It's new to me: Kung Fu Heroes

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Beat ‘em ups have a long history. We’re pretty used to the kind of beat ‘em ups that games like Final Fight ended up inspiring, but there were plenty of entries in the genre in the years before that started to happen, too. Culture Brain’s Chinese Hero is one such beat ‘em up: it doesn’t take place in a dirty, crime-filled city, nor does it feature the kind of mohawked hooligans you’re used to beating up in a Double Dragon or Final Fight or Streets of Rage title. Instead, it’s set in a “nameless land” with a (surprise!) Chinese aesthetic full of kung fu and dragons and evil half-cat creatures, with your character moving through various castles in order to rescue a captured princess and 10 stolen treasures.

It’s a bright and colorful game, especially in its original arcade form, which released in 1984 in both Japan and internationally. Chinese Hero — which was known as Super Chinese in Japan — would receive a Famicom port in 1986, one that kept quite a bit of the gameplay intact. North America wouldn’t receive the same port on the NES until 1989, which probably made it feel at least a little bit dated compared to what else was going on in the beat ‘em up world by that point, but then again, Kung Fu Heroes — as it would be called in North America — is still fun over 30 years later. So let’s not project too much on what the past might have been feeling about it.

While later Super Chinese games would introduce role-playing elements by using a Dragon Quest-style overworld map and random battles, only with the battles being side-scrolling beat ‘em ups with some light platforming, Kung Fo Heroes is more straightforward. It features a topdown view and single-screen arenas for you to defeat a dozen foes before moving on to the next single-screen bout. There are loads of hidden bonus rooms, all kinds of collectible items to power you up and give you some agency over how you’re going to defeat the many foes in front you, and a plethora of different types of said foes, so the game itself isn’t necessarily straightforward or basic. Just how you go about moving through it can be.

Which is fine, because again, you’ve got lots of enemy types to consider, even more of them to defeat, and a whole bunch of experimenting to do in order to actually power yourself up enough to make it through Kung Fu Heroes intact. Your basic moves are a punch and a kick, the latter of which is more powerful and looks a lot like you jumping on an enemy’s head, an image that is further supported by the fact that some of the foes you defeat this way will look squashed. There’s far more to do than just punch and kick, though. You can eventually find a sword, which will increase your range and the power of your punch attack (and can be drawn and sheathed whenever you’d like by pressing A and B at the same time without touching a direction on the D-pad), and you collect a number of Miracle Kicks over the course of the game. Lots and lots of Miracle Kicks.

These are a lot like the regular kick, only much stronger and faster, and they take a little more effort to implement since you don’t press a direction on the D-pad to use one, meaning you can’t manipulate your movement in mid-air like you can with the standard kick: you just press A and B and unleash a miracle in the direction you’re facing. They’re also limited use, as said: you have to pick up a power-up that you find by attacking blocks in each stage in order to accrue Miracle Kicks, the number of which you have available is shown at the top of your screen along with your score and lives. So don’t spam Miracle Kicks, especially since, late in the game, you’re going to need them if you don’t want to have to punch an enemy who can kill you with one hit six or seven times or whatever before they go down. And there are some enemies who can only be damaged by a Miracle Kick, as well. Save up! You can also find G-balls around that let you shoot fireballs from your fists, which, you know, helpful. Temporary, and enemies react by running from you, but helpful.

There’s actually a ton of information displayed on screen at a time, a shocking amount for a game from this time period. Your lives are there, of course, as are the number of Miracle Kicks (represented by a “K” icon), but there are also E balls, which, if you collect five of them, you get an extra life. There’s a fist icon, which shows how powerful your current attacks are, and which you upgrade through collectible punch power-ups. There’s a money bag, which you don’t use to buy anything, not really. Instead, if you have six of them, you can cash them in for a P-ball, which turns you invincible and lets you run amok through enemies like you’re Pac-Man after the ghosts have been made susceptible to damage with a power pellet, or Mario with a super star. Like with Mario, every enemy defeated while invincible is worth more points than the last one, so you can rack up quite the high score here while also serving to clear out a difficult stage in a hurry. And despite the comparison to Mario here, Kung Fu Heroes (or, at least, Chinese Hero) was first.

In order to have six money bags to cash in, you need to punch blocks and then attack the floating question mark balls that pop out of them sometimes. And hope that it’s a money bag inside that ball, and not a X ball, which resets your money bags to zero. These usually only appear after you’ve already collected a couple of money bags in a given stage, though, as a way to keep you from refilling that every level before you head into the next one, so if you’re smart about it and aware of how often you’ve collected money bags already in a given stage, you can mostly avoid those X balls. And just avoid them entirely if you’ve already got six bags, because that’s the max you can hang on to, anyway.

And last, you’ve got a running tally next to your score of the treasures you’ve picked up in your quest. You’ll find treasure boxes inside of the blocks you attack, and they’ll either have a punch upgrade or Miracle Kicks in there, or one of the game’s 10 treasures. These treasures aren’t just for show, but actively make the game easier for you to progress through: the first temple mark, found in stage 1-2 and 3-1, makes it easier to defeat “Mr. Coffin,” an enemy that is literally a walking coffin that can trap you inside if you touch it, leaving you open to attack from an enemy who can kill you. The second temple mark reduces the time the Cat Mage’s stun beam stuns you for, the mirror deflects a number of enemies’ beams if you’re facing them when they hit, the candle shows you the trap floor tiles in the one very annoying level with trap floor tiles, and the sword? That’s a sword.

