I’m not sure what I was expecting when I fired Joy Mech Fight up randomly a couple weeks ago: a simulator, maybe, or something with a hex grid? But once the gameplay started, I quickly recognized it as a fighting game I’d read about before, with cleverly segmented characters allowing for a flicker-free experience.

Still, at first the battles seemed terribly easy, and spamming basic moves was enough to dispense with the 7 available opponents. With no password or save system in the menu, as I beat the boss, I wondered: was this really it?

Hardly! Soon enough I discovered that those foes were only the first group of four, with 35 total characters to overcome. This makes for a long game, but Joy Mech Fight autosaves your progress, allowing you to resume wherever you left off. It also has multiple unlockables, including a hidden Special difficulty level which (once you clear it) unlocks the boss characters in versus mode.

On higher difficulties, Joy Mech Fight becomes a beast…well, kind of. Your adversaries will punish even a small lapse in judgment or timing, yet I was able to defeat certain late-game opponents simply by walking up to them repeatedly and throwing them. Joy Mech Fight gets compared to Street Fighter II a lot, but some things remind me more of the Mortal Kombat series, with its controller-reading and strange AI holes. It’s also got a huge Mega Man vibe, of course.

The translation is implemented very well, and nails the “late NES release” style: I’d imagine an official localization from the era would have looked and felt a lot like this. I played through the whole game on real hardware with zero glitches or issues.

Since I don’t speak Japanese, I can’t evaluate AlanMidas’s translation. A recent hack opted to retranslate some game elements “for accuracy”, which suggests it’s not 100% faithful. This does feel like a patch from 2000, with some abbreviated lines and the odd bit of weird grammar or punctuation. The number of typos – “stonger”, “untill”, “gettaway”, “commedian”, “You’re” for “your”, “arial” (aerial) – is also a tad high, considering the small amount of text.

None of this gets in the way of enjoyment, though, and AlanMidas et al. are the best for bringing this game to us in English. (It’s a little ridiculous that no one has taken the time to review their patch until now.)

As a one-on-one fighter on the NES, it’s easy to dismiss Joy Mech Fight with the proverb about the dancing bear – “The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that it dances at all.” I think it’s better than that. Though I occasionally found myself frustrated by inconsistencies in attack priority or collision detection, the game controls well, offers a thoughtful player experience, and has a wealth of characters and a creative, distinctive style. How many 16- or even 32-bit fighters can say that?