Mighty Final Fight

Take the gritty arcade brawler Final Fight and convert it into a cute chibi style on the plain old NES? It sounds like a recipe for disappointment — and yet Mighty Final Fight is one of the loveliest and best-executed beat 'em ups on the eight-bit console.

Instead of a faithful port the NES hardware couldn't have handled anyway, the creators chose a different approach: they redrew the characters into cute, big-headed chibi proportions and rebuilt the game from the ground up to fit the console's capabilities. The result is a brisk, colourful beat 'em up that keeps the spirit of the original — Haggar, Cody and Guy fight through the city streets and pummel gangs of enemies — but adds its own juice.

Unlike the straightforward arcade templates, a progression element works here on top of that: defeated enemies give you experience, your character levels up, learns new strikes and grows stronger. That gives the game a pull and a reason to keep going that pure brawlers often lack.

Each of the three playable characters plays differently — Haggar is a slow powerhouse, Guy fast and nimble, Cody balanced — so the choice of fighter changes the pace and style of play. The animations are surprisingly fluid and the humorous, exaggerated visuals give the whole scrap a lighthearted, playful touch.

Mighty Final Fight came out late in the NES's life and is proof of how well developers learned to handle the console toward the end of the generation. For fans of the genre and the Final Fight series alike, it is a little gem worth discovering.

Why play: A cute chibi reinterpretation of an arcade legend with RPG progression and three distinct heroes — one of the best beat 'em ups on the NES.