Hey, welcome back to Stop Skeletons From Fighting, and okay, listen, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into when we started making these How the West was Worse videos. First we covered Capcom broadly as a company, and then we thought we could smoosh Street Fighter and Final Fight into one follow-up video, but that didn't really work out... or maybe it did work out, because Final Fight is kinda like a Greatest Hits of Capcom localization bungles! We got censorship, we got bad western-only spinoffs, we got Capcom refusing to acknowledge mistakes, it's kinda beautiful, in a way, but we're gonna be honest with y'all, after Street Fighter's Shen Long-pocalypse, we were just about ready to throw in the towel, and that's why we called in the #1 top 10 alchemizer-in-chief Matt McMuscles to lend a hand! MATT: Hiya, skelefriends! You know I never miss out on the chance to talk about one of Capcom's most legendary franchises! DEREK: Awesome, thanks Matt! Now, would you please set the stage for us? MATT: Capcom, in 1989... A well known localization Crime Capital, has been ruled by violence and bad translations for many years. At the center of the problem is the HUGE gang known as... Cross-Cultural Communication! DEREK: Ha-hoo! Ha-hoo! Haaa-ha!! Okay, fun and goofs aside, it's time to get serious, because the story of Final Fight is long and crazy! And we are gonna break down its tumultuous journey through localization, So grab your metal pipes... MATT: ... and strap on your chest belts, people! This is gonna get wild. DEREK: 1989's Final Fight wasn't the first brawler, but it's one of the best! The arcade game is a benchmark for the genre, featuring radical designs, gorgeous sprite work, great sound effects and music, and it just feels good punchin' dudes! Final Fight was a big arcade success for Capcom, not Street Fighter II successful, but still respectable! It's hard to say how successful, since Capcom doesn't report arcade sales, but even the old Dimond Center Safeway, where the Best Buy is now, had a Final Fight machine for YEARS! That's an Anchorage, Alaska deep cut! That content you want! ... but the point is, even Alaska had a few Final Fight machines back in the day. This video is, of course, all about localization, and the arcade version of Final Fight is an odd example. It's odd because there's very little changed between the western and Japanese versions. When we're looking at the localization of Final Fight ports, however, there are four main things we're gonna be looking for: 1: Jessica in the intro, 2: The names of Damnd and Sodom, 3: The quote in the car bonus minigame, and of course, 4: What's goin' on with Poison? Outside of the fact that she and a lot of her Mad Gear cohorts are references to popular metal bands of the time. MATT: I think myself as a Final Fight intro expert, for some reason, and the only major difference in the arcade port from the Japanese version is that a tied-up Jessica, Mayor Haggar's daughter, is missing from the intro. Mike just gets mad that Damnd is on his TV, which doesn't really make sense, but it's kinda funny how angry he gets regardless. Outside of this, it's pretty much the same game, and it put Final Fight in an interesting position: Most of the time, western players weren't even aware of changes that were being made to their games, but the West fell in love with THIS version of Final Fight, and would DEFINITELY notice any changes. DEREK: Indeed they would! And while Final Fight would, I guess, eventually be absorbed into the Street Fighter franchise, it was a long-running franchise in its own right! Except that the original Final Fight was almost a sequel to Street Fighter. In name only, obviously: Final Fight was originally showcased as Street Fighter '89, but the name was scrapped because people wanted a REAL sequel to Street Fighter, not a game shoehorned into the franchise. ... which brings us to the other not-really sequel to Street Fighter, Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight. There's a lot to unpack here, and we've now done it in two videos, first off: Capcom USA decided to add the Final Fight subtitle, for some reason, even though Final Fight was already out in arcades, and despite having absolutely nothing to do with Final Fight. It barely has anything to do with Street Fighter! Like, this isn't even a brawler, it's more of an action platformer? And not even a very good one. Japan, however, was not having any of it, because they dropped the Final Fight subtitle, and even re-arranged the title to officially make it 2010: Street Fighter. But maybe they were just predicting the future, because the Final Fight development team would go on to make Street Fighter II. Now you know. And now, folks, the big localization bombshell! 1991's Super Nintendo port of Final Fight! Most Final Fight's localization problems come down to this port, which... it's pretty piss-poor on its own. Guy's missing from the roster, there's no two player, but that's not really what we're here to talk about. Like we already mentioned, because the arcade game was widely available for close to two years, most the people playing this port had already played the largely uncensored version, and it was easy to spot the changes. MATT: First off, Jessica is in the intro this time, but with moderately more clothing than the Japanese arcade game. DEREK: Alright, not so bad. MATT: Sodom is renamed "Katana", and Damnd is now "Thrasher". DEREK: Understandable. "Oh! My god!" MATT: ... is now:
