Reader request: Joy Mech Fight

Nintendo made a Japan-exclusive fighter that'll at least visually remind you of Rayman and Gunstar Heroes, and did so way back in the Famicom era.

This column is “Reader request,” which should be pretty self-explanatory. If you want to request a game be played and written up, leave a comment with the game (and system) in question, or let me know on Twitter or Bluesky. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

In the days before Super Smash Bros., Nintendo didn’t spend much time making fighting games. It’s just not a genre they’ve always put heavy focus on in their four-plus decades of making video games, but in the wake of the success of Capcom’s Street Fighter II, minds were at least temporarily changed. And how could they not be? Street Fighter II broke the hold that shoot ‘em ups had on arcades, bringing fighting games to the fore and relegating STGs to the niche market. It eventually joined Pac-Man and Space Invaders as arcade games that grossed over $10 billion, and, across its multiple versions, was the best-selling fighting game ever until 2019, with over 23 million units sold.

Nintendo’s first fighting game since 1984’s Urban Champion did, uh, not have that kind of impact. They’d get there eventually, of course: Super Smash Bros. is now the second best-selling fighting game franchise ever behind Mortal Kombat, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, released for the Switch in 2019, is the game that finally toppled Street Fighter II in the sales rankings with nearly 32 million copies sold. But back in 1993, in the wake of Street Fighter II, the ideas and execution were much better than the profits: that’s when Joy Mech Fight released for the Famicom, in spite of its successor, the Super Famicom/SNES, already having been on the market for three and two calendar years, respectively.

There’s really something to those late-life Famicom games that shows the system, somehow, had so much more to offer even a decade into its lifespan. It’s easy to forget, from the North American perspective, that the basic NES hardware dates back to 1983: it released in Japan in July of that year, but wouldn’t come to North America until October of ‘85. for some additional contextual weight of the lifespan of the classic system: The Famicom had 681 licensed exclusives, more than there were worldwide releases for the system, and three more games than North America saw even with its own 186-game slate of region exclusives. The Famicom/NES had just under 1,400 licensed games, which is far, far more than your average NES enjoyer might be aware of, considering the more limited window in which their version of the system was both available and marketed to them. The NES saw another nearly 200 new releases after the SNES hit shelves in North America, while the Famicom put out another 340 after the Super Famicom landed. More games earlier, more games later, more games period for the Famicom.

So, as North America moved on to the SNES (and rival Sega Genesis), leaving the NES behind, Japan’s console war wasn’t nearly as bloody. The Mega Drive didn’t take off there even a little bit, the PC Engine was successful, sure, but not at Super Famicom levels, and neither of the major 32-bit systems, the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn, would arrive until 1994. So the Famicom could keep getting exclusives and attention in a way that maybe wouldn’t have worked out in North America, if the trail of extremely rare due to lack of sales late-life gems of that system are any indication. Joy Mech Fight, Nintendo’s answer to Street Fighter II — or at least an answer to the sudden popularity of Street Fighter II’s genre — was one such game that stayed in Japan where it wouldn’t be as overshadowed.

Also known as Joy Mecha Fight — likely due to its Japanese name, Joi Meka Faito — it’s the kind of game that can only come out on a system when its developers are fully aware of what it’s capable of. The Famicom was 10 years old at this point: no one was going to develop a game with arcade-sized fighting game sprites, with perfectly smooth animations and detailed, colorful backgrounds, in 1985 or 1988 or whatever, and you know this is true, because you know what Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3, if nothing else, looked like in those years. Kirby’s Adventure, released in 1993, looks like it does for a reason, and that reason is a decade of familiarity with a system capable of so much more than 1985 and 1988 could show. Joy Mech Fight is in that same bucket.

There are plenty of reasons to enjoy Joy Mech Fight, but the one that sticks out the most is that it’s welcoming to beginners and gets complicated enough that fighting game veterans can have a good time, as well. It has button combos, but they only utilize the cardinal directions on the D-pad instead of half circles, making inputting them feel as simple as, say, Sabin’s pseudo-fighting game inputs for his Blitz attacks in Final Fantasy VI, rather than the wildly complicated setup of a King of Fighters. Each fighter has an array of similar moves at their disposal, but they also have a series of special moves and a hidden one: thanks to the lack of half circles and diagonals and more complicated inputs, as well as a simple B/A face button setup, you can experiment your way to them a lot more easily than in fighting games with far more buttons.

It ends up being kind of a happy medium between what Nintendo would move toward with Smash Bros., where all you need to do is press a direction and a corresponding button to perform a different move like you’re grappling in WWF WrestleMania 2000, and the more complicated fighting games of the time (which persist to this day). The trick — and what gives Joy Mech Fight a longer shelf life — is in figuring out which fighters you want to use, and which fighters are better fits for particular match-ups.

This is no small task, either, as Joy Mech Fight has 36 fighters to choose from. That wasn’t just a huge roster for the time, but the largest of its day, and for quite a few years. As Hardcore Gaming 101 explained back in 2009, most people who played weren’t even aware that the roster was that large, because it was hidden behind completing the story mode on its many difficulty levels:

To make all 36 robots playable, but only outside of story mode, do the following: In story mode, defeat the first seven opponents and the first area boss. Exit story mode, then select it again. You will be given the choice of two difficulty levels at this point. Choose the lower of the two. Finish the game on this mode exclusively and wait through the entire credits. Push Start when you are asked to do so to make every character except the area bosses playable (Push Select at the character selection screen to choose from the others). At this point you’ll have a third difficulty setting available – beat the entire game on this mode exclusively and wait through the entire credits. Push Start when you are asked to do so, and all 36 combatants will be playable. Joy Mecha Fight saves your progress in story mode automatically, so you don’t have to do all this in the same sitting.

