- Millennia of peace have passed since the mechanical gods ascended, leaving the lower order robots to cultivate the world.
But something forgotten and terrible now stirs amidst the stars...
A Robot Named Fight! is a Roguelike developed by one Matt Bitner and released in 2017. You play as the eponymous robot, named Fight, as they seek to take on a horrible, moon-sized creature known only as The Megabeast as it lays siege to their world in the absence of its protection by the mechanical gods, raining twisted organic creatures down upon the planet in a seemingly unstoppable plague of meat. Coined as a "Metrogue" specifically, the game plays very much like 2D entries in the Metroid franchise, featuring procedural generation of its maps and items as you fight your way down through the tunnel systems of the planet, fighting disgusting meat-creatures as you search for the relics of wartime to "become fight enough" to take on the Megabeast.
The game, as of now, is receiving regular bugfixes and balance changes to pretty much everything.
This Game Provides Examples Of:
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Though the vendors show no end of appreciation for Fight's mission, they require scrap to be able to craft the relics to help Fight on the fly. Goes further with the Shrines to the Mechanical Gods, who will often take your offerings and give you nothing in return unless you abide by their Arc Number.
- After the End: Not only is robotkind on the verge of annihilation by the Megabeast when the game begins, but the world is already in the aftermath of a Robot War that left humanity near-extinct and led to the creation of the Megabeast in retaliation. This can be seen most clearly in the Buried City environment - a remnant of the original war.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Mechanical Gods were created by humanity to assist with restoring a broken Earth. Though they succeeded, they decided humanity was part of the problem and tried to "fix" this problem by enslaving them. When humanity pushed back against their hellish living conditions, the Gods decided that Murder Is the Best Solution, at least until Maximon and Tutorial Smith gave them the means to fight back.
- Almost Dead Guy: The Tutorial Smith, who you find wounded at the start of every game tries to give his last tutorial if you talk to him. Key word is try.Tutorial Smith: Press X to shoot, Press A to jump, Press Right Trigger to-...Oh god i'm dying! Press buttons. Everything is going dark...
- Of course, the fact that it's the same Tutorial Smith every time hints there's something up with him...
- Anti-Frustration Features: The Mothorb has a sizable delay before it will pick up scrap to convert them into nanobots, mitigating the drain on resources it would be since scrap is also needed in sizable quantities to buy things from vendors.
- On the auditory side, the Item Get! jingle only plays in full when you first collect that particular item. A duplicate of an item you've already found will just play a shorter synth note and let you skip the notification faster.
- One of the first unlockables is the Revenant Station, which gives you single-use checkpoints that you will revive at when killed.
- Another such unlockable, for getting four orbs in a single run, gives you a random chance to start a game with an orb already following you.
- Arc Number: Each Mechanical God is associated with a different one of these. Making scrap donations in multiples will guarantee rewards.
- Arm Cannon: Fight always starts with a cannon taking up one arm. Initially they can only shoot weak but quick bullets, but later upgrades let the weapon become much more powerful and adaptable.
- Asteroids Monster: The Mouth Meat line of monsters will typically split into multiple entities on death, as well as shedding smaller monsters with every hit they take. The Beak Lord will also shed its five heads as separate bouncing monsters on death.
- Beneath the Earth: The Buried City, remnants of the old Robot War. It's home to molemen, the devolved/mutated remnants of humanity.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: The premise is an A.I. Is a Crapshoot scenario from the perspective of the AI, so this is in play: as far as the machines are concerned, they gave humanity safety, sustenance, and purpose so they genuinely couldn't understand why the humans revolted and fought back just because these took the form of manual slavery. Buluc Chabtan, the God of "empathy," decided the best response to this was to Kill All Humans. Maximon and Tutorial Smith were the only machines willing to stand up for humanity - and even in their cases, it wasn't out of genuine compassion, but out of realization that genocide wouldn't fix the problem.
- Bonus Level of Hell: The Forbidden World, a labyrinth of visual garbage full of unique enemies and at first has no map indicators associated with it.
- Door to Before: The final area of the game, The Buried City, will typically have ways into it from both The Factory and The Caves, with the Cave entrance being intended for use after you've cleared the final area.
- Drone Deployer: Fight can find or buy special drones called Orbs that have a wide variety of functions. The Mothorb in particular converts dropped scrap into explosive drones that home in on the nearest enemy.
- Dying Dream: It's hinted that the Forbidden Place is this, an AI's purgatory before death. It's usually accessed through (and heavily associated with) Tutorial Smith, the NPC found dying at the start of every run, and late dialogue with him paints him as some sort of avatar of death. The Forbidden Place itself is a disorienting maze of visual garbage and intention glitches, and is much harder than anything else in the game.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Megabeast, a living organism the size of a moon that can endlessly vomit out smaller unnatural creatures.
- Expy: Fight is one of Samus, running with the idea back during her debut that she was a robot. Some of Fight's animations are even similar to Samus' during her 2D adventures, primarily when running or jumping.
- Fragile Speedster: The Speed Shell reduces health in exchange for increasing movement speed and rate of fire.
- Gone Horribly Right: The Megabeast is a human superweapon made to reclaim Earth by creating a biological supercomputer in an effort to subvert what went wrong with the Mechanical Gods. It proceeded to grow around their starship and gain so much mass that it grew to the size of a moon and began using the humans' last directive given to it, destroy the robots, as its only dictative thought process.
- Heel–Face Turn: Maximon and the Tutorial Smith who gave humanity the means to fight back against the Mechanical Gods determined to wipe them out, though it backfired pretty terribly.
- Hero Antagonist: Maximon and the Tutorial Smith, who recognized that the solution to human suffering was self-defeating and taught the survivors to create the Megabeast, though they had no idea things would go so badly.
- Hidden Badass: While Tutorial Smith typically appears so feeble that he dies immediately after being spoken to, he is actually one of the most powerful enemies in the game, acting as the final boss for the third and currently final ending.
- Informed Equipment: Mostly averted; Every equippable item that isn't an orb or mapped to the Y button will show up on Fight in some way.
- Irony: The main conflict in the backstory happened because humanity crafted Mechanical Abominations to restore their world, and said abominations warped their intent into "preserve the world even at the cost of human lives." The current conflict happened because humanity (with the aid of Maximon) crafted the Megabeast, a fully-organic supercomputer Eldritch Abomination with the goal of retaking the planet and destroying the machines, and it warped their intent into "exterminate every last machine, at any cost." In essence, the first A.I. Is a Crapshoot is left to contend with the consequences of a second, wholly-different A.I. Is a Crapshoot.
- Legacy Character: Fight is not a single robot, but any robot that takes up the name and equipment of the original's model to protect their planet.
- Mighty Glacier: The Wrecker Shell reduces movement speed, but increases damage.
- Mother of a Thousand Young: The Megabeast's main form of assault and defense is to birth various horrible monsters onto the world below.
- Multiple-Choice Past: To explain how Fight starts off at half health, they have either:
- Rolled out of a pile of dead robots with their design.
- Survived their gunship crashing into a building.
- Just finished fighting a flying spawn of the Megabeast.
- Nonindicative Name: Buluc Chabtan is the Mechanical God associated with empathy. His "empathic" response to humanity suffering and resisting under the robot's rule was to attempt to genocide them all.
- Orbiting Particle Shield: Most orbs will float around Fight when their ability is not active.
- Practical Currency: Ancient Scrap is used not to buy weapons so much as provide the materials to make them. Most items will usually require any combination of grey, blue, or green scrap, with red being used for Orbs and some Shells. All merchant and shrine purchases punctuate this by having the machine in question construct the item for you on the spot.
- Puppeteer Parasite: Some creatures have taken over machinery rather than just destroying and eating it, mainly robots with blasters that now hobble along the ground, and security turrets that fire homing missiles. The Metal Patriarch is a giant wartime robot being controlled by a Beak Lord
- Shout-Out: Primarily to Metroid, but a few others sneak in.
- The Energy Axe and Wave Bomb items are references to Castlevania subweapons, specifically the Axe and the Holy Water. Not only can you also find graffiti that reads "WHAT A TERRIBLE NIGHT FOR A CURSE", but the Beak Lord boss is reminiscent of Dracula's second form from Dracula's Curse. Additionally, Red Chompers melt into the ground when damaged and reform just like Red Skeletons, and some wall-mounted enemies act exactly like Castlevania's Bone Dragons.
- The Slide, an alternative to the Arachnomorph as a 'get through tight spaces' item, is reminiscent of Mega Man. The Moleman Shaman also uses spectral eyes to mimic the attacks of Wood Man, Metal Man, and Air Man. Plus there are frog-shaped meat monsters in the Forest Slums that spit out a spray of three smaller monsters, just like the Kerog enemies from Bubble Man's stage in Mega Man 2.
- The Viridian Shell lets you invert your personal gravity, and is named after Captain Viridian.
- The Buzzsaw Shell's jumping spin attack might draw comparisons to Samus' Screw Attack if not for the fact that the shell also gives you a spin dash and a stylish spiky haircut.
- Theme Music Power-Up: The main theme of the game plays as you re-enter the city with your vast arsenal in-hand.
- Villain Protagonist: Downplayed. The robots are undeniably the villains of the overall story, but Fight is just a simple protector robot with the goal of keeping robotkind safe. While they may be facilitating the extinction of humanity by fighting back against the Megabeast, as far as they're concerned it's just protecting their own, and they're completely disconnected from the overall narrative. Later story mode endings suggest that the robots generally are ill-treated by the cruel and petty Mechanical Gods, and that at least some of them are martyred for sympathizing with humanity.
- Womb Level: Beat the game enough times and upon defeating the Megabeast, instead of dying, it throws up a large red tractor beam leading inside it. It leads to the True Final Boss, the Megabeast Core.