"Oh! My car!" DEREK: Perennial favorite! The audio between the Super Nintendo and Super Famicom versions are actually different, which is ridiculous, because they're both equally indecipherable. MATT: Another famous change is the graffiti on the Bay Area stage, which proudly proclaims that the public bathrooms are... SEXY. All the SNES versions have decidedly less... SEXY places to relieve oneself. DEREK: This is probably a censorship change Capcom instituted for Nintendo systems, which is different from how the Big N regards sexual content nowadays. MATT: There were some visual changes to characters, like Dug and Simons having their skin tone lightened for some reason, but the big issue here is Poison. DEREK: Ah, poor Roxy was never quite able to step out from behind the shadow of her pink-haired counterpart. MATT: Nintendo of America had pretty strict content restrictions in place for their consoles back in the day, so that's the main reason why Capcom changed all this stuff in the first place. DEREK: But Poison... this one's not really Nintendo's fault! MATT: Well, it kind of is... DEREK: [sigh] Look, it's... it's complicated. For the uninitiated, Poison is an enemy character who appears multiple times in Final Fight 1 to antagonize you. He's notable for a couple of reasons, first of all, she - and Roxy - are the only women enemies in the game. She's a stone-cold babe-a-saurus, and she was swapped out for a male sprite in the Super Nintendo version. But that's not the whole story, because of course it's not. This is Capcom we're talkin' about here, and Poison's gender identity kerfluffle is an infamous, complicated story, and wrong information has permeated the internet at different times. Heads up! Poison was handled very poorly by Capcom. This video is going to include some CHOICE vocabulary, because again, Poison was handled very poorly by Capcom. At this point there was no ESRB, but Nintendo still policed their content so they could be viewed as a kid-friendly company, something competitors would exploit. One of Nintendo's rules was no violence against women. You can most clearly see this rule in effect for Birdo - or Birdette? - in 1988's Super Mario Bros. 2. Birdo's situation is actually very similar to Poison's. However, everything's more complicated than it seems. There's a story from the book Game Over by David Sheff where, when Capcom USA told Capcom Japan they didn't think beating up women would work on a Nintendo console, they responded: "Oh, you mean the transvestite?" Which... ugh, okay, was a different time... sure, but Capcom's attitude around this was in incredibly poor taste. We are not the first people to point this out, but the solution to the problem of violence against women isn't solved by making Poison transgender. This could have also been taken as a joke, but actually it looks like Capcom Japan wasn't joking, and there's evidence that Poison was intended to be transgender from the start: Her concept art includes the phrase "new half", which is Japanese slang for "trans woman". While this information wasn't included in the arcade versions, as far as we can tell, Capcom Japan stuck with it in the Japanese versions of the Super Famicom and Sega CD ports. So basically, Poison becoming Billy WAS due to Nintendo of America, but Poison being transgender was down to Capcom. Poison, and her friends Sodom and Damnd... ... oh, a- and Roxy, always forget about Roxy, have spotty appearances in future releases. However, not all ports are plagued with these censorship issues, for example, the Amiga port! Now, I wasn't super familiar with this port before working on this video, but in terms of actual differences between this and other ports, the Amiga version features all three playable characters, pretty solid spritework, and almost no censorship! It's got bra!Jessica in the beginning, Damnd and Sodom and Poison, and by that measure, it's arcade-perfect! But from what I can tell, this is not a well-regarded port. Published by U.S. Gold, Final Fight Amiga was developed by Creative Materials Ltd., but more specifically, it was made by one man, Richard Aplin, and he had a rough time making this port! We know this because Final Fight Amiga has one of my favorite features from games of this era: A developer rant in the code! Apparently Richard was a tall, 21-year-old half-Australian who liked drinking, raves, and was apparently sick of writing