The fighting game is a genre at a crossroads. For years, people have maligned it for the lack of innovation. After all, how much variation can there be between two dudes hitting each other? Even before the advent of 3D, fighters had cannibalized themselves on their brethren, a tidal wave of similar titles of varying levels of quality. The fact that 3D fighting didn't add entirely too much to the formula initially (some would say it took certain crucial elements out of the formula) added to this feeling of malaise. Even what some would call the pinnacle of the genre, Soul Calibur II, arrived to a comparatively lukewarm response due to a general feeling of, "It's great! . . . But more of the same."

If anyone who feels disdain at the lack of innovation in fighting games immediately dismisses Def Jam: Fight for NY for any reason (be it the wrestling game heritage it has or it's hip hop pedigree), he should have a bottle smashed over his head, be thrown against a pimped out SUV until the vehicle is demolished, and then summarily thrown in front of a subway train.

WWE Street?

Last year's Def Jam Vendetta was basically a slight evolution of Aki's classic wrestling formula, which was made popular by a series of WWF and WCW games for the Nintendo 64. So imagine my surprise when it became more and more apparent that the sequel was going to be closer to Fight Club than yet another formulaic wrestling sim. But as you'll see, coming into this game with preconceived notions simply results in more and more surprise.

The premise for Fight for NY is that D-Mob, the Kingpin-esque figure from the first game, is about to be taken away for his criminal dealings when he is rescued by a mysterious individual. This is you, and now that you've earned D-Mob's favor he's going to take you in and with your help reclaim his chunk of the underworld that is now being encroached upon by one pimptastic individual named Crow (played menacingly by Snoop Doggy Dogg).

Def Jam's story is surprisingly articulate for a fighting game, but as I said, this game is one that contains many surprises. The plot, while straightforward, is presented in excellent fashion and with great delivery (special props go to the performances of Method Man as your trusty best friend, Snoop Dogg as Crow, and Sticky Fingahz as a ghetto Joe Pesci). It's a bit linear, with the only branching being events directly tied to your girlfriend, but this isn't an RPG, people.

Speaking of your girlfriends, one definite misstep from the previous game is the assortment of women and the depth of your interactions with them. You get a grand total of six potential girlfriends, and the fact that two of them are Carmen Electra and Lil' Kim is enough to get me irritated. If the developers were going to bother with bringing back the girlfriend aspect of the series, they should've gone a bit more in depth than just having them fight over who gets to be with your character (which was exactly the way it worked in the first game). I'm not asking for Tokimeki Memorial here folks, but c'mon, either do something with it or take it out of the next game.

To run through the story mode, you're required to create a character (or use one of the pre-made characters, but where's the fun in that?) before you can begin your fighting conquests. This is where my personal biggest surprise comes in: for a wrestling game, DJ2's create-a-character is surprisingly light. Now granted, there are tons of additional options that are available to you once you've begun story mode in earnest. You can purchase an entire wardrobe and get a wide variety of haircuts, as well as ice yourself out with jewelry in true hip hop fashion. But your actual options for your body type and facial features are a bit on the limited side. You only get maybe ten options per feature, and body types (even the huge ones) tend to be well-muscled and undetailed. Granted, this makes sure all the create-a-characters look great (in comparison to the disfigured monstrosities that you can cook up in other games), but it still boils down to lacking in customization.

Also surprising, but not as negative, is the way that your fighting style develops. Visiting your trainer, Henry Rollins, you have the traditional option of assigning the development points to your individual statistics (upper body strength, lower body strength, speed, etc.) as well as adding entirely new fighting styles (you can have a total of three). You cannot customize every individual move (like in most other wrestling games), but instead get a general move set. This is made even more confusing by the fact that training in an additional style results in a strange hybrid of the two. For example, I had started out with martial arts, which has excellent counters and wall moves. Adding street fighting gave me a whole new set of kicks (which were neither pure martial arts nor street fighting) as well as replacing my punches with the unholy lethal haymaker of death (street fighting's trademark). Then when I added kickboxing, my kicks were further mutated into the deadly rapid-fire variety of kickboxing, and my punches mutated into quick rapid-fire hits, and my haymaker (while retaining it's deadliness) was turned into a powerful right straight. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (unless you're really hot for mapping out each individual move), but I felt that it could've been explained a bit better either in the game or in the miniscule instruction manual EA included.

