Video Game / Fight'N Rage

Fight'N Rage is a Beat 'em Up video game created by sebagamesdev, launched on Steam on September 19, 2017. Made by only one person (Sebastián García, although the soundtrack was made by Gonzalo Varela), the game is considered a tribute to all of the Beat'em Ups of The Golden Age of Video Games.

In a distant future, a great apocalypse known as "The Great Pulse" has devastated most of the technology on Earth, and the animals had mutated and reclaimed the planet under orders from "The Boss", whose only laws are the Law of the Jungle and that humans must die or be enslaved. But not everything is lost: two humans and a rebel mutant decide to fight against the savage regime by the Boss and free the oppressed humans.

Everything in this game is inspired by the classic Beat'em ups such as Streets of Rage, Final Fight, and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. Including multiple combos and special attacks, cooperative local three-player mode, multiple paths and endings. It includes a variety of additional content such as a Battle Mode, Training Mode, and even the chance to play as any enemy that you've unlocked so far. The three protagonists are:

• Gal: a girl who has escaped the clutches of human slave traffickers. She uses her own style of martial arts based on Kickboxing and plenty of cartwheels and jumps.
• Ricardo: a powerful mutant Luchador and activist of human rights, with his own arsenal of moves, ready to send his unfortunate enemies to a world of hurt.
• F.Norris: a ninja whose past remains unknown, and the only known wielder of a forbidden technique with a high power.

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Fight'n Rage provides examples of:

• Action Girl: Gal, with a healthy dose of She-Fu.
  • Dark Action Girl: Tracy and the other Linda Lash expies, although they don't have many attacks, they can be quite dangerous on high numbers.
  • Diane the foxgirl is certainly no pushover either as she fights like Gal but with some special moves of her own.
• Airborne Mook: The human-sized flies with boxing gloves, they are incredibly annoying due to their fast attacks and how hard is to hit them. Surprisingly, none of the actual bird enemies fly in battle.
• Anti-Frustration Features: The game smooths over some of its inspirations' rough patches, particularly the more quarter-munching ideas:
  • Due to the sheer number of endings (see Multiple Endings below), you only need to clear the game following a specific path without any secret conditions. Heck, you can clear the game on Easy and still get the ending.
  • Also, continues doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is the route and decisions taken.
  • The game offers AI partners as an unlockable option, mainly so they can help you get endings that require multiple characters.
  • When playing in co-op, characters who run out of lives will eventually revive with a small amount of health so their player isn't stuck waiting until the team uses a continue to get back into the game.
  • A game in progress was be resumed by selecting the same character and difficulty next time. This happens whether the game was quit from the menu or via game over.
• Apocalypse How: "The Great Pulse"; it rendered every technological device useless, leaving the world at mercy of the mutant animals.
• Artificial Stupidity: The game even admits that the AI helpers aren't very smart, though in all fairness, it is selling them short. They can pull their weight rather well, but they are a bit too aggressive and will grab enemies that counter grabs, stand near bosses who punish players for being too close when they get up, and refuse to eat food until they're almost dead. The first three problems are what rookies would do anyway.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: The game's soundtrack is mostly face-melting electric guitar, coming out strongest in boss fights. The only exceptions are the beach level and the nightclub, which go for relaxing tropical jams and jazzy swing, respectively.
• Berserker Tears: Implied in a particular path where The Player Characters start the stage instantly in a powered up state after Jennifer, whom they just rescued, is murdered.
• Bittersweet Ending: Endings G and H have the heroes defeat the Boss, but fail to save Jennifer, which weighs heavily on them, especially Ricardo. Gal's Ending G alleviates this somewhat by focusing more on Gal preparing to find and fight the secret benefactor of the Boss than on Jennifer's murder.
• Brick Joke: Of a rather twisted variety. If you go to the nightclub stage and keep going right, you'll find some Privates trying to figure out what to do with a girl they caught, with one suggesting they use her as bait to lure people to Attary's arena in the building. Taking the detour just outside their room has them doing just that.
• Bonus Feature Failure: Several of the unlockable characters fall into this in comparison to the cooler and more practical main characters. Though to be fair, if you thought characters like Filcher were going to be of any value, then there's something wrong with you.
• Cast from Hit Points: Just like Streets of Rage 3, you have a SP meter that drains when you use your special attack and then refills slowly over time, and if you use it again when the meter isn't full, it drains your HP instead.
• Continuing is Painful: Downplayed on Easy and Normal (and after an update, Hard and Hardest); continuing will return you to the start of the section where you lost all of your lives. Played straight on Insane and higher difficulties, where you return to the start of the stage.
• Damsel out of Distress: If you play as Gal, you gradually learn that Gal was originally kidnapped to be sold as a slave girl to The Boss, but Gal was able to free herself during the warehouse explosion, which is why she's one of the playable heroes.
• Don't Celebrate Just Yet: If you take the "Blood on the Road" path (retreat at the start of the game, and then agree to help Iris), you get a "Stage Clear?" message after defeating Tracy and General Tigar. The score screen is interrupted by the appearance of Lt. Fleek and Mr. Flak, who tell you that you have to fight them in order to clear the level for real.
• Double Unlock: Taken to the extreme as just about everything is a double unlock. For example, to unlock the enemy characters for use in other modes (except Arcade Mode and Training Mode), you have to defeat a set number of them on the Arcade Mode; after that they will be available to buy on the Extras Menu.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep":
  • The Boss's real name is never given; he's only known as The Boss even after you unlock his bio.
  • Mutants call all their female human captives "gals". As an escapee from a human trafficking ring, it's possible that the playable Gal has no name of her own.
• Expy: Almost every character has been modeled after a classic Fighting/Beat Em' Up character.
• The Extremist Was Right: If you choose the "escape" route at the warehouse, you eventually meet a human tribe with a female mechanic named Iris. After it becomes clear that the mutants knew about the warehouse rescue mission, Iris and the village elder have an argument about how to proceed from there: the elder wants to take the more prudent route and escape before the mutants find them, while Iris's plan is more violent; she wants to take their only truck and fight the mutants directly. Iris turns out to be right; if you don't go with Iris's plan, the mutants will launch a raid on the humans and kill almost the entire group, though at least Iris herself will survive.
• Fragile Speedster: Gal has the greatest speed and combo potential of the heroes, but she has the lowest defense and health.
• Game-Over Man: The Boss appears to taunt you on a Game Over. Amusingly, if you continue, he'll have a shocked reaction.
• Girly Run: The normal walk cycle for female NPCs. Frankly it looks necessary to keep their assets under control.
• Hard Mode Perks: Enemies get stronger and the Elite Mooks appear earlier, but you earn more coins for unlocking the Extras at the end of the run.
• Hope Spot: Promise Village, which our heroes can go to after rescuing Jennifer in the first stage. The villagers have managed to get a peace treaty with The Boss's mutants, letting peaceful humans and mutants join their ranks to live safely... They keep that peace treaty by giving up any deserters to the mutants, and that includes our heroes and Jennifer. The village is named after that promise.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: You can find apples and chicken that regenerate your HP immediately by hitting drums and being dropped by some enemies.