copy protection. Yeah, that's a losing battle, bro. Sorry. Final Fight Amiga, though, is unique because it actually features a rant in-game! If you hit the Help key five times, this video will pop up! And it's amazing. And dark?! Afterwards, infinite lives are turned on. Ah, thanks Richard! I'll see you at the rave! Things would be quiet in Metro City for a couple of years, until 1993 which, by the way, was a banner year for the series. The next major Final Fight release was the substantially better port, Final Fight CD. Finally, consoles had two-player co-op, all three main characters, all six main stages, and a HILARIOUSLY bad voice acted intro! CODY: "Guy, Jessica was kidnapped!" GUY: "Jessica?" CODY: "My sweetheart since childhood!" DEREK: Oh yeah, that's good stuff. It's the port that I played the most growing up, but beyond that, it's an interesting port because of the way it handled the Poison problem. Y'see, Sega is edgy! Mortal Kombat is uncensored on Sega! Well, if you did the code anyway, but this means Poison was unambiguously Poison and not Billy. But she gets a raggedy wife-beater and bike shorts, but she's still there! However, Jessica is in her dress, Sodom and Damnd are censored, but the words are just removed during the car minigame, so who knows what he's sayin'? Oh, my car? Oh, my god? We'll let you decide: [super compressed]
"O, my cuh." MATT: Final Fight CD was a decent exclusive get for Sega, but it was short-lived, as Mighty Final Fight dropped on the NES just a few months later, in Summer '93. And this one also features Poison! What, in a Nintendo game?! What gives? I mean, I guess Nintendo had softened its anti-women violence stance a bit at this point, since Chun-Li was a part of the best-selling third-party game on the Super Nintendo. Or maybe Capcom just didn't self-censor for this one, but... ... then again, Damnd is still Thrasher, and Sodom is still Katana, along with his brother, Katana... ... yeah, there's more of them this time, not sure if that makes anything better though. But the important thing here is that we're starting to see just some inconsistency when it comes to Final Fight localization, also, Belger is a cyborg in this game, and this is very important. DEREK: Our last game from '93 is Final Fight 2 for the Super Nintendo. The boss Won Won is missing his machete, which is a weird place to draw a line? But mostly, Final Fight 2 is worth mentioning because it underscores, again, the inconsistencies Final Fight has with women. So Final Fight 2, which never had an arcade version, had Mary and Eliza in the Japanese version, but they became Leon and Robert overseas. However, Maki is a main character! Is it okay for Maki to appear as a woman because technically she's doing the hitting or something?! Are you cool with women in punching games, or not?! This game's just drawing weird lines all over the place! Furthermore, they rewrote Maki's backstory for the West: In Japan, she's the leader of a motorcycle gang, however, across the pond, she's actually a peaceful girl who hates fighting. [snort] Despite this, she still became a fan favorite, and would later appear in a few fighting games. That wraps up a busy year for the Final Fight games, but there's still plenty of titles to chew through, titles like 1994's Final Fight Guy! This is a big example of How the West was Worse, but not for the reasons we've been dealing with so far in this episode. Final Fight Guy is not a sequel, but an update of sorts for the Super Nintendo port. Like the name implies, it features Guy, who was absent from the Super Nintendo port, but it only swaps Cody out for Guy, so it still does not feature all three characters, nor does it feature two-player support. It does also have a few other minor fixes, but it's still not really that great of a game. The thing that makes it the worst version is that it was released TWO YEARS LATER than the Japanese version, and it was a Blockbuster Video exclusive, meaning it wasn't widely for sale, only for rent. As such, it's one of the rarest games on the system, making physical copies extremely expensive. However, the Super Famicom version typically goes for a fraction on eBay. MATT: Speaking of expensive games; Final Fight 3! This late-era SNES title was a lot like the second: An original game, and not an arcade port. There's actually not too much to talk about here, except in Japan, it was given the objectively better name of "Final Fight Tough", and that women can now be hit! There's a Skull Cross Gang member by the name of May, who the player can smash and/or bash in the first equal opportunity mainline Final Fight game in the West on Nintendo systems! DEREK: Wow, what a distinction! By this point in our timeline, however, we are in the mid-90's, when Final Fight characters started appearing in Street Fighter games, and they would retain their Japanese names. ... except for Andore, who became Hugo. And Poison's there too, as his manager! That's