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No self-respecting Saturn owner
can ever have too many fighting games. Knowing this,
Electronic Arts hired a small Japanese design firm to create
Rabbit. This game may look like your ordinary, average
Street Fighter clone at first... and for the most part, it
is. However Rabbit does have its own unique twist... the
ability to summon beast spirits to battle at your
side.
These animals act as an extension
of the host character's personality. For instance, the
game's lanky bombshell has an alluring fox as her fighting
partner, while the masked ninja Ja-Koh calls forth a sinister
cobra to assist him in battle.
 The beasts in
Rabbit are a bit like the stands in Capcom's fantastic JoJo's
Bizarre Adventure, but unfortunately, they don't serve much
purpose aside from lightening the mood with comic
relief. You can use the ghostly creatures as
projectiles, and it's necessary to call out your wet-nosed
alter ego if you wish to perform your fighter's unique super
attack, but past that the beasts aren't much good for
anything. In fact, activating your animal spirit
sometimes hinders your character as much as they help... for
instance, Rex's brawny tiger weighs him down, shortening his
jumps.
Electronic Arts and Aorn missed a
lot of golden opportunities with this promising play
mechanic. However, the rest of the game holds up pretty
well in comparison to other early Saturn fighters. All
the basic features you'd expect from today's tournament
fighting games are here, including the ability to parry your
rival's attacks and a combo system which challenges you to
chain together a devastating series of kicks, punches, and
special moves. You can even claim your opponents'
abilities as your own after you defeat them, giving the game's
story mode more variety.
Also, the graphics and sound are
pretty solid. You'll notice a definite Capcom influence
in the backgrounds... they're blindingly colorful and have an
interesting sense of perspective. The scenery actually
seems to bend toward the camera, almost as if you're viewing
it through a fish-eye lens. There's also an appealing
Chinese atmosphere, most noticable in the laid back Eastern
soundtrack and clever character designs.
Rabbit's going to be a hard sell
for anyone who's already satisfied with Street Fighter Alpha 3
or King of Fighters '97. However, if you're a big, big
fan of the genre and having the best fighting games just isn't
enough to keep you satisfied, you might as well throw down the
lettuce for a copy of Rabbit. It's not the best game of
its kind on the Saturn, but it certainly isn't the
worst. |
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Rabbit
Electronic
Arts/Aorn
Versus Fighter
 
Beat the game and you'll be given
the option to shut off the camera's constant zooming. Do
it! The game looks much, much better this
way.
The win quotes are in Japanese,
but most everything else is in English.
You'll wait ten seconds for each
match to start, about the same as most of Capcom's early
Saturn fighters.
Rabbit is similar to JoJo's
Bizarre Adventure, a Capcom arcade game based on a popular
comic series. Each hero is JoJo's has a ghostly alter
ego called a Stand, which can fight in tandem with its
master.
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