• I Am a Humanitarian: The Slaughterhouse is all but stated to house humans that the mutants later kill and cook for food, what with the bloody cells that have humans in them, butcher's charts on the walls depicting female humans, and the blood soaked kitchen that the protagonists all recognize to smell like human corpses.
• Jack of All Stats: F.Norris, who strikes a balance between Gal and Ricardo by being an all-rounder with good reach, without Gal's speed or Ricardo's might.
• Last Chance Hit Point: When two or three players are present (AI included), if one (or two) player(s) runs out of lives but the other(s) doesn't, the Life Meter will recover slowly until it fills up, then the downed player(s) will revive with 20% of their life, and you can use this indefinitely. At least, until all the players have lost all of their lives.
• A Little Bit Beastly: The catgirl in the shop menu section looks like she came from a traditional anime, with only feline ears, fangs and tail. No explanation why she looks more human than the rest of the mutants.
• The Lost Lenore: If you play as F.Norris and rescue Jennifer the hostage, Jennifer will remind F.Norris of an unnamed lost love, and F.Norris will be very protective of Jennifer, which makes it worse when Jennifer is killed anyway after the villagers sell her out.
• Mighty Glacier: As a Haggar expy, Ricardo is slow, but can basically destroy enemies with ease.
• Monster Compendium: Buying a playable enemy comes complete with a brief bio about them.
• Ms. Fanservice: Seriously, not only Gal, but every female enemy and NPC counts as this!
  • Playing as Gal, it becomes clear rather quickly that both her and the other female slaves were not given a choice about wearing such a Stripperriffic outfits, with Gal being earmarked for The Boss' personal possession before she managed to break free.
• Multiple Endings: Every playthrough can have one of eight different endings, and there are seven possible combinations (each character, the three possible pairings, or the three characters together), bringing the grand total to 56 endings!
• Nintendo Hard: Enemies get more numbers, have more health, and hit really hard as the game progresses (even on Normal!), and there's also the Checkpoint Starvation at the Final Stage, and if you're playing on Insane or Higher, you will have to start the whole level over! See Continuing is Painful above.
  • If THAT isn't hard enough for you... the last unlockable difficulty is called Unfair, and it's the rough equivalent to Streets of Rage 2's Mania difficulty!!!. Fortunately, there aren't any unlockables that require you to beat this difficulty.
• No Fair Cheating: The "Clear arcade on X difficulty" costumes can only be unlocked via single-player, so a group of players can't just breeze through the game and earn unlockable content.
• No True Scotsman: If you play as Ricardo, The Boss will pull this fallacy on him; right after recognizing his strength, The Boss will claim that no true mutant would ever advocate for peace between humans and mutants as Ricardo does.
• The Order: The Ancient Order, which F.Norris is gradually revealed to be a runaway from. However, the organization itself is not discussed in detail, so we don't know too much about it.
• Our Minotaurs Are Different: One of the main characters, Ricardo is a Minotaur.
• The Quisling: An entire village of them. If you save Jennifer the hostage in the first level, your player character and Jennifer are invited to stay in a village that has a peace treaty with the mutants. Unfortunately, you learn too late that the peace treaty, in exchange for not killing/enslaving the human inhabitants, requires that the village turn over deserters to the mutant army, and Jennifer is killed anyway.
• The Runaway: If you play as F.Norris, you gradually learn that F.Norris is a runaway from the Ancient Order, but it's never made clear why F.Norris ran away or what the Ancient Order is like, though The Boss makes an insulting remark that F.Norris was seduced by "coward ideals". That and the fact you run into ninja mooks (sharing his move set) suggests this order has sided with the Boss.
• Schrödinger's Player Character: Character selection influences what happens in a given run and the dialogue in cutscenes reflects that. For instance, if you escape in the first level as Gal or F. Norris, the resistance mourns Ricardo's apparent death; if playing as Ricardo, they're overjoyed to find him again and make no mention of the other human characters.
• Sequel Hook: Every ending heavily implies that there was someone else pulling the Boss's strings.
• Shout-Out: Has its own page.
• Some Dexterity Required: Every character has access to (at least one) hidden special move that it's not documented in the tutorial:
  • Gal can do a fast springkick after landing (Hold Up in mid-air from a back jump and press Attack as you land).
  • F.Norris can do a guillotine throw that would make Ryu Hayabusa proud (Do a 270 from Back to Up and press Special).
  • Ricardo can perform his own version of the Shoryuu-reppa (After performing his Tauro Uppercut, keep holding the Attack button, tap the direction you want to go and release Attack as you land on the ground).
• Story Branching: There are multiple paths for the players to explore, either by walking upon certain paths or by making choices, and everything counts upon getting a different ending.
• There's No Kill like Overkill: When you defeat an enemy, you can keep attacking until they explode in a shower of bones for more points, just like a Brutality.
• Too Dumb to Live: Sometimes Ratty enemies will try to attack you by running you over with motorcycles, regardless of whether or not that's really a good idea, like inside an elevator or driving into an oncoming truck.
• Unlockable Content: Oh, boy..., where do we start: you have more difficulty levels, more outfits for your characters, the enemy characters themselves, and even speed settings. Everything can be unlocked by earning coins based on your final score (after you lost all of your lives or if you cleared the game).
• World of Buxom: There is only one chest size here, and it's Gal's.
• Wrestler in All of Us: Ricardo, being a minotaur version of Haggar, has plenty of these moves. The same goes for the wolf, another minotaur, and the jaguar enemies.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: One of the major path options is saving the hostage in the first level. If you escort her to a village, she winds up being killed anyway, as it was all a big trap.
  • Similarly, there's an alternate path in the nightclub where you find a woman dangling from a rope. After being pulled offscreen, Attary piledrives and kills her for no reason other than because he can. However, in this latter case, you can subvert the trope and save the woman's life if you choose not to take the detour to the basement; you'll still have to fight Attary as a boss, but the woman will be unharmed afterwards.