Galaxy Fight, as the title suggests, takes players across space to various planets to fight with strangely designed characters. The roster of 8 characters is one of the most oddball of any fighting game ever produced including a giant lizard, a slow moving robot, cute anime' inspired girl, a ninja, and the standard Ryu-like human wearing a jetpack. Whether or not you can relate to these characters may very well influence your enjoyment.
The game features a zooming camera, but it's movement seems much more natural than in other games on the system. It goes very far back without a hitch, moving at a very fast pace. It's impressive to say the least. One of the stranger decisions by the developers was excluding any corners. Combo-happy players will have a tough time trapping people and lighting them up. Then again, with the strange 3-button setup, combos don't come off very naturally either.
Each of the three buttons represents a stronger attack than the last with the fourth designated as a taunt (though a few super moves use it). Pulling off special moves may be a bit confusing at first with this set up, but a little patience and you'll soon get the hang of it. Dashing is also a big part of the game and ends up making the game unbalanced. For instance, you can dash in, pull off a dragon punch maneuver, and then fly through the air with your momentum out of counter attack range whether you landed the blow or not. I won't ruin it and tell which character can pull this off, but it won't take long to figure out.
Playing against a human opponent isn't too bad, but the computer AI (even on the lowest difficulty setting) is unrelenting. Making it past the second fight is a serious challenge and you probably won't stand a chance against the last boss should you make it that far. Also, as one final gripe, the jumping in this game is very floaty, resembling the first edition of Virtua Fighter. It will throw any hardcore fighting game fans timing completely off.
The game performs admirably in the graphics era, but is occasionally hit or miss. The rain effect in Musatar's stage is laughable, but the rest of the stages feature superb depth thanks to great parallax effects. The designs of a few stages are just outstanding and a few have some foreground animation as well. Check out some of the wacky looking creatures in Roomi's stage to see just how weird this one really is. The character designs are definitely out there, but they animate on par with other fighters on the console. Make sure to check out some of the taunts as well (especially G-Done's. It's an all time fave).
To go along with the nice graphical package is a wonderful CD-like soundtrack. Some of the stages even have some lyrics to go along with the great tunes. All the voices are crystal clear without any distortion and you'll really feel some of the stronger hits. It may not get very much attention, but this is one of the best sounding games on the system.
I'm not completely sure, but I think this was Sunsoft's only release for the system. It's far from a great fighter, but I'd bet it has a decent number of fans. It's completely unique in almost every way and that alone may draw some people to it. If your interested, there is a pixel-perfect on the Saturn. It was a US release too, so you should have little trouble tracking it down. This is one I encourage fighting game fans to try simply because you never know.