In the "Unquestionably awesome" category - huge applause to EA and Aki for the way this works out - is the way stats are handled. In so many games, regardless of how your settings are listed for your character you can't really "feel" the difference unless you are extremely under- or overdeveloped. But in Def Jam, you can instinctively tell when you've dropped a couple into your speed, a couple into your toughness, and so on. It really is impressive the amount of nuance with which your individual stats are built up and how it shows up in gameplay.

Showing it's wrestling game roots, DJ2 has a wide variety of matches you can take part in, all of them appearing some time or another in story mode. Most of these have to do with environmental attacks (throw your opponent into the ring of fire, throw him out a window, etc). These add a bit of spice to the multiplayer even if they're a bit of a cheat since they're basically built around individual stages in the game as opposed to being specific types of matches.

Layin' down the pimp justice

So you're probably wondering "But how do the freaking fights play out, you wordy windbag?" Well there's no question that the influence from Aki's wrestling origins is felt slightly, but the game itself is a lot more fast-paced and kinetic than any wrestler I've ever played. Grapples (in traditional fighting game fashion) are better used as a way to to counter turtling opponents than as the ultimate form of devastation. It's all about awesomely painful combos and environmental damage. Environmental tactics are always fun to use, watching wood splinter and car windows crack as you slam your opponents in a howlingly painful way into whatever's lying around. (These are also some of the moves that do the best damage.)

My only complaint is weapons are ludicrously (and realistically) unbalanced. There's no better way to turn around the momentum of a stone-cold ass kicking then to grab a tire iron from the crowd and wang on your opponent's face with it. Despite being kind of unbalanced, it's still kind of awesome (if only because you realize afterwards that that's how it'd happen for real). There's really something ultra-visceral about how Def Jam plays that make Tekken and Virtua Fighter look like video game tiddlywinks.

And that really has a lot to do with the graphics. EA has been doing big, awesome, kind of cartoony-looking characters alot ever since introducing SSX Tricky, and here they are again, each looking distinctly individual and all of them looking great. DJ2's greater graphical asset it's its overabundance of artistic grooviness, with licensed clothing lines, stylized character models, and attention to detail. (After all, I'm sure at least a few of the stars in this are prima donnas who would whine if they weren't represented in the game juuuuust right.)

I especially love all the little details, like how your weapons dent after smashing someone in the head with them enough, and the way glass will splinter . . . splinter . . . and then shatter, as well as the (relatively light) facial deformation and damage that characters show. This is without a doubt the best-looking fighter this side of Soul Calibur II, but while that game sparkles like a rainbow, Fight for NY's soft lighting and gory details give it a distinctly different flavor. The only real complaint I have with the visuals is how freaking oogly the background characters are compared to everything else. The ancillary spectators look so out of place and blocky, it's like seeing a beautiful painting with a crudely scrawled crayon characters in the background.

Sound in the game is, of course, a big heaping helping of Def Jam recordings. While I'm no hip hop connoiseur (the only reason I listen to Jurassic 5 is because I liked what I heard in Jet Set Radio), I found none of the music awesome enough to look up and find out who performed it, yet none of it irritating enough to make me want to turn the music off - so, if nothing else, the soundtrack has dodged a bullet in being surprisingly indistinct. The SFX are excellent though, with all sorts of nasty sounding impacts, snaps, pops, and crunches. The voice work is also awesome, from the superstars to the original characters, but some of these people are just scary-sounding. If I ever see David Banner in real life, I'm either going to run the other way or stick a brick down his throat for his horrifyingly stupid way of announcing what state he's from.

All in all, Def Jam: Fight for NY is a triumph for EA and Aki in defying fighting game conventions that have been in place since the original Dead or Alive. It's not perfect, but it sure as hell is a lot more interesting than most of what's going on in the world of 3D fighting games right now. And as with every good new entry, I hope this will signal a resurgence of creativity in fighting games, but instead I predict a huge washload of hip hop influenced games with pasted-on licenses and not a drop of the hard work and creativity that are displayed in this title. But for now, let's enjoy the moment, and push Xzibit in front of a subway train and show him that there are some things that Right Guard deodorant doesn't protect against.

· · · Lee Francis