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When it comes to fighting games, stages are the kind of thing that some people will insist don’t matter, but let’s be real…yes, they kind of do. Sure, you can just spend your days in the grid-filled training room background, but that’s boring. These fighters need that variety to liven things up. They give the game personality and build up the universe it takes place in. Mood, lore, excitement, and even humor are added to the experience by just having your two-out-of-three brawl take place in a busy parking lot filled with onlookers.
With so many games with so many installments, there are so many kickass stages to choose from. Here’s a look at the best of them. There’s a one-entry-per-game rule, but not one-entry per franchise. I just can’t do that to those sweet, sweet King of Fighters choices. It would break my heart.
15. Dr. Wily’s Military Base (Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes)
The first full-fledged Marvel vs. Capcom game had so much character to it all, but very little of it comes to life in the backgrounds. They’re colorful (well, mainly very blue) but just don’t have much going on in them. The pulls from both properties fall flat, like Avengers Headquarters, the Blue Area of the Moon, and somehow a demonic death metal concert venue.
The one place that rightly embraces the setup is Dr. Wily’s fortress. It’s a busy and animated setting where an old man is yelling at you to get off his lawn, except that the old man is also a maniacal Albert Einstein pastiche who is busy setting up his latest plan for world domination. Various low-level robots are shown milling around as Wily’s skull-based attack ship is being worked on in the back. All the while, the mad scientist is beside himself, screaming at everything with a megaphone. Throwing Mega Man and Roll into these games was a big deal at the time and this stage really does a fantastic job capitalizing on it.
14. Warrior Shrine (Mortal Kombat)
It’s a badass use of the game’s digitized sprites. The various kombatants are immortalized in statue form, which does raise some questions. How fast were these made, considering Sonya was an impromptu entrant? Did Shang Tsung cheap out by making only one ninja statue or did he just want things to be roughly symmetrical? Are these the only people in the tournament, is Shang Tsung celebrating the favorites to win, or are there more statues on the other side of the room? Either way, it looks really cool.
It also helps build up Goro’s mystique. The first game really made a big deal about this boss battle and while you don’t get to see footage of the four-armed monster in action until you reach him, at least you get a little preview of what he looks like in-engine. Just look at him, towering over all the other MooKs.
13. San Francisco Bay (Street Fighter Alpha 2)
Capcom just loves Easter eggs, don’t they? In a rare flex, we see Ken showing off that he’s extremely wealthy, Ken throws the love of his life Eliza a birthday party on his huge yacht. What better place to watch martial artist drifters throw down?
Not only does it look nice, but it’s also filled to the brim with well-dressed cameos. Seemingly every guest is from a Capcom game, some more obscure than others. Whether they’re from different continuities or different eras, many of them shouldn’t exist in this time and place. They’re even reimagined to fit the scenario, like the human versions of Darkstalkers or the classier takes on guys like Captain Commando and Unknown Soldier.
12. Danger Room (X-Men: Children of the Atom)
Sometimes fighting games like to make sense out of why allies would be fighting each other. It could be mind control, a tournament, distrust, or even miscommunication. X-Men: Children of the Atom had the easiest out by just suggesting the idea that it was an X-Men training exercise. Seriously, if they made an entire X-Men fighting game and didn’t put the Danger Room in there as a setting, I would be aghast. It’s such a perfect stage idea.
The art direction really goes to town here, which is the norm with Children of the Atom’s fluid backgrounds. They easily could have just left it a cold facility with Xavier looking on through the glass from the control room, but they really went all out. The holograms keep altering the settings, turning them into outer space, the tropics, underwater, and so on. All the while, the door and window contrast against the illusion in a neat way.
11. New York City (Guilty Gear)
The Guilty Gear backgrounds tend to look like something that you would see on the cover of a heavy metal album. Everything is just rad and larger than life. The first game’s art feels very washed out, but that only improves Sol Badguy’s stage in the ruins of New York City. If you don’t know the Guilty Gear storyline…well, I don’t have enough of an allowed word count for that. Basically, there was a 100-year war between mankind and magical mutants called Gears. The games themselves take place in the aftermath, where society is moving towards a utopia, but also there’s always a danger that the war will start anew.
New York City was a casualty of the war, now a dusty tomb with the striking remains of the Statue of Liberty. It’s desolate, haunting, and goes well with the feeling of cynical dread that comes with the first game. It’s also fitting as a hangout for Sol himself, as he is not only one of the ones who ended the big war but secretly the one who inadvertently caused all this death and destruction in the first place (the titular “Guilty Gear”). Later games would clean up the rubble and build over it, but it never looked as memorable as the first game.
