Hokuto no Ken/Black Belt Review

[BobSega]

I liked Black Belt, but it seems a bit plain and bare compared to that which it is a localization of, Hokuto no Ken(Fist of the North Star, orig. Jap. mid. '86). I liked Kenshiro and his opponents' colourful clothing and the post-nuclear scenes, better than that of Riki and opponents and Black Belt's old Japan backgrounds. The game is like Kung-Fu Master(orig. arcade, late '84) except the action is outdoors and your view is "zoomed-out" i.e smaller sprites, more opponents visible, coming at you from both sides, until the end boss fights, which are zoomed-in making these duels like an early, crude Street Fighter. The bosses can be beaten quicker if you discover their weaknesses(or pressure points like in the Fist of the North Star cartoon). Funnily enough, there are also Mortal Kombat fatalities/finishing moves of sorts, performed automatically when you beat a boss, a couple of these cause the boss to break into pieces, similar to the violent deaths of bosses in the cartoon. I realize now that the Japanese that appears in the middle of the screen during the finisher in both Hokuto no Ken and Black Belt gives the name of the finisher according to the cartoon e.g the flurry of punches used to finish Shin/Ryu is called 北斗百裂拳(Hokuto Hyakuretsu Ken/Northstar Hundred-rending Fist) though in Black Belt the name is changed to 鉄拳制裁 (Tekken Seisai/Ironfist Punishment).

So through the stages there are thick streams of opponents coming at you and like Kung-Fu Master you have to choose between the slow/long range kick and fast/short range punch. You can use jumping and jumpkicking too. If you miss and let the opponent stream in it can be costly and hard to recover from. What makes Hokuto even harder than Black Belt is that there is no food supply floating overhead for you to catch and restore health, nor an invulnerability kanji(I've read that there are some hidden power-ups).

Hokuto no Ken would make my SMS top 20 if not top 10 for being a good platform beat-em-up based on a manga/anime. And one more thing, my assumption that the game was turned into Black Belt for export, because the cartoon was unknown outside Japan seems to be wrong, it was because of legal issues that they had to change it so that there was no obvious link to the Hokuto no Ken franchise. Otherwise we could have had Fist of the North Star released for SMS worldwide with the Japanese content translated.

[ian]

I've always loved this game. It plays so smoothly and the controls are very responsive. And enemies exploding into little pieces will always be satisfying.

I can understand why they re-branded Hokuto no Ken when releasing it in the west, I doubt anyone was familiar with the anime at that time. I like that they made the effort to add a new boss (Gonta) and change the game enough to make it feel completely unrelated to Hokuto no Ken.

I would be very interested to know all the Japanese translations in both versions of the game if you know them?

[BobSega]

This fan page has a lot of the translations from Hokuto and Black Belt, stage names, boss names, finisher names. Like I said the Black Belt finisher names are different and apparently made up and not from the Fist of the North Star cartoon. You can use Google Translate to try and figure out the English behind the Black Belt finishers. In the case of Hokuto no Ken there are actually links to pages describing each finisher and where it occurs in the manga or anime.
hokuto.fandom.com/wiki/Hokuto_no_Ken_(Sega_Mark_III)

The only other thing is the narrative messages at the end of each stage(Hokuto only). I found a patched, fan translated version though.

Chapter 1 End:
"(After beating Shin to save Yuria)It was a doll just like Yuria. You must save the real Yuria"

Chapter 2 End:
"He(The Colonel) was already dead. Even more terrifying foes await Kenshiro in his search for his beloved Yuria."

Chapter 3 End:
"The Demon(Devil Rebirth) has been destroyed. Next you must challenge the Legend of Cassandra to find Toki."

Chapter 4 End:
"Kenshiro has passed the test. In the midst of the battle, Toki teaches Ken the Fist of Gentleness"

Chapter 5 End:
"(Defeating Souther)The battle is drawing close to an end. At last comes the showdown with Raoh. Your destiny awaits you"

Chapter 6 End:
"(Defeating Raoh)I have no regrets for the life I have lived"
"(Rescuing Yuria)Ken embraces Yuria not knowing how much time they have. They shall spend the day living in peace"

[Centrale]

This is one of those early games that has some very rewarding gameplay if you spend some time with it. It also had the visual shock factor of the multi-layered parallax backgrounds that really underscored that a new era of console gaming was upon us.