![](/uploads/1/2/5/7/125746148/330576262.jpg)
Fighter Maker (格闘ツクール, Kakutō Tsukūru) is a series of games for PlayStation consoles and Microsoft Windows.It features a robust character creation system, letting players even create animations. There are two versions of the games, Fighter Maker (FM series) and 2D Fighter Maker (2DFM series).
is another one of those games that confounds criticism. Is it good? Well, good compared to what? Other fighter-making games? What other fighter-making games? It is perhaps not that good when compared to a commercial 3D animation package, but you can't compare a $50 game to thousands of dollars worth of computer software, either. Some other creation engines are catching up on it in a few areas -- the newest WWE SmackDown! has superior cosmetic editing features, and it's making a go at animation editing as well -- but they're still nowhere near Enterbrain in its specific area of expertise. So this is not so much a review as a collection of suggestions and advice. If you want to try and create a 3D fighting game without the benefit of a small fortune in computer equipment, software, and development licenses, this is what you want to get. You are warned, however, that it can be an extremely frustrating experience, limited by an occasionally backwards interface and clumsy preview controls. The results may be rewarding, but I personally can't predict what another gamer might get out of this one.
Gameplay
A bit of a misnomer, that, because this is not a game. It's a system for editing character models, move sequences, and animations, so as to allow the user to create characters for use in a pre-packaged 3D fighting engine. There are some pre-created fighters to play with, but buying the game to just fiddle with the sample characters would be like buying a Corvette and never driving past the speed limit.
A bit of a misnomer, that, because this is not a game. It's a system for editing character models, move sequences, and animations, so as to allow the user to create characters for use in a pre-packaged 3D fighting engine. There are some pre-created fighters to play with, but buying the game to just fiddle with the sample characters would be like buying a Corvette and never driving past the speed limit.
There are three main editing systems: the body editor, where you determine a fighter's appearance; the sequence editor, where you assign move commands and chain moves together to create combos; and the animation editor, the most complex of all, where you edit moves frame by frame to determine how they play out on screen. Each has its own problems and limitations, but a few are common to all three.
The primary difficulty I found in every mode was the cumbersome preview control. To move around the model being edited in any mode requires toggling out of the main editor (losing control over the task at hand) and switching over to a separate set of preview controls. Furthermore, those controls make it difficult to view the model from a perspective that doesn't look straight down a particular axis. The ability to split up the screen into multiple preview windows helps somewhat, but I'd still rather be able to just move the camera around on the fly.
In this regard, I think I'm badly spoiled by the system in the last SmackDown game, which used the dual analog sticks to let you easily rotate the character models around all three axes. Indeed, that game used the analog sticks for all kinds of editing features, although those controls would probably be too haphazard for manipulating animation and model details in Fighter Maker.
Actually manipulating the animation details isn't too difficult, once you get the proper perspective in the preview window. It's easy to move from frame to frame in order to get an idea of what the final animation will look like and tweak individual frames. The process is certainly tedious, but there's nothing that can be done about that -- there's no way to make this kind of work quick and simple. What the system lacks in user-friendliness it makes up for in versatility, offering control over every salient point on the character model.
![](/uploads/1/2/5/7/125746148/330576262.jpg)