Do you have far too many games to play right now? Of course you do. All your free time is being sucked up by Balduring Gates and Starring Fields. And I get it. These are great titles that take dozens, if not hundreds, of hours to complete. Your Fall season is already packed and we still haven’t even been hit by Mortal Kombat 1 and Super Mario Bros. Wonder. There are too many games to play, and the nature of just how much work you’ll need to do to keep up is suffocating.
Anyway, here’s another game to play! But, and this is the nice part, it’s a Nintendo-developed fighting game from 1993 that never made it to the West until now. It’s also free if you’re paying for Switch Online. So not really free. But kind of free? Anyway, you should be playing Joy Mech Fight. Which, as of right now, is in the Nintendo Entertainment Section of the Switch Online emulators. For free-ish.
Technically Joy Mech Fight is a Famicom game and not an NES game since it never came over here, but that’s neither here nor there and we really don’t have time. Something about a sound chip being better and cartridges being more reliable. Yes, the Famicom was great. Thank you. We’ll all be sure to cluck in amazement at used games next time we’re embarrassing ourselves while visiting Nakano Broadway.
Let me back up. Joy Mech Fight is a Nintendo-developed, 8-bit fighting game released in 1993. As you might note, the Super Famicom was available in Japan in 1990 and Street Fighter 2 first came out in 1991. So this game came out during that big first fighting game boom. You’d expect it to be complete garbage like the vast majority of the other fighting games shoveled out during that time. It’s also understandable that Nintendo would think nobody outside of Japan would want the game. It’s a fighter that had to make due with a dying system’s hardware years after the hot new system had been released.
Except, it pulls it off! Joy Mech Fight is a fun fighting game that is far better than it has any right to be. Like the original Street Fighter 2, it has eight fighters to choose from. Each fighter, as you’d expect, has their own moves and strategies and so forth and whatnot. Rather than being somewhat racist caricatures of people from all around the world, Joy Mech Fight uses a robot theme and story that’s basically Mega Man. Seriously, I know Mega Man didn’t invent “two scientists invent robots and then disagree on how to use them and one scientist turns evil,” but Joy Mech Fight definitely sticks super close to the formula.
The cool part is that, instead of inheriting a boss’ powers like you do in Mega Man, progressing through the single player 'story (it’s all in Japanese; good luck to you) allows you to use each robot you beat as a fighter. So instead of getting, say, Woodman’s leaves you’d get to fight as the whole damn Woodman if you wanted to. It’s not mind blowing but it does give a fun sense of progress as you 'turn' robots to your side.
Naturally, there are also straight up player vs. player, player vs, computer, and computer vs. computer modes. Also good news: you don’t need to progress through the game to unlock stuff. Mostly because there’s not much stuff to unlock. But still, it’s really a game that you can turn on right now and be fighting in a good thirty seconds.
The fact that the game is actually great is a miracle. The hardware pulls it off by animating the head, hands, feet, and torso independently of each other. You know in an SNES game when a dragon or monster or whatever would have a head and then a bunch of moving circles layered one over the other would represent a neck? Same deal. Probably. Someone’s going to get mad that I said this was the same deal. To be fair, this style can take some getting used to. Missing the connective tissue like “arms” and “legs” initially makes it hard to spot exactly what the fighters are doing. It’s even harder when the fighters are somewhat similar colors.
But, more importantly, it allows Joy Mech Fight to move and play like what we’d consider a normal, modern fighter. The controls are relatively smooth. The frame rate is far less choppy than you’d think considering the hardware. Despite being an 8-bit fighting game, it delivers a great experience and makes for incredibly fun versus matches. It was developed by Nintendo. The company knew how to squeeze the last drops of power from the system.
Most other fighting games (or two-player fighting modes) on the Famicom/NES were stuck pitting side-scrolling beat-'em-up characters against each other. Which is neat and all. Meanwhile, 8-bit games that tried to have bigger sprites were slow and awkward. I love the series, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters on the NES does not hold a damn candle to Joy Mech Fight on the Famicom.
Also, fun fact: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters was released in America but not Japan while Joy Mech Fight was released in Japan but not America. It’s been 30 years but we can finally play it easily without having to download a rom. That might not sound like much if you’re used to doing that all the time, but it’s encouraging to see some real classics that never came to the West finally and officially hitting an audience. So take five minutes from your miserable life scanning planets and play Joy Mech Fight.