Dragon Ball FighterZ introduced the world to a full-on competitive fighting game that looks and acts as close to the source material as we’ve ever seen. From the graphics style closely resembling the anime to the various uber powered techniques you can pull off, sometimes it can feel like you’re playing a scene right out of the show.
One of the cooler (no pun intended) mechanics that FighterZ offers is its Clash system that sees combatants essentially cancel each other out when two similar attacks make contact with each other at the same time, and this can lead to some crazy parry-like sequences. Master of combos and obscure fighting games, Desk, has released a video that shows that this idea apparently existed in another fighter that released a whopping 32 years ago.
Now, it’s not uncommon to see similar ideas across different fighting games, even when they are generations apart. Much of what we see in modern fighting games stems from past concepts that have been expanded upon, adjusted, and touched up for today’s audience.
However, this one is particularly interesting considering that the idea of clashing is also something found often in the Dragon Ball series itself. Characters fight it out and have points where they’re evenly matched, so punches and kicks just collide with each other and essentially do no damage all while the fighter doesn’t miss a beat in the slightest.
The fighting game Desk presents to us here is called World Heroes, and it came out in arcades all the way back in 1992. This title was developed by a company called ADK (who was originally called Alpha Denshi), with some help from SNK, and it released on the Neo Geo MVS arcade cabinet back in the day.
World Heroes is essentially a four button fighter that only uses three actual face buttons to play. Players have a punch, kick, and throw button, and both punch and kick have strong and weak variations that are performed depending on how briefly or how long you pressed the button.
As Desk demonstrates, this obscure fighter has its own Clash system that looks a ton like Dragon Ball FighterZ’s. Right from the jump, we see two character tossing fireballs at each other, then colliding with a punch and a kick that sends both sailing backward while still on their feet and losing no health.
It also features a cast of oddball misfits from a football player to a pirate to the obligatory Bruce Lee clone, which makes for an interesting watch for sure.
Check out Desk’s video demonstrating the power of clashes 32 years before Dragon Ball FighterZ below.
And if you’d like to see Dragon Ball FighterZ’s Clash system in action for comparison’s sake, you can check out the best example of it ever performed in tournament below.