cool, that's fun! But also, our buddy Sodom officially entered the fighting game world in Street Fighter Alpha 1, but retaining his Japanese name. However, Sodom would don the Katana moniker one last time in the AMAZING and inexplicable port of Street Fighter Alpha 2 for the Super Nintendo! This feels, to me, less about censorship and more about preserving localization, which... I dunno, weird time to suddenly start taking that seriously, Nintendo. But maybe by late 1996, nobody was really paying attention? Plus, the home ports of Alpha 1 and 2 on other systems released around this time kept the Japanese name! Furthermore, Katana would be Sodom once again on the Game Boy Color port of Alpha, but, anyway, let's get back to Final Fight. Before we close out the 90's, we have a Final Fight curio: Final Fight Revenge! This game re-imagines Final Fight as a fighting game and, for me, is most notable for how awesome Poison is! Developed by Capcom USA, the West never got the home port, but... it's not really a great game, so we didn't miss out on too much. MATT: Augh, you missed tons, man!
DEREK: [chuckle] Alright, man! MATT: Aah, I've been waitin' for this, it's my time to shine, baby! DEREK: Alright, Matt, what's so great about Final Fight Revenge? MATT: Final Fight Revenge was bold enough to place weapons on the battlefield, for anyone to use, had cinematic supers that would change depending if you finished someone off with one, it had Haggar pile-driving you through the EARTH! DEREK: What?! Dude, that's awesome! MATT: Oh, and there's Zombie Belger! DEREK: Why don't people like this game again? MATT: Oh, I don't know, because... ... 'cuz I guess it was only on the Japanese Saturn? And it cost like 300 dollars? Psh! Didn't stop me from buyin' a copy though! DEREK: And it never made it out of the arcades over here, so there aren't really any localization things we can talk about? MATT: None that I'm aware of, no. DEREK: Well, then can we watch that zombie dance, maybe? MATT: Yeah, I'd like that! ♫ "On the ceiling and onto the dancefloor" ♫ ♫ "Flashing colors are shimmering bright" ♫ DEREK: By this point, arcades were starting to die out. Home consoles started to catch up to arcades, and the graphical capabilities gap was fastly closing, and that's not the only thing that's changed! Games ratings boards like the ESRB now allowed content once thought too racy for consumers to exist unchanged and uncensored! But by 2001, the original Final Fight was 12 years old, and it was high time for the original arcade classic to finally be brought to the West, just like it had been in the West in arcades- wait. You'd think a system that also has Wolfenstein 3D fully uncensored wouldn't still censor Final Fight, but Final Fight One would see Jessica in a dress, and Billy instead of Poison. However, Damnd is Damnd and Sodom is Sodom, so it's not as cleaned up as the Super Nintendo version. It's baffling, really, like it's 2001! I thought we were past all this! But for context's sake, Capcom would release the censored version of Resident Evil for the DS in 2006, so... we're not really sure what their deal was. It honestly feels more like laziness instead of censorship. But outside of all this, Final Fight One is an otherwise-faithful port of the game, and thanks to some extra stuff and a ton of bonus unlockables, it is still a must-have for Final Fight fans. MATT: What's very much not a must-have is the next game. DEREK: Yeah, Final Fight didn't see much action for 5 more years, until one of the most baffling entries in the series; Final Fight: Streetwise. It's another one of those Capcom games that didn't even release in Japan, which is always a warning sign. Streetwise was made by the same American studio as Revenge, and the Maximo series, which is a great series! But Streetwise was originally going to be a LOT different from what we actually got. MATT: Yeah. Initially the game was pitched as Final Fight: Seven Sons, which looked like it was going to be a much more faithful a translation of a Final Fight-style brawler into the third dimension. It was colorful, cel-shaded and featured tons of moves, like hulking out into a bigger, powerful-er, more Final Fight-ier form. Apparently, Capcom USA execs thought the game wouldn't sell with this direction, and mandated it be scrapped and re-shaped to something more akin to popular western games of the time. And despite a lot of nods to the arcade originals, Sodom/Katana and Poison are never mentioned in the finished game, though early concept art for both characters has surfaced, but were cut from the game for... some reason. As an aside, Capcom released a very similar title just a few months before Streetwise, that being Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance, which, oddly enough, DID get a Japanese release. DEREK: Can I be honest? I constantly forget that Streetwise and Beat Down are even two different games. MATT: Right? It was developed by Cavia, a