10. Kousyu Street (Street Fighter III: Third Strike)
Street Fighter III and its upgrades boasted some of the sweetest sprite work to exist in the world of 2D gaming. Whether it’s Gill’s lava stage or Hugo’s questionable bachelor pad/attic, the backgrounds in these games are things of beauty. The best of the best comes from Third Strike, where Akuma gets his own stage. This is a rarity, as Akuma is usually more of a secret opponent or someone so shrouded in mystery that it’s odd to see him have a home to call his own. Usually, Akuma’s stages are a cave of some sort.
Here, he’s off in nature, albeit in a creepy setting befitting his dark aura. The Master of Fist trains in the middle of the woods with the edges of a mountain peaking in, unable to obscure the gigantic full moon looming in the sky. Adding to the eeriness are rows of statues, presumably training dummies fashioned by Akuma himself. It’s a fitting background to fight Akuma in, but to make things extra cool, when you fight his more powerful Shin Akuma form, the same background has a blood moon, turning the environment red.
9. Thanos’s Palace (Marvel Super Heroes)
Capcom’s Marvel Super Heroes is a very loose adaptation of the 1991 comic event Infinity Gauntlet. Not as loose an adaptation as the MCU’s Infinity War ended up being, but the comic certainly didn’t involve Psylocke and Shuma Gorath fighting on a train. Thanos is the final boss of the game and his stage is a perfect recreation of his domain in the Infinity Gauntlet comic. The architecture was created from his omnipotence and imagination, defeated heroes (Scarlet Witch, She-Hulk, Drax the Destroyer, and so on) have been turned into statues, and you can even see Death and Mephisto just chilling in the background.
Its inclusion is perfect due to how it relates to the source material. In Infinity Gauntlet, a big collection of heroes went after Thanos all at once and he still slaughtered them all. He only lost in the aftermath by fumbling his power. Here, you get to succeed where the heroes of canon failed. Your choice and your skills can overcome what well over a dozen could not.
8. Stroheim Castle (Fatal Fury 2)
Wolfgang Krauser doesn’t get nearly the same amount of love as his half-brother Geese Howard, but his boss fight feels so incredibly epic. As imposing as the colossal Krauser is, flexing off his own armor while threatening to “chisel your gravestone,” the golden halls of his German home enhance the experience. Everything in this package tells you, “This guy is better than me and he’s about to utterly kick my ass.”
The best part is that “Requiem Dis Irae” plays throughout the fight. It’s a prime boss theme, but it’s also playing in the context of the game! Krauser is going so all out on this final battle that he has an entire orchestra playing music for the fight. This is one of those times when it might be worth having the Neo Geo CD version of the game.
7. Fighting Barroom (Street Fighter II)
Vega is a character with a busy character design. He’s an obsessive narcissist with a hatred for ugly people. He’s a skilled matador and a highly trained ninja. He comes from a noble family, but he is also a sadistic cage fighter, assassin, and executive for a terrorist organization. The man has a lot going on, and his stage really plays into his persona.
When you face Vega, you do so at Meson De Las Flores: an illegal cantina and gambling den in Spain. The dancers, musicians, and patrons are separated from the fighters via a large cage, trapping you with their champion Vega. Unlike the other stages in the game, this is the one domain where the enemy fighter has a home-field advantage, as Vega can climb the cage, making him completely invulnerable until he strikes with an aerial attack. They would bring it back in Street Fighter V, but ban it from tournament play due to the way it gave Vega players a leg up. Discrimination against the handsome is what it is!
6. Tower of Arrogance (Vampire Savior)
Darkstalkers has always had the most style of any Capcom fighter, mixing Universal Monsters with off-the-wall anime aesthetics. It’s equal parts creepy, kooky, spooky, and altogether ooky. The various corners of the animated supernatural lead to some fantastic visual concepts that find themselves both in the fighters’ animations and the various backgrounds. For sure, the Darkstalkers series has some absolute winners behind the action, like the demonic, living train and the freaky torture chamber.
Tower of Arrogance feels simple, but also does so much. The fight takes place on the side of a skyscraper, near the top. Not on the scaffolding or anything like that. Just two monsters and/or monster hunters inexplicably doing violence to each other on the side of a building. All the while, you can see a helicopter down below as well as the flickering traffic lights. There’s a real feeling of vertigo, but it’s okay, because you can’t fall to your death. Physics be damned.
