Love me Tender, Punch 'em Hard...
Knuckle Bash is a 1993 Beat 'em Up arcade action game made by Toaplan, and the company's last title before it folded a year later.
A corrupt wrestling group called the Mad Bull Group organization threatens to taint the reputation of the sport, leading to a group of ex-wrestlers to quit their jobs and return to the ring, for one last fight, to restore wrestling back to it's former glory. Three of the best wrestlers - the Luchadore El Plancha, the Elvis Impersonator Michael Sobut, and the street brawler Jack Brow - are available for players as they kick all sorts of ass through a series of location from a Chicago Hotel, New York's Chinatown, a Thai Boxing court, an underground fighting ring in the Middle East, a Buddhist Temple, and numerous places to recruit the best wrestlers around before infiltrating Mad Bull's headquarters.
Off to Destroy The Bull Group, for the Fierce Battle of The Four Mad Bulls...
- Acrofatic: The Final Boss, leader of the Bull Group, is a grossly overweight brute with a bulging stomach, flabby arms and legs and at least a meter taller than you, who can move rather quickly around his office despite his girth.
- Ambiguously Human: En route to confronting the Bull Group's leader, you fight a tengu demon who literally Power Floats into the arena and have the ability to breath a powerful laser blast. But after you beat him down, he's then revealed to be a man disguised as a demon. The source of his supernatural powers, though, is quickly brushed aside and never brought up again.
- Boss-Only Level: Several levels consist solely of boss fights.
- Boss Tease: Mad Bull's unnamed leader and the game's Big Bad Final Boss actually appears right in the first stage... for a quick cameo. You don't get to fight him until the final stage and ten bosses later.
- Defeat Means Playable: There two unlockable boss characters:
- Mr. Hayate the ninja, unlocked by completing "Destroy The Bull Group"
- Kyaputeso (キャプテソ?) the rugby player, by defeating "Fierce Battle of The Four Bulls".
- Die, Chair, Die!: All over the place - right in the first stage, the front of the hotel contains four parked cars, two on either side, which you proceed to rip apart with your fists in order to proceed. And the following area gives you a Manneken Piss replica to smash up...
- Dual Boss: As soon as you exit the hotel in the first stage (by getting blown out the building by dynamites), you fight two bosses at once, consisting of a huge muscleman brawler and a Muay Thai fighter. The fifth stage has you fighting two overweight luchadors.
- Elvis Impersonator: Michael Sobut a.k.a "Clash". Imagine an ass-kicking Elvis who beats the crap out of multiple people everywhere he goes. His throw turns the enemy into a guitar, which he rocks out on before throwing the enemy aside.
- Evil Overlooker: Hayate, the tengu, and Kyaputeso on the front cover.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: The stage near the docks have a quick shot of a giant, brown-and-green furry arm bursting out a man-sized crate in an area you just left. In the next section, you're fighting a gigantic furry monkey.
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Subverted: the second-to-last boss have you fighting a horned tengu from out of nowhere, given you spend the whole game fighting human-based enemies up to his point. But then the demon is revealed to be a dude in a mask.
- Kevlard: What allows the Bull Group's grossly overweight leader to absorb your punches and kicks like crazy... and keep on going.
- Malevolent Masked Men:
- The second-to-last boss wears a tengu mask, which make the players assume he's a real demon. It falls off upon his defeat.
- For reasons unexplained, the game's Final Boss - an overweight giant of a man - wears a mask made from a flayed piglet. Which could barely cover half his gigantic head. Maybe he's trying to invoke himself being a Pig Man...
- Maniac Monkeys: The stage at a wharf have you fighting a green-skinned, yellow-furred feral monkey as a boss.
- Masked Luchador: Besides one of the heroes, El Plancha, there's also a trio of luchador boss enemies fought on a ring in a later stage.
- Mini-Game: Every few levels, you play a game where you mash one of the buttons to charge up a boxer's punch. The more you mash, the more health you regain. If you knock the opponent out, you get all your health back.
- Ninja: Hayate, one of the playable characters.
- Palette Swap: More than half the mooks are made from recycled sprites of each other. Notably the waterfront stage which has identical guys in sunglasses wearing either red or blue shirts, as with the Luchadore enemies and the thugs in Chinatown, which are identical models with different skin colours and attires.
- Spin Attack: The Arab fighter boss you battle in the ring does this with his scimitars, which cuts away quite a bit of your health should you fail to dodge.
- Suplex Finisher: Michael can execute this on enemies with the grabbing move, which deals greater damage to their health.
- Title Drop: The final cutscene ends with this line:What a Knuckle Bash it was!
- Unreadably Fast Text: Levels in-between gameplays have entire paragraphs of stories whizzing past in seconds.
- Watching the Sunset: The game's final scene have the three heroes, El Plancha, Michael and Jack - alongside Hayate and Captain, two of the defeated bosses, watching the sunset.
- We succeeded in destroying the Bull Group. The World is free of their evil ways.
The story of our heroes has become legendary...