Now, they aren’t all unique characters — as HG101 would go on to say, some are palette swaps, some are “Ken-and-Ryu-style clones,” but even with that, there’s still a considerable roster here for head-to-head play, whether in 1993 or in the present, non-Smash Bros. division.

To get back to the match-ups thing, while basic moves like punches and kicks are shared across characters and easily performed, unique special moves might be the difference between winning and losing a given fight against a particular robot, and deployment of the hidden version of those moves even more so. If your opponent expects your special move to be horizontal, so they come at you from above using a long jump, and you can use the hidden variation of that same move that works vertically? Well your friend is going to be very annoyed at you, but it’ll be worth it. And there are fighters your pal could have chosen to mitigate this, too, which is kind of the beauty of all of this. You’ll be able to discover who can do what, special and hidden moves, too, by playing through the story mode on the various difficulties., which will also teach you plenty about which robots are right and wrong against others unless you’re skilled enough to blunt force your way through a fight, anyway.

This story mode features one scientist who has decided he’s a bad guy now, and has programmed his robots to go along with it, and his scientist friend who’s out to put a stop to that and return everyone to normal. You start with one robot, Sukapon, and pick an opponent from the eight available. As you defeat these first eight fighters, they become playable by you in (and out of) story mode; once you’ve cleared this first group, another appears, and so on until you’ve defeated them all. While story mode limits the robots you can pick — and you’ll be using the “worse” versions of some robots in story mode when tougher iterations of them begin to appear — everyone you defeat becomes playable outside of story mode, so it’s worth going through it all on multiple difficulties both to unlock and to learn.

Fights are a best of five with a little bit of a twist which makes them feel less drawn out than that implies. You have three health bars which might be utilized across five fights, and the only way to get some health back is to win. You don’t get much back after securing a W, but you get a little, and that little bit might be what you need to, say, go up 2-0 without having used a health bar yet. Which means you’ll have a lot of leeway for the much tougher, much more desperate, nearly eliminated stage of the fighter you’re battling. The music picks up the pace when a winner can be decided with one more fall, and so too does the computer-controlled fighter who’s on the ropes.

This also means that you can be up 2-0, then be dropped once or twice in short order if you don’t adjust, evening things up at 2-2 and making it all precarious. It’s not likely on the lower difficulty levels, no, but the robots get harder the further you go, and as said, will bust out special and hidden moves far more on the tougher difficulties, too, making your job harder — that you can be briefly stunned when you take enough of a beating means defeat is never as far away as it looks. And if you’re fighting against a human opponent, well, they can also adjust and learn from their mistakes, and make you pay when their backs are against the wall, too.

As you saw if you watched the above embedded video, the way Joy Mech Fight was able to have such smooth animation of such large sprites was to not make large sprites at all. Each character, instead, is made up of a number of smaller sprites, that are either connected a la Gunstar Heroes’ various large-scale bosses, or with no interest in actually connecting limbs or hands or feet to bodies, a la Rayman. The results speak for themselves: sure, more powerful systems could do a bit more in some areas, but that this appeared on an 8-bit system with 10 years behind it is hard to believe. And yet, there it is. The backgrounds scroll while objects within the background have their own animations, all while two large-scale fighters smoothly duke it out. Wildly impressive, if you remember even a little bit of the flickering and chug chugging of the 8-bit era, and it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t just look good “for the time” or “for the Famicom.” That’s just some impressive work in a vacuum.

You can tell this is the rogue scientist, because of the mustache.

Joy Mech Fight was conceived by Koichi Hayashida and Koichiro Eto, who met at a programming seminar hosted by the Big N, then completed an early version of the game, known as Battle Battle League. Hayashia would end up working for Nintendo in the long run — why wouldn’t they have tried to hire the programmer who could make the Famicom do what seemed impossible? — and Battle Battle League would become Joy Mech Fight.

Hayashida, who directed and programmed Joy Mech Fight, is still with Nintendo, and has quite the résumé there: Super Mario Sunshine programmer, assistant director of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, level design director of Super Mario Galaxy, director of Super Mario Galaxy 2, Super Mario 3D Land, both NES Remix entries, and Super Mario 3D World, producer of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker and Super Mario Odyssey, and, most recently, game design for Super Mario Bros. Wonder. For a bit of full circle here, he also served as the original game supervisor for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate . Every one of those games, save 2023’s Wonder which released after the fact, is on the Nintendo top 101 published at Retro XP: sure, that list needs updating, but it’s not because any of those titles need to be removed from it. A pretty good 30-year run there.

While Joy Mech Fight either wasn’t available at all outside of Japan for those 30 years, you could play one of the unofficial translations, the first of which was released in 2000, or the rom hack that worked on balancing the game for competitive purposes back in 2021. It hasn’t been completely unknown — it is a Nintendo game, after all — but it got its first worldwide non-niche bit of attention just last year, when it was released on the Nintendo Switch Online service. It’s untranslated, but you can figure out what’s going on without being able to read any of the game’s story dialogue, and the gameplay translates easily enough without access to an English manual. It’s absolutely worth giving a shot if you have an interest in fighting games or even just seeing something you didn’t know the Famicom could do, and if you’ve got a NSO basic subscription, you can do so without an additional cost. It’s not as good as having it available to purchase, but hey, that it’s available at all is something of a welcome surprise.

Thanks to

William F. Edwards

for the game request

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.