Video Game / Fur Fighters

Fur Fighters is a video game developed by Bizarre Creations and published by Acclaim for the Sega Dreamcast in 2000. It was ported later that year to Windows, the next year to the PlayStation 2 (as Fur Fighters: Viggo's Revenge), and to iOS in 2012 (as Fur Fighters: Viggo on Glass). Although Bizarre Creations are now defunct, the copyright belongs to a former employee who bought it for five pounds.

The game has the player take control of six characters, five that have retired from a special military squad and one who is the child of a member, as they attempt to save their babies/siblings from the Big Bad General Viggo. As if kidnapping the hundreds of babies wasn't bad enough, Viggo also kidnapped their spouses/mother and have transformed them into mutant monstrosities and is using them to conquer the world in true super-villain fashion.

The game is a third-person-shooter but is also a massive platformer, each character having their own abilities which enables the player to explore the massive worlds and save their lost babies in.

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Fur Fighters contains examples of the following tropes:

• 100% Completion: Completing every level, with every baby rescued, and every token collected (the level hub and the Hub World tokens count).
• Affectionate Parody: The last level is basically one big homage to James Bond and other 1960s spy fiction.
• Animal Stereotypes: The main characters themselves (really noticeable in the PS2 port) and General Viggo.
• Anvil on Head: An unusual variation of the trope. The introduction to Cape Canardo shows a bus that Roofus is traveling on being destroyed by a anvil out of nowhere. Cut to a decrepit space station where Viggo complains that after spending a fortune repairing the station and giving the bears astronaut training, his minions only brought one anvil to drop from orbit onto the Fur Fighters. He promptly orders everyone to begin abandoning the station. Cartoony villainy at its finest.
• Applied Phlebotinum: As an extra insult from Viggo to the heroes, their kidnapped spouses/husband/mother are somehow mutated into giant super-powered monstrosities. These creatures tend to figure greatly in Viggo's schemes. It's a little ridiculous when a dog or a kangaroo of maybe 4-5 feet turns into 400 m. tall mutants. And after they get shot enough, the afflicted turn right back into their former selves with no medical complications.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Many, many times (often when up against a chameleon bot in many a level: Its eye).
• Authority Equals Asskicking: Viggo doesn't serve as the game's final encounter for nothing.
• Badass Adorable: Pretty much every Fur Fighter has shades of this, but Tweek especially; being a baby dragon with a surprising knack for firearms literally right out of the nest.
  • The Fur Fighter babies also occasionally demonstrate some incredible competence far beyond their years. For example, one of Bungalow's kids is briefly shown calmly and confidently flying a helicopter.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: In the Space Station Meer you bump into a large Alien, only for it to be removed by a copyright lawyer fox from 31st Century Films who insists it is breaking at least 35 copyrights. A debate between him and whatever character you're playing occurs, and then a debate quickly becomes a gunfight.
• Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Most of the characters in the game don't wear shoes, but are otherwise fully-dressed.
• Bears Are Bad News: They are some of the Mooks of the game, after all. Robinson Bear is the single exception.
• Big Damn Heroes: The arrival of every single Fur Fighter, partner and baby at the end to save Roofus.
• Bigger on the Inside: Juliette's wardrobe within her house in Fur Fighter Village is absolutely colossal, and shouldn't be able to fit inside the building.
• Bloodless Carnage:
  • Fluff serves as the "blood" of the game. Which raises the question of whether or not the animals are real, needless to say however it's good clean fun despite having a "Teen" rating.
  • Taken a bit further with the blood cheat which is unlocked if you kill all the rabbits in Fur Fighter Village, it does absolutely nothing unless you're playing the PAL version of the game.
• Brainy Baby: Tweek. Despite having been born at most a day prior to General Viggo's initial attack on Fur Fighter Village, he's still highly proficient with firearms and guerrilla combat.
• Cats Are Mean: General Viggo, the main antagonist. Averted with Juliette and Claude, who are heroic and just snooty and artsy cats respectively.

