Originally announced in 1999, this promising fighting game developed by Bottom Up, unfortunately, was never released. It appears that the software house was closed down a few months later, leaving some incomplete projects for the Nintendo 64, including this Chanbara Fighter. The game should have been a classic fighting game 1 VS 1, but with an interesting super deformed cartoon style. It was possible to chose between a chef, a warrior, a crazy old man and many more. In Chanbara Fighter we would have been able to play in arenas with the background built to resemble a sheet of paper, hand-drawn by a child.
Each character used its own weapon to combat, for example, the chef used a frying pan while the old man had a stick. Chanbara was practically a mix of Super Smash Bros and Soul Calibur! The controls of the game were just as bizarre as its characters: we would have moved our avatar with the D-Pad, while fighting by moving the analog stick (or the yellow C buttons). There were few good fighting game on the N64 and it’s a shame that this project was cancelled. Chanbara Fighter could have been a very interesting game and maybe even a lot of fun.
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That’s an interesting idea for a fighter – and I like the detail there of seeing the puppets’ wires in some screenshots – but damn, that looks rough as hell for an N64 game in 1999. I mean, the Dreamcast launched that year. The PS2 was coming up. Some games on the N64 that released in 1999 were Quake 2, Star Wars Episode 1 Racer, Rayman 2, Rocket: The Robot on Wheels, Jet Force Gemini and Beetle Adventure Racing… like, not every N64 game looked great, but by 1999, a lot of the limitations and hurdles were definitely worked around by then. Things didn’t need to look this low-poly and this blurry-textured…
A lot of games get canned during the end of one hardware generation during the ramp-up/transition to the next; I can kind of understand this one dying because of that. If it looked more impressive, maybe they could’ve argued they could’ve moved it to a next gen machine. But this looks like a 1996 game :/