Like Hyper Sports before it, Yie Ar Kung Fu (One Two Kung Fu, to translate the less well known bit of Chinese) is an Imagine conversion of a Japanese arcade game by Konami. Taking after Technos’ arcade Karate Champ, which was a clear inspiration to Way of the Exploding Fist, Yie Ar Kung Fu is less interested than either in representing a real sporting competition. Instead it imaginatively carves out the future for a whole genre.
As with its predecessors, two competitors move left and right across the width of a single screen, trying to inflict blows on each other. They do not stop when a hit is successfully landed, though. The cagey, high stakes jostling of Way of the Exploding Fist is set aside, in favour of generous energy meters that allow you to keep on going after taking a pummelling. The bigger change still is in the form of the competitors.
Way of the Exploding Fist was a competition between two evenly matched men (indeed, identical except for the colour they wore) with athletic but realistic abilities. The difference in Yie Ar is clear the first time you press up and your character Oolong leaps to several times his height. Proceedings don’t take a lead from kung fu as something practiced in reality, but as something practiced in over-the-top movies.
Even more significantly, the competition is now an asymmetrical one. You fight against a series of cartoonishly distinct characters with very different abilities. By the second stage you are fighting a character armed with throwing stars, while you have no such tools at your disposal. You’re not just dealing with a series of opponents each steadily using the same moveset more proficiently, but reacting to a new set of moves each time.
All of the differences lead us away from sport and into something flashier. Yie Ar’s execution of its moves is not always the greatest, frequently feeling rather loose and flimsy. I would probably rather play my way through the tight contest of Way of the Exploding Fist. I wouldn’t rather watch it, though. Not when the alternative is the sight of one fighter taking a giant bound over another one corkscrewing through the air perpendicular to the ground, head first. Yie Ar Kung Fu is a key marker for the fighting game as receptacle for spectacle. It’s a lesson that other arcade developers would learn well.