5. Spinal’s Ship (Killer Instinct 2)
Pirate ships make for prime fighting game stages. It says so in the bible. There are a lot of cool ones out there, like Kraken’s stage in Power Stone, Kharon’s Ship in Mortal Kombat 11 (sailing over an endless sea of blood in Hell!), and the various Cervantes stages in the Soul Calibur series. When it’s time to think about the best of this subset, the crown goes to Spinal in the second Killer Instinct. Not only does it look metal as hell, but it also ties in perfectly with Spinal’s crazy design of being an ancient warrior resurrected as a sword-swinging skeleton.
Spinal is even captaining an entire slave ship of reanimated skeletons rowing for him in unison. That his theme song involves low-voiced chanting makes one wonder if those skeleton slaves are the ones singing while all the fighting is going on. The stage even bobs and shifts, all while the rain keeps cycling in and out. As the cherry on top, one can knock their opponent overboard, culminating in watching their body spiral down into the depths as they drown.
4. Rainy Park (King of Fighters ’99)
With most King of Fighters games, the 3-on-3 setting means a best-out-of-five setup. With so many potential rounds, it’s fun when it shows off the passage of time. The park in King of Fighters ’99 doesn’t especially make sense as a landmark for an international fighting tournament secretly hosted by a mad scientist organization, but damn if it doesn’t look breathtaking in action.
During the first round, the sun is shining and various people are just enjoying the day. Children play in the background, and nobody seems to pay much attention to the angry redhead guy throwing purple flame at the buff cyborg in the foreground. During the second round, it’s starting to get cloudy, and people are starting to move on. A mother opens her umbrella, while a groundskeeper steps under shelter. Then after that, the rest of the match takes place under pouring rain, brilliantly animated in pixel art. It’s a total downpour, and the only ones sticking around to endure it are the remaining fighters.
3. Kahn’s Arena (Mortal Kombat II)
When it comes to backgrounds, no fighting game has a better aesthetic than Mortal Kombat II. The first game feels like it dips its toes in otherworldly strangeness. Despite everything going on, we’re still on Earth and there are pieces of supernatural weirdness peeking its head in. Mortal Kombat II embraces that supernatural by taking place inside this grindhouse fantasy world full of barbarians and mutant assassins. Each stage exhibits epic worldbuilding.
It comes to a head at Kahn’s Arena, where you spend the final few battles in front of a massive audience. Most importantly, the game’s big bad is watching on his throne, surrounded by his two prisoners: Kano and Sonya (the only playable characters from the first game who didn’t get to jump onto the sequel’s roster). Not only is it imposing to have to fight it out while Kahn coldly watches on, but once it’s his turn, the setting stays the same, albeit with an empty throne. Always a cool touch.
2. Fire at the Wadamoya (Last Blade 2)
The Last Blade games never really took off like SNK’s other fighters. But for those who do remember them, they are regarded for some great gameplay and some of the most beautiful graphics on the Neo Geo hardware. The pixel art in this game is on another level, but nothing compares to Fire at the Wadamoya. In this stage, you fight inside a completely inflamed building. Why is it on fire? Who’s to say? All we know is that the place looks like it’s going to crumble any second, and the two warriors would rather cut each other to ribbons than seek an escape from certain death.
Not only does the endless fire look so good but there’s a nice heat shimmer effect over it. To add to the background, SNK did not give it any music. All you hear is the crackling and flames, occasionally accompanied by the faint sound of clanging. It’s just a wonderful setup on every level.
1. KOF Stadium (King of Fighters ’96)
One trope in fighting game backgrounds is establishing the background, then escalating it into something far more ominous. None do this better than the finale of King of Fighters ’96. In terms of lore, this is the first game that really treats the tournament as an event for the public to celebrate, and not just a supervillain’s scheme to feed his ego. Granted, there is a plot to it, as the one behind the tournament, Chizuru Kagura, is trying to draw out the game’s final boss Leopold Goenitz. To test the player’s team, she fights them in a huge stadium, filled with fans, media, people in mascot costumes, and even a cameo or two in the background.
Once Chizuru is defeated, Goenitz shows up. As a high priest with wind powers, Goenitz doesn’t look all that intimidating at first, but the way the stadium transforms shows how nightmarish he is. The arena is now torn apart by an apocalyptic storm. The throngs of viewers are mostly gone, replaced with the occasional frantic person being torn away by the winds. Even the huge monitor, once meant to hype up the tournament finals, is destroyed in the debris. That this is meant to represent the man who is only the harbinger of the series’ initial main villain speaks volumes.
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