• Checkpoint: The telepoints, which also double as the game's Save Point throughout the levels.
• Child Soldiers: Tweek the Dragon. Being the last of his mother's eggs to hatch — right around when Viggo attacks and kidnaps her — he's forced into action literal minutes after being born.
• Colossus Climb: An interesting example where you are helping the colossus. In certain areas of levels, the character you play as will be attacked by ticks and you will take control of the Mighty Flea to fight off the ticks, which will upgrade a skill of whoever is saved. These levels take place on a different part of each Fur Fighter: Roofus's head, Rico's face, Bungalow's butt, Chang's tail, Juliette's chest, and Tweek's back.
• Complexity Addiction: Played straight for Viggo, whose schemes are elaborate for relatively simple goals. Right at the end, Viggo realizes that he was always trying to be too clever, and that from now on he's just going to use his own brute force to get the job done.
• Don't Fear the Reaper: The Grim Beaver is actually quite personable.
• Doomsday Device: Several make an appearance in the final world, including a nuclear bomb and lots of missiles.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Bungalow's wife Esmerelda is a shrieking harpy who is introduced throwing pans at her husband. As Bungalow is the Butt-Monkey of the Fur Fighters, this is all played for comedy.
• Dual Boss: The bosses of Anatat Tatanatat (AKA the City of Fear), Winnie and Mai. Fittingly, you can play as both Roofus AND Chang since it's both their wives, by switching them out in mid-battle to recover.
• Dumb Muscle: For the heroes, Bungalow the Kangaroo. For the villains, every single Bear.
• Every Bullet is a Tracer: All bullets leave behind a cartoony line upon firing.

• Evil, Inc.: Viggo Industries. In addition to being blatantly run by a super villain, here's a sample of their advertising campaign.
  (Ingame billboard): Viggo Industries: You will buy our products.
• Faux Affably Evil: General Viggo balances the line between this and Affably Evil.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: The Bad Place is portrayed as this. The level is the game's equivalent of Hell and it begins on a series of narrow paths of floating, red rock with fire periodically shooting from either side.
• Follow the Money: The golden Tokens, which a) provide much-needed health, b) unlock later levels and c) are often placed to indicate which way you should head next (a much-needed feature, given the size of the levels).
• Funny Foreigner: All of the Fur Fighters are from different parts of the world, so naturally, this trope is combined with Funny Animal.
• Game-Breaking Bug: When trying to enter The Bad Place for the second time in the Dreamcast version, the game would allow you to walk anywhere just fine in the literally hellish level. But as soon as you try to enter the nightmare door, the game would take control of your character and slowly move him/her to the right until they fell off and died.
• Genius Bruiser: Viggo. Criminal mastermind and still able to lay a beatdown on the heroes if need be.

• Henpecked Husband: Poor Bungalow, married to an abusive harpy of a kangaroo.

• Hub Level: Each and every world in the game.
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: How does "City of Fear" tickle your fancy? With its sub-levels "Jungle of Despair", "The Temple of Gloom" and "The Bad Place".
• I Have Your Wife: The game starts off with General Viggo covering Fur Fighter Village in Knockout Gas and absconding with the heroes' children, along with their wives/husband/mother. Viggo did this to dissuade the Fur Fighters from interfering with his world domination scheme. They had other plans.
• Improbable Age: Tweek is one day old. He is just the biggest child of his family, and was too heavy for Viggo's bears to kidnap. He fights just as well as every other Fur Fighter.

• Island Base: Viggo's headquarters is an island base which is just off the coast of Fur Fighter village.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: After passing through the Door to Nowhere in the Bad Place, Roofus ends up in a white void full of red doors (Dreamcast version) or a floor on a hotel (PS2 version). Six doors in the area have the Fur Fighters' faces on them, and going through these doors will put the player into the Nightmare of the room's occupant. In order of access:
  • Tweek starts in his home and is still in his egg, and the nest with his unhatched siblings is out of reach. The goal of this Nightmare is to get Tweek back in the nest. This suggests that the one-day-old fears separation from his clan.
  • Bungalow appears in a marshy swamp, presumably somewhere in Australia. All the tokens for the Bad Place are solely in his Nightmare, and he has to locate/grab all of them to leave. Bungalow is aware that he's the least intelligent of his friends, and harbors feelings of intellectual inadequacy. Bungalow fears any intellectual burden for he feels he cannot do it.
  • Chang starts in a completely white room with invisible walls and is totally white himself. It's full of alligators that cannot see him beyond these walls, and the barriers form a maze. Chang wants people to notice him, but thinks they cannot because he's short or for some other reason. Alternatively, he thinks this will happen when he is old; unloved and unnoticed. Chang fears being ignored.
  • Rico is placed in New Quack City without any pants. He must run through the city alleyways while getting chased by police bears and fired upon by tanks. Rico wants to be free. Alternately, Rico has no underlying fears or insecurities the Door to Nowhere can exploit, so it just conjures up a "default" bad dream that anyone would reasonably not want to experience.
  • Juliette is in a mansion's dining hall in a formal black dress. People can be heard laughing at her attire. 6 dingoes wearing masks of the other Fur Fighters immediately attack her. Paintings of Viggo cover the walls, with one depicting Juliette in a bridal gown. She is all about being the fashionable one as her humongous closet can attest to. Her being laughed at means that people have dismissed these efforts, proving she worries about what others think about her. Getting attacked by her trusted companions states that she thinks they talk about Juliette behind her back. The portraits hint at something worse; she feels that the Fur Fighters trust her so poorly that she could defect to Viggo without much convincing. Juliette fears what others think, but she especially fears betraying her friends' trust.
  • Roofus is in a soldier's uniform in a burnt out building. He's been transported back to the war he served in, stuck in the middle of an active urban warzone. Roofus has to destroy two enemy tanks adorned with Viggo's emblem to leave. Simply put, Roofus does not want to go back to war.
• Justified Tutorial: The Undermill, if you choose to play the level that is. It's set up to put the formerly-retired Fur Fighters (and newly-born Tweek) through their paces and get them reacquainted with their skills, or taught them for the first time in Tweek's case.

• Late to the Tragedy: For lack of a better trope and in purely non-tragic sense. The game is basically set at the final chapters of a long conflict between the heroes and Viggo. Various hints are made that they have been fighting each other for the vast majority of their careers, Viggo being the classical spy movie supervillain and the Fur Fighters being the specialized team that foiled his schemes. The Fur Fighters had retired by the beginning of the game, and Viggo just wanted to get rid of them for his latest bid for world domination.

• Leitmotif: Whenever playing as any of the six Fur Fighters, each of them have a different variation of the level's theme play for them. Roofus has bagpipes/snare drums, Juliette has accordions, Rico has calypso music, Bungalow has aboriginal motifs, Chang has Oriental music, and finally Tweek has Gregorian chanting. This is not, however, a Variable Mix, as the music actually resets whenever the player switches from one character to the other. But the music plays so well with its own rhythm that it doesn't become noticeable after a while. In the first levels of New Quack City, there's little variation in the actual theme. But as the game goes on and you explore new levels, each new area creates wider variations, to the point of even becoming entirely different styles.
• Lost World: The dinosaurs have a human-like society where everything is just incredibly massive to the point of the Fur Fighters being the size of mice to them.

• Made of Iron: If it isn't a vehicle or a robot, the various mini-bosses seem made of some horrible synthesis of Kevlar and graphene. Expect to burn through enough ammo to kill 50-80 bears on one of these guys. Crocodiles also take several shots to bring down.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: General Viggo, bar his pink tracksuit in the final encounter.

• Mini-Boss: Various Chamelion Bots, and a Lawyer from 31st Century Films to name a few.
• Missing Mom: Tweek's Mother in particular, along with other Fur Fighter mothers kidnapped by Viggo.
• Mooks: Bears, Alligators, Peacocks, Dingos, Armadillos, and Cows.
• Multinational Team: Multi-national and multi-species, at that. To wit; you've got an Australian kangaroo, a Scottish hound dog, a French cat, an English baby dragon, a Chinese red panda, and an Argentinian penguin.
• Multi-Platform: First on the Sega Dreamcast, then on the PS2, and now on the iOS. Now it's only a matter of time before an HD re-release of the PS2 remake of the game is planned to be available for download on the Next-Gen Consoles.
• Never Say "Die": "You Fluffed It", which appears whenever you die.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: Crocodiles are one enemy type. They have no guns, they attack by running up and biting, and they take a lot of firepower to kill.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Sergeant Sternhauser, the strict German gazelle who tutors the Fur Fighters, has a passing voice reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger, even in the Simlish-style grunts of the Dreamcast version.

• Non-Mammal Mammaries: Every female character has a fairly sizeable bust, this includes the birds and even Tweek's dragon mom.
• Off with His Head!: A fun experiment to try: run up to any bear while using a shotgun and fire. Watch that head fly!
• Old Soldier: Roofus is literally this. Though by extension, the other Fur Fighters except Tweek are also this. More noticeably, General Bristol.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: The Bear Disguise, which is just a cardboard box with different angles of a bear's head drawn on the sides. The bears are dumb, remember.
• Pokémon Speak: Tweek (Although in the first boss fight, he said "Mother?".)
• Posthumous Character: General Bristol
• Power-Up: There's three of 'em and are usually rare in the course of the game, typically right before a mini-boss fight or ambush. These are the Beetle Shield which is exactly what it sounds like, Bear Disguise, which allows you to slip past enemies unsuspected (unless you're foolish enough to open fire on them), and Meerkat Multiple, where four Meerkats with sub-machine guns shoot with you.
• Respawning Enemies: Averted, as other levels, including each Hub Level (Other than most of the character's Nightmares in The Bad Place), do not have enemies respawning.
• Retired Badass: Five out of the six main characters are retired agents/soldiers who are forced back into action by Viggo to save their families and stop his evil plan. Tweek is the sole exception, but his mother Gwyneth — who appears as the first boss — was the sixth agent to serve alongside them.
• Right-Hand Cat: Inverted for Rule of Funny and/or unintentional terrors. Actually, it's the cat who has a rather creepy Right Hand 'Human'' named Fifi.
• Running Gag: Viggo executing a peacock per each world introduction, subject to ever-increasing levels of overkill.
• Shout-Out:
  • Contains several to James Bond, as well as some more obscure ones such as Pulp Fiction.
  • Tweek has two shout-outs in himself. His birthplace is listed as Royston Vasey in England, and in his home is a model of a steam locomotive that looks almost exactly like Ivor the Engine, the titular Welsh steam train from the 1970s British animation of the same name.
  • And later, one of the rescued babies angrily asks "What's all this shouting? We'll have no trouble here!"
• Solve the Soup Cans: Oh so very many of them...
• Speaking Simlish: The characters did this in the original Dreamcast version, as well as the PC and iOS versions. They are fully voiced in the PS2 port, though.

• Spirit Advisor: General Bristol. His ghost will appear and give advice from time to time.
• Sublime Rhyme: Each and every one of Tweek's Babies has a name that rhymes with the aforementioned character.
• Tagalong Kid: Tweek, who unlike the rest of the Fur Fighters, is saving his mother rather than a spouse.

• Umpteenth Customer: Happens in a New Quack City level where the player enters a gun store and is given 60 seconds to run around collecting ammo and new weapons.
• Updated Re-release: The PS2 port gives the characters actual voices, improves the graphical cel-shaded style, switches a bit of the music around, adds a level exclusive to it, as well a couple of new weapons, changes most of the script of the original game as well as adding a few new lines to the script, and adds a few extra bonus levels to obtain new upgrades to the Fighters' physical attacks.
• Villain Ball: Viggo knocks out everyone in Fur Fighter Village, and doesn't simply shoot the heroes as they're unconscious. By doing this, Viggo draws them back into action instead of just quietly taking over the world. He also doesn't attack the Village again until the very final level. Viggo might be smart, but he's taking this ball all the way to the end-zone.

• Violent Glaswegian: Roofus, the leader of the fighters, does indeed hail from Glasgow itself. But he does retain a cool level head despite his ruthless assault upon Viggo's men.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: Partly Justified, as noted in a later scene that the teleporter can only handle one person out without causing damage. Doesn't really justify why they don't walk to the levels in groups, other than for quick escapes...
• We Have Reserves: Viggo and his men, of course. It's brought to its logical conclusion in the intro for the City of Fear; as a result of the Fur Fighters rampaging through all the previous locations of the game, they killed all but five of Viggo's bears. Naturally it doesn't actually affect the hordes you fight.

• World of Funny Animals: Even includes dinosaurs and mythical creatures.
• Xenomorph Xerox: Played for Laughs in the space station level. Some Xenomorph-esque creature shows up and prepares for a fight, but then a smarmy lawyer claiming to represent 21st Century Fox barges in and demands immediate cessation of hostilities as the creature's very presence breaks about thirty-five copyrights. The current Fur Fighter gets into an argument with him and then he (the lawyer) becomes the boss fight for the level.

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