicely on the CD platform.

With the exception of a few censored sprites, pretty much everything that was missing in the 1990 Super Nintendo conversion is present in the Sega CD release.

All of the arcade game's playable characters and stages are intact, and the simultaneous 2P mode is included. The CD version can throw far more characters around on screen with no slowdown (though in a few extreme cases it can flicker pretty badly), making the challenge much closer to that of the original.

The graphics look great it appears as if this version retains most (all?) of the animation of the original, and though it has lost a lot of color, the overall look of the arcade game is faithfully reproduced. The intro and ending cinematics have been redone with (groan) full voice acting, and it also has a brand new, remixed version of the soundtrack that streams directly off the CD. Most people really seem to love the new tracks, but I've never been a big fan. I love the arcade soundtrack, but this one always sounded fairly cheesy to me. Too bad they didn't include an option to play the music using the system's FM chip. The sound and voice effects are all loud and clear, though, and that new Time Attack theme is pretty good.

I did find it funny, but kinda cool, when the vocals kicked in stage 3. Does anyone know if that's Mitsuyoshi singing during the cage fight with the Andores? It sounds awfully similar to some of his Daytona vocals.

Final Fight CD isn't quite an arcadeperfect port, but it is excellent. The CPS1 hardware could have run circles around the Sega CD, but you'd never be able to tell looking at these two games. This version stands up to the Streets of Rage games far better than the SNES ports ever could.

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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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