Bill Cooney

Continuing on my recent trend (well, trend of one post anyways) here’s another super-keen piece of doujinsoft. Eternal Fighter Zero combines a few of my favourite things : Kanon, Air and all-girl fighting games that I can button-mash the shit out of.

See, I’m just not that good at conventional video games. I was never allowed a game console as a child because according to my mother, “They wreck the TV and rot your brain.” Thanks, mum. As a result, I am generally shit at video games unless they are platformers, puzzle-based or turn-based or point-and-click RPGs. I am terrible at Halo, wouldn’t event consider playing anything on PS3 and can only succeed at fighting games if my opponent is either drunk, lacking in opposable thumbs or worse than I am at fighters (something that, were it to occur, would unravel the fabric of space-time because of the sheer impossibilty that anyone else could suck more than me).

So that’s why I love Eternal Fighter Zero – it’s a game where I can select Tsukimiya Ayu from Kanon, mash the shit out of my keyboard or control pad with a flat palm and still be reasonably successful against the CPU. And the fact that the specials and combos are animated to a level that is on par with the professional releases they are inspired by (Street Fighter, Guilty Gear and King of Fighters) makes this even more pleasurable.

The only thing that’s annoying about it is the dodgy CPU AI. If you have it set to easy, it’s like the AI is just randomly rolling a 1d20 and 1d6, then picking one of six possible attacks if the d20 comes up as an even number. And if you try cranking up the CPU then it just turns into a button-mashing clone itself, and gameplay begins to feel like playing tic-tac-toe against yourself – neither side can win and everybody knows the whole thing is pointless.

Eternal Fighter Zero is released by Twiligh Frontier (in Japanese Tasogare Frontier), who have also released  number of Touhou games in collaboration with Team Shanghai Alice. Despite being first published in 2001, Eternal Fighter Zero is still available in places like Messe Sannoh in Akihabara and in Manadarake in Nakano Broadway.