Japanese developer who also worked on Resident Evil: Dead Aim and Umbrella Chronicles, so... I guess that explains that? DEREK: I guess? Streetwise was the last Final Fight game, but that doesn't mean Final Fight's localization issues are over. We're gonna wrap up this video with Poison, because Capcom is still struggling with how to deal with her localized gender. A year after Streetwise came out, Yoshinori Ono, the producer of Street Fighter IV, said on Twitter, and then deleted, that in North America, Poison is officially a post-op transsexual, but in Japan, she simply tucks her business away in order to look like a girl. Ono? More like Oh, no... Gotta love the mid-aughts Capcom PR, yeesh. At this point, it's 2007, why do things need to be different between regions?! Capcom would continue to wiffle-waffle on Poison's transgender controversy, through press kits promoting 2010's Final Fight: Double Impact including a... - oh god, really? - ... "It's A Trap!!!" pink Poison hair spray. While derogatory, at this point Capcom seems to be going all-in on her transgender identity. But this wouldn't last: In 2011, Poison fans got some radical news! Poison would finally be playable in the Street Fighter series! Sick of being just a manager to Hugo, Poison's gonna rope in the talent by beatin' the crap out of 'em! Or something. It's fun. But another wrench gets thrown into the story for our purposes: Both Yoshinori Ono and Capcom USA's Chris Svensson would say during San Diego Comic Con that Capcom is ambiguous on Poison's gender, and doesn't have an official stance. Ono even goes on to say in an interview with EGM that Poison was originally intended to be "female". Okay, Ono, if that's how you're gonna play it, then what was up with the new half thing? Okay, so, in 2007, series designer Akira Nishitani mentioned in an interview that during the creation of Poison, they were "mildly concerned about the possibility of a lawsuit". I guess that makes sense though, living in fear of a lawsuit is one of Capcom's defining traits! Anyway, back to 2011 and Capcom's stance that there is no stance: Bafflingly, while saying that Capcom wants to play both sides by not acknowledging if Poison is transgender or not, Ono tacitly admits she is by saying they were working with GLAAD to make Poison's inclusion less problematic. So basically, they're admitting she's trans enough to need to pull in GLAAD, but they don't wanna alienate anyone by saying she is? It's not like you don't have a ton of options if you wanna play a woman who isn't trans, Capcom! Alright, I'ma be honest, let's- let's get real here. We really struggled with how to handle Poison ourselves, because at the end of the day, this is a region differences video, and with region differences, intent is important. Localization is about filtering your intent through another culture so that intent reads the same way in another culture. But Capcom isn't being clear about its intent here. It's hard to keep this within the scope of How the West was Worse if it's so all over the place with every region. Poison is a failure of localization in a lot of ways, but she's also great! To be honest, you couldn't throw a rock at a 1990's arcade without hitting a game with a Barbie bimbo babe-style character like Poison. No-one would care about Poison if it wasn't for this! For example, Roxy's fanbase is infinitesimal by comparison! Okay, we're gonna try to be nuanced here: Neither Grace or I are really qualified to address this, and I feel like by even talking about it, just gonna make everyone angry, but here we go: We don't think Poison was fully intended to be trans from conception, because throwing in the phrase "new half" really does feel like an eleventh-hour cop-out. But, at the end of the day, what's important is that she's here now. It's been almost 30 years of back-and-forth with Poison, and 30 years later, there still aren't a lot of trans characters in media, and regardless of how Capcom stands, there's no reason Poison can't be a trans icon, no matter how she started. And that is it! We're thankful to Matt for layin' down his barrel-smashing knowledge on Final Fight for us! MATT: Hey, no problem! Now, we only touched upon Final Fight: Streetwise, but if you wanna hear more details about that car wreck, check out my series, Wha Happun?, where I chronicle lots of video game catastrophes! DEREK: And thank you all for joining us on what turned out to be a three-part journey on Capcom, How the West was Worse. Check out the other two videos if you haven't already. We got more videos highlighting western localization lunacy on the horizon, but tell us what you wanna see next! Subscribe, tell a friend about the show, and of course, the specialest of special thanks to our wonderful Patreon supporters, every single name, every single name you see right here... awesome! All of them, awesome! That's it for now, thanks again for watching, and we'll see you again real soon.