There are more treasures, but they’re all in this vein of protecting you or weakening various enemy types, and if you don’t punch blocks, you won’t find them. So, good luck with the late-game if you don’t punch blocks. The blocks can also be used as weapons sometimes: some blocks have treasures or power-ups inside, some simply break when you punch them, and others go flying in the direction you punched them in. If one of those flying blocks hits an enemy, it’s possible it’ll kill them — “possible” because some enemies aren’t going to be taken down by a single flying block, just like they won’t go down to a single punch or Miracle Kick. Like with the P-ball, flying blocks have point multipliers, so killing a few enemies with one can net you a higher score than if you just defeated them the traditional way(s).

There is somehow even more to find in the blocks than described above. There’s sometimes an extra life in blocks. There are keys, which when collected open secret bonus rooms. Some bonus rooms are for scoring extra points or maybe collecting an extra life, all while avoiding a stream of bazooka rounds that are flying across the screen. There’s a “Break Time” room that sometimes opens up when you destroy a certain block, and this room awards you 500,000 points and lets you chill for 30 seconds without fear of dying. It’s just that kind of odd game that begs you to explore it to find everything that makes it more than it appears to be on the surface.

Visually, there’s a bunch of personality in Kung Fu Heroes. Your characters — Jacky if you’re player one, Lee if you’re player two — have raised eyebrows and animate in a fun way, with their fists growing large when they punch, and distinct visual cues for the different kinds of kicks. The enemies… well, I mentioned there were lots of enemy types, and there are. And many of them are pretty weird! Have a look at the pages in the NES instruction manual that detail the various enemy types, courtesy this full scan and upload of it as a PDF:

This leaves off a few of the more basic enemies, but you can see the glare and mustache of the spear men in action in-game, not just in the manual’s character art, the various cat enemies (Cat Mage, Ware Cat, Medusa Cat) are all very clearly sporting feline features, and it’s also obvious that the Dragon Man enemies are wearing masks over their heads. Uni-Gon is a hulking sprite that you will want to run from if you’re not going to challenge head on, as is the actual dragon. There might be kung fu and swords and Medusa Cats, but there’s also a guy whose whole thing is “has a bazooka.” Variety is good. Oh, and if you jump over a fired bazooka round with your kick/jump, you score some bonus points for doing so — this goes for every projectile, but it’s especially fun to note at the part about bazookas in a game centered around kung fu performed in the Chinese-flavored castles of the “nameless land.”

The enemies are also pretty smart about chasing you or running away from you. They’ll use passages at the sides of the level to escape you, reappearing on the other side of the stage, just like you would from them. They run when you’re powered up with the P- or G-ball. They’ll give chase if they sense they have the advantage. And they also show up in groups of four, and don’t stop populating the stage. When you’ve defeated 12 of them, the locked door opens, and you can move on to the next of four levels in the castle. Defeating 12 enemies early is a lot easier than 12 enemies late, especially since you die in one hit and have to be careful to avoid non-kick or non-punch contact with any of them, but you also don’t want to rush out of a stage too early just in case you miss a power-up or treasure in a block. The big stuff, like treasures, are in pre-set locations, so you don’t have to stick around waiting for blocks to respawn and try your luck again. But it’s also easier to just destroy blocks as you unlock the door, because enemies move faster and are more aggressive toward you once you do unlock the doors, making punching blocks and collecting what comes out of them more difficult.

Kung Fu Heroes can be tough if you don’t play it correctly, but if you’re going around punching blocks and collecting power-ups, it’s much easier. You can store up to nine lives at a time, and also continue from where you left off after a Game Over even if the game doesn’t indicate that this is the case — just hold down the A button and press start at the title screen after your game ends, and you’ll go back to the first stage of the castle you were in, only with your score reset, as well as your non-treasure power-ups and collectibles, as well as Miracle Kick count. Two players makes things easier, since it divides enemy attention and the non-Miracle Kick power-ups are shared, meaning you don’t have to fight over who gets to open the blocks for the most part. It might take a few minutes to get used to the game’s little control nuances, but once you do, it feels surprisingly good for a game with as many inputs and options as this one, from this long ago.

Kung Fu Heroes isn’t available to buy anywhere these days, but it is on the basic tier of a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, on the NES channel. This might be about as good as we can hope for outside of a Super Chinese collection appearing at some point, given Culture Brain’s franchise wasn’t a huge hit outside of Japan, even if it had enough juice to pump out 12 games in 15 years, plus some compilation releases in the aughts. Still, one can hope that such a collection does appear: Kung Fu Heroes is the most basic version of the series in some ways, given it’s before developer Culture Brain started experimenting with blending beat ‘em ups with RPGs and then fighting games, but even this “basic” game has quite a lot going on for the era, and more people should have the chance to experience it.

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