STORY (5): It follows the simple plot of the game; Andy and Terry train to avenge their father Jeff, killed by a suave Geese Howard (fresh from getting his butt kicked by Ryo Sakazaki of Art of Fighting, I guess) ten years ago. I admire a lot of anime protagonists' resolve. I'd be pretty pissed if a guy killed my dad in front of me, but I always figured that around year seven of my rigorous training, I'd be impressed with my awesome build and pose for Muscle and Fitness or something.
So, it's not that great, but it's decent enough until a cheesy romance is seemingly forced into the show with Terry and a completely meaningless cookie cutter female lead named Lily, who helped (?) set up Jeff years ago. I think even casual viewers will also see nothing in this and label it as weak storytelling, which it is. I'll get to her later.
ART (6): For as much as I criticize Masami Obari's character designs, his representation of the FF cast is pretty good for the most part. Hungry Wolf's art is sketchy and dated, but it looks decent.....until it moves. It's amazing how little fighting there is in this, but thats probably a good thing. The fight scene animation is on par with Weiss Kreuz or Slayers, the backgrounds are garrish and bland, Andy's hair is the wrong color that even the box art got it right, and the effects for the character's signature attacks are so bad, it's laughable. Not horrible, just incredibly cheesy.
SOUND (8): This was back when not only VIZ, but Ocean Group, utilized their best talents. I still believe Mark Hildreth is the most underrated male voice actor in the business today next to Troy Baker. Ward Perry does a great Geese Howard, channeling a voice thats so evil and smug, you wanna punch him yourself. Paul Dobson's Billy Kane rules (he's used that accent for Zarbon, which suited him more than Funi's dub). The rest of the voices are great, the sound effects have a nice, old school, early 90's anime feel to it, the two musical scores in the movie are catchy and I sing them in my head all the time, and the background music, while limited, is not bad.
CHARACTER (4): All the characters from the game do their job great. I give all the characters from the Fatal Fury video game franchise an 8. This score is for one character, and one character alone............Lily. This is Sulia from the Motion Picture all over again, and this is the last time I hope to say this. If it's not Blue Mary, keep these women away from Terry Bogard! She means nothing, serves nothing to the plot, brings out nothing new in Terry, the rest of the cast barely acknowleges her existence, and wastes about eight minutes of film time that could've been better spent making better fight scenes! She got more screen time then Raiden and Richard Meyer combined, and all she did was turn the best fighting game lead into a generic, lame-duck softy who needs THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP to fight his foes! I was scratching my head when this character became prominent within the first few minutes of the movie and she makes this painful to watch, although I've found it easy to block her out over the years. Give me more Joe Higashi, dammit!
ENJOYMENT (7): I'm such a sucker for the video games that I've rewatched this a lot of times. I gave it a 7 because it's short run time makes it simple to sit through, and I can listen to the voices all day. Every few years, I watch this just to kick back and bask in the stark cheesiness of the film, knowing that as goofy as this is, it's still not Virtua Fighter or Street Fighter II V. The lack of action might make it a bore, but it's been eleven years and I can still have fun watching it.
OVERALL (6):
Pros: Voice acting, music
Cons: Kind of boring, terrible fight scenes, Andy's BLUE hair
