Did you know: Fighters Destiny : D (fun facts)
-Ryuji was called Saeki in the Fighters Destiny Beta. For Fighter Destiny 2 they changed his name back to the original one because they wanted to give players an impression that there were many new characters in the sequel. Besides that they wanted to move away a bit from SF similarities. Mei Ling had a small aesthetic change too - they changed her hair color to red, which resulted in a less obvious Chun Li connection/influence and made her more similar to Ryuji, the game’s other poster character.
Still’ those decisions didn’t stop developers to try pulling out a Blanka/Dhalsim thing with FD2’s Ziege/Federico.
FD1 Ryuji could quite possibly be a reference to Ryu’s original appearance in Street Fighter/Fighting Street.
-Ninja character is inspired by Virtua Fighter’s own Kage Maru (in the Japanese version, Fighting Cup, Ninja is even called Kaze). Ninja’s alternative costume color could be a reference to another popular video game Ninja, Strider Hiryu.
-Pierre was called Pielle in the Japanese versions of FD and FD2, in the sequel you can see a zeppelin with his original Japanese name written on it and unchanged in the USA version. In the First game beta, he was called „Crown“
-Pierre Stage in FD1 might have an Italian plumber cameo, on the center of the ring you can see something that could possibly resemble Mario’s face. However, it’s not that detailed meaning it’s hard to tell whether or not this is a cameo, it could be Pierre’s face too. The cap is weird, and he has a star over his eye, much like the real Pierre. However, Mario’s trademark in SM64 is a shiny star, so they maybe wanted to reference both things.
(on a sidenote, I was 100% sure it was a Mario cameo all up until the era of HD TVs when I considered the possibility of that image actually being Pierre’s face)
-You’ve probably asked yourself why was Joker Russian, yet he does not have a Russian accent or any connections to that country whatsoever. Well, it’s a reference to a lethal game of chance called the Russian roulette, since when playing the Master mode player feels pretty much like playing Russian roulette having the fear of the Joker slots and knowing that it can result in a game over.
-Robert is an early prototype basic character model, dating before they even created real character models. Later on during the game development, the basic model that we now know as „Robert“ was used as a training dummy, but since they already animated some really slow basic moves exclusively for the dummy in order to give players a chance to react to most basic types of attacks in training mode, they decided to include him as a playable bonus character. Due to the game’s high risk/reward nature, it was still possible to win matches using Robert, despite the fact that he’s just a joke character.
-In the Japanese version, Ninja is Called Kaze, Pierre is called Pielle and Boro is called Eyvokan
-In the German version, Boro is called Heidi, Valerie is called Sabine, Bob is called Pablo, Ushi is called Emil
-Unlike the USA/UK version, German version of Fighter’s Destiny had pretty spot on translations. English localisation team completely forgot about finishing Master monologue translations where he’s giving tips to the player if he enters Training mode from Escape/Special/Aerial submodes. There are even some ??? marks left that were about to get the most proper translation and context but it seems that the team completely forgot about those.
-It’s important to mention that all of the European versions of Fighter’s Destiny were noticeably slower, due to PAL TVs usually not having 60Hz support in the 90s and N64 PAL releases being adjusted to work properly on 50 Hz TVs. As it matters for racing games like F-Zero, it also matters for a fighting game like this. But still, although slower, the European version plays smooth and with no extra slowdown at all.
-The original name for the game was supposed to be Struggle Hard. They renamed it to Fighter’s Destiny for the USA/PAL release later on and Japanese version (which came out later) was renamed to „Fighting Cup“. The publisher had to deal with copyright infringement in the USA. There’s not much info about that topic available on the internet nowadays, but it can be speculated that the trouble with the copyrights was the reason why they suddenly decided to go for an early price drop without no real marketing for the new game, probably not shipping that many units because publisher was fearing the outcome of copyright infringement.
Still, the publisher was aware that they had a pretty solid product there, an unique fighting game with many creative ideas, done in 3D during an era when 3D fighters were really getting popular, on a system that handles 3D graphics with ease, but has no other above-average 3D fighting games for competition. So they decided to give the game another shot with a rushed quasi-sequel named „Fighter Destiny 2“ so that they avoid further copyright problems, but at the same time make sure that fans of the original recognize the new game.
