Asuka 120% Burning Fest. 1994 Sharp X68000 Full Playthrough

(I forgot to include the character bios intro. It was early and I was super tired.)

(I slightly increased Floppy Disk loading for user enjoyment. Do you really want to see long loading between fights? Believe me they can be pretty lengthy without speedups!)

Machine Configuration:
CPU 20MHZ RAM 4MB Accessories Installed Midi Unit, SxCSi Unit, 2 Floppy Drives.

Asuka 120% Burning Fest is one of those all female fighting games that you see more in Japan than anywhere else from what I've seen in my long gaming career. This one is a fairly good fighter though. Some of the mechanics remind me of Guilty Gear XX and some are unique to this series in general. The Sharp X68000 version came out a month after the FM Towns version which is the original release of the series. I chose to show the X68000 version as this one is probably the better one of the two. There is however a second title that is for the Towns only called Asuka 120% Excellent which is kind of a odd one as it adds a school sim with some dating sim stuff? I'm not too sure as I never messed around with it too much as playing those types of games in Japanese even with Google Translate is a huge hassle. There are also 5 releases after these. One appearing on the Sega Saturn and 3 appearing on the Sony Playstation with 2 being exclusive to Playstation all in Japan only of course. There are also releases on Windows and PC Engine as well. All of those release add more fighters or are different games. Though I only found the last release on the Playstation to be a lot of fun to play and will probably be shown on this channel at some point.

The fights takes place at Ryōran Private School for Women which is from what I understand the equivalent is a school for the rich. The school holds a martial arts tournament to decide something not sure what. Maybe a scholarship? All of the fighters belong to there own club and that club determines their fighting style. Take for example Asuka who is in the Chemistry Club. One of her moves is throwing a tube of chemicals that explodes. So if you want to consider throwing volatile chemicals martial arts be my guest. Though if it were me I'd stay far away from this crazy place as much as possible and call the authorities!

Gameplay wise this is a pretty fun fighting game to play and to watch. You can do instant air recovers after being hit like in Guilty Gear and there is a sort of parry like system from Street Fighter III though it doesn't work quite like it. For example you can attack your opponent while they are attacking. You can keep on doing this to break their attack to deal damage as opposed to pushing forward to deflect and make your move like in Street Fighter III. All this can make the fights pretty fast and the fast speed of the X68000 certainly helps. The Towns version isn't as smooth as this version, though still plays really well even though it suffers from some slow loading. One interesting thing this game does is automatically detect whether you are using a 2 or 6 button controller and adjusts the controls accordingly. For the record I was using a 2 button controller setup.

The music is actually pretty catchy. The game like others on the X68000 has a Midi option. Since I never found the Midi stuff to sound that good on Japanese computers. Though there are some games that use midi that sound great. I just stuck with the Internal sound as the Yamaha YM2151 which is the X68000 sound chip just sounds better than some DOS Midi Card to me.

Sadly most of these games except for maybe some of the Playstation ones are locked to whatever platform they were on. I don't think these got re-released. Some of the Playstation ones are probably on the PS3 PSN store though so I'd check there otherwise emulation is your only option outside of owning an actually X68000 and game. I'd still check out this series though.