Survival Arts

Survival Arts is a 1993 arcade fighting game and Mortal Kombat clone developed by Scarab (predecessors to feelplus, developers of Ju-On: The Grudge and MindJack) and published by Sammy of Guilty Gear fame.

Why It Won’t Survive

 * 1) The game is extremely unbalanced because some of the characters are overpowered while others are too underpowered. For example, the very first character you fight, Mongo, can spam his machine gun, flamethrower, throwing knives, and aerial torpedoes at will and at the exact same time.
 * 2) *By the way the torpedos are extremely powerful, if they connect, they can take a third of the opponent's health bar, and if they are used as a counter, THEY CAN INSTANT KILL THE ENEMY CHARACTER, and curiously this is specially effective when fighting the final boss (yes there is a character that can kill the final boss in 1 hit).
 * 3) Terrible and hideous graphics, especially by 1993 standards, the color palette is oddly unpleasant and ugly to see, which tries too hard to be a copy of Mortal Kombat, but fails terribly. It is possible that you refuse to see the graphics in more than 3 minutes.
 * 4) The character sprites are so big, they take up half of the screen, this causes the arenas to be incredibly small and make the gameplay even more clunky, as it gives the players a really small space to move.
 * 5) The levels are too small for fighting game standards. Some of them make absolutely no sense either, for example an aquarium while fighting Santanna, something like looks like a ripoff of the future scenes of Terminator when fighting Mongo or a museum when fighting Gunner.
 * 6) Laughable and uninspired character designs, they are all extremely simple, and some others looks stupid, Gunner looks like a baseball player rather than a cop, Hiryu with his mask looks like an arabian guard and Tashia looks like an aerobics teacher with a mask rather than an assasin.
 * 7) The costumes worn by the actors playing the characters are too shiny.
 * 8) Terribly monotonous soundtrack, which largely consists of trumpets, trombones, and drums mashed together, and its barely memorable.
 * 9) The screen tears apart if a character jumps up and down, which is really annoying to the eyes.
 * 10) The fatalities are optional. To perform one, all you need to do is kill your opponent using a special move in the final round.
 * 11) *All the fatalities are extremely basic and similar.
 * 12) The final boss Dantel has a beyond ridiculous design, complete with purple robes and an 80s-style mullet.
 * 13) When Dantel has defeated heads of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini start coming out of his body, which makes everything even more ridiculous.
 * 14) Cheap difficulty, even while using an extremely broken character like Mongo, the cpu is really annoying, aggressive, blocks and counters constantly to the point of irrritation, and Dantel specially is a pain in the ass, due to his overpowered special moves.
 * 15) The interactions with the stage by picking weapons that appear on it, is kinda wasted, and doesnt contribute anything to the game, its much better just using the overpowered moves of some characters.
 * 16) The bonus stage sucks, because there are items that are way to short to hit them.
 * 17) Some movesets are really uninspired, for example Mongo or Gunner who just use attacks with their weapons, or Kane who just has a simple brutish moveset of strong punches and dash attacks.
 * 18) *Also some characters like Tasha and Gunner have really small movesets.
 * 19) The gameplay is unremarkable, and older games like Street Fighter 2 does the 6 button fighting style much better.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Decent animation, unlike most Mortal Kombat clones.
 * 2) It's so bad it's funny.
 * 3) The controls are good unlike most of its peers.

Trivia

 * Ports of the game for the SNES and Sega Genesis were announced in 1994, but said ports were nowhere to be seen since the announcement meaning they were quietly cancelled.