Kishin Doji Zenki: Vajura Fight submitted by missa

In writing this review I now know how the first human being who tried to convince someone else that the world was round felt. I assure you though, Zenki on the PC-FX is truly a first-rate game...and not just by PC-FX standards either. Zenki isn't just a good game, it's a truly great game. Zenki FX takes you by the ear, kicks your ass and then feeds it back to you. Only it's so good, that you won't complain. The concept of Zenki is pretty interesting too. It is part action game, part fighting game, with a complex story to boot.
Luckily for English viewers, the story is acted out on screen, easily giving you a sense of what is going on. The opening movie which will have you singing along with it the second time you hear it, to the beginning scene with lush 2D in-game animation: some lizard-men with spears kicking a woman in the head reminiscent of some of the best Neo Geo games.
If Neo Geo is the REAL DEAL, this is the REAL DEAL FX! In fact Zenki on the FX is everything a game should have been on the Neo Geo CD console: fast load times, utterly insane animation quality (just try rapidly pausing and unpausing when you kill some of the enemies sometime), quality effects like FMV elements as part of the background. Like in the scene where the jet airplane explodes or during some of the more psychadelic parts of Zenki. To make things even sweeter, there are animated portraits for each character
whenever they talk which show their emotions. It is often like having 3 mini movies playing on screen while the sprite characters act it out on their own. It can be a lot to watch at times, but following More's Law, that's a good thing, right?
Like most games, Zenki begins with fairly easy, lets call them bosses. However, just because they are easier to fight does not mean that they have any less detail put into the animation, and many of the bosses take up half of the screen's height. Some like the possessed frog are massive taking up 3/4Th's of the height and easily 1/3rd the width of the screen, all the while dishing out frantic flurries of moves. In the later stages, the bosses of Zenki will make you feel like a swat team trying to kill a raging person on PCP. No matter how many times you hit them, they keep rushing at you, their hands blurring with fierce alacrity.
The enemies you face in the action part of the levels are for the most part too easy to kill, but they give you a break in between each boss fight and offer a chance to earn more continues. Continues in Zenki are precious on the hard difficulty so I am grateful the programmers decided to add them in. Occasionally you get cheap'd during a boss battle and loose 75% or more of your life before you can respond, the harder the difficulty, the more this is magnified. However I never feel like the computer is cheating like I have with
other fighting games like Street Fighter II where the computer could press foward WHILE holding down back to execute one move while charging the other -_-;

The true delight of Zenki though is the story which plays out during the game. In most fighting games you simply go from one random fighter to the next. But in Zenki every fight has a reason and what is happening generally makes sense. Not that Zenki will suprise you with plot twists much but the storyline is solid and as I have said before, FULLY animated out for your viewing pleasure. A common Zenki plot device could the boy in the wheelchair who is blocking you path, could he be something other than what he appears on the surface? Or was the kidnapping of the girl a trap?? I myself found these chiches to be charming and they helped make it easy to understand and enjoy the storyline.

In the end, Zenki gives PC-FX owners a glimpse into the kind of games the FX was capable of. Fast paced action games, with multiple scrolling backgrounds WHILE playing back FMV. Large, fast moving sprites. Rocking soundtracks. Almost everything every other FX game is lacking Zenki brings on in heaps! I can't complain about even the play control. Zenki is truely a great game which you can play over and over again.