Best of the Best: Championship Karate is a martial arts video game that features kick boxing masters. It was developed by Loriciels, a French game development company, and published by Electro Brain for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1992.
I thought this was a tie-in game of the movie Best of the Best. An underrated 1989 martial arts movie. I played it for being quite realistic in martial arts moves during the early 1990s before the dawn of 16-bit Street Fighter goodness in my country.
The Story
You got a dream of entering the arenas, matching your Karate skills against the Best of the Best. Now that dream has turned into reality as you are now ranked 16th in the world and now you are ready to enter the International World Championships. Train well. Continue to master your martial arts moves, focus on a combat style, or just create your own.
Those who lack the guts will lose the battle. You will meet many master fighters as obsessed with being the best as you are and they are ready to beat the shit out of you!
The Graphics and Sound
Best of the Best's graphics are limited in the size of the characters and even in their details. The fighters moves are screwy when they connect, but the animation tries to move smoothly. Another thing that I hate about the visuals is the fact that the fighters are tiny on the screen and you have to focus your eyes to look at the game.
In fairness, the design of the martial arts moves is good, but the execution is a bit poor.
The sound is limited too. There's an occasional beat in the background during the fight. The sound effects are few, ranging from punches and kicks to the seldom thud when a strike makes contact. it is quite a disappointment.
The Gameplay
Best of the Best: Championship Karate is a technical type of game. You can't progress just using one or two moves. As you win through the game, the opponents become tougher and love to block your attacks so you will have to vary your moves in order to defeat tougher fighters.
On game start, you’ll have many choices on style of play and who you’re opponent will be. Throughout your matches, you will be able to change your fighter’s moves and tweak his stats up to the point needed to complete the next stage.
Once you know how you want to fight and what fight moves you want, then you can fight your opponent or go to the gym and work on to improve your stats to aid in your matches.
The matches got several rounds of fighting and the only thing that you have to do is survive and hit your opponent well. When you get an opening, hit it and keep at it on in order to suck the opponent's life meter. If you can't beat your opponent, then you gotta change your moves or go back to the gym and train some more stats to give more damage. Fighting is not hard and mostly requires a directional press and a button to get the various moves to activate.
Your character's speed is restricted by the game. Your fighting moves are pre-selected by you, so you gotta memorize just what button combination your fighter will do to do a different move. The computer seems to take damage well, but hardly knocked down before you do. If you do get knocked down, tapping the buttons rapidly will gain you just a bit of health, but won't help you in the long run.
My Verdict
Best of the Best: Championship Karate is better than other karate games on the NES because of its technical edge. Its poor presentation and deep combat make it an ordinary game. If you like games with many martial arts moves and with realistic motions then it is your kind of game. Those looking for arcade-style fighting might look for something else.
Try it on the NES or on emulators. Play it on 2 player mode with a friend if he knows how to play the game too.