Recruiting her love interest Iori (Will Yun Lee) and despondent clan descendant Kyo (Sean Faris), they venture to stop Rugal from unleashing the power of Orochi. This grants ultimate but corrupting power, and a fighter named Rugal is hell-bent on mastering it. She soon learns, after a mishap at a museum opening, that this virtual world is an alternate dimension containing the mystical evil Orochi. Longtime protagonist Mai Shiranui (Maggie Q) enters a seemingly virtual world to compete in the King of Fighters tournament (via a proto-AirPod looking thing). The King of Fighters opens with an interesting premise. I honestly question whether anyone could view this and decide they wanted to give the video game, an excellent fighting game in its own right, a shot. By the end of the film, any viewer will gain little and retain absolutely nothing. Fights are stop-motion frames cast over seizure-inducing light shows. Weller) and a wholly color-by-numbers plot that moves at a snail’s pace, despite only lasting a little over an hour. Samurai Shodown is filled with laughably bad voice acting (especially for Galford D. The samurai joins, but only because he wants revenge, and so the group runs off to Amakusa’s castle. The holy warriors then arrive and try to convince Haohmaru of his destiny. That includes Haohmaru’s “mother,” who reveals that she found him as an infant in the mountains.
His days are apparently filled with destroying the ecosystem (he crushes a hive of bees and murders a bear for absolutely no reason), until Amakusa’s army attacks his village and slaughters everyone. The padding that follows is a long stretch of Haohmaru, a stoic samurai in the games, acting like a fool in a remote village with no recollection of his past. At the last moment, their souls are whisked away into the ether and sent forward in time to be reborn 100 years later, with the intent to overthrow the evil Ambrosia and the traitor Amakusa. Shodown opens with the end of all things, as the “holy warriors” fall to a traitor in their ranks. Samurai Shodown fails in every last one of these respects.
Is this faithful to the source material? If not, does the film re-imagine the fiction in an interesting way? Are the fight scenes solid? Is it watchable by a normal human - the kind of person that would let a thought like “I should pitch a fighting game movie ranking” dissipate in the void of their brain? When evaluating these films, I examined several criteria. Without any further delay, let’s get to the good stuff! Third, some of these movies make use of gross and shoddy reasons to compel their characters, so please heed this content warning for scenes including sexual violence and assault, especially on the lower end of the list.
And so, sadly, the Darkstalkers OVA series (which is pretty alright!), Battle Arena Toshinden, and two of the Fatal Fury specials do not appear. This extends to any length of television special series as well.
My list is strictly limited to films - so animated series like the Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter ones don’t count.
Second, I did draw some guidelines for myself. If you are, however, a connoisseur of cheese and ridiculousness that would make the robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000 blush… Welcome. But if you’re looking for cinematic mastery, look elsewhere. There is a definite line, right around the top five, where we start to venture into territory marking some level of quality.