Sonic The Fighters is one of the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise's many obscure entries. A fighting game that debut in the arcades, it saw a limited release in America, and would not see a console release until the Sonic Gems Collection for the PlayStation 2 and GameCube.
The story has Dr. Robotnik (Dr. Eggman in the Japanese version, as this was before America adapted the name as a nickname) has built the Death Egg II to conquer the world. Thankfully, Tails has a spaceship, the Lunar Fox ready, but it needs eight chaos emeralds to power (why there is an eighth Chaos Emerald in this game and not the others is beyond me), and shockingly, Sonic and Tails has one emerald, and six others, including Sonic's friends Knuckles and Amy, the bounty hunter Fang, and new characters Bark the Polar Bear and Bean the Duck, also have a Chaos Emerald. With the Lunar Fox being a one-seater, the eight have a fighting competition to decide who gets to go stop Robotnik's latest conquest.
In this fighting game, you choose between eight playable characters. The controls are simple, as you get three buttons: punch, kick, and barrier. Barrier is basically your block button, only instead of blocking, your character activates a barrier that is limited by a meter on the bottom screen. When that meter expires, you can no longer defend yourself the rest of the round, as the barrier will break, meaning you need to be careful not to be on defense too much. Also, the characters have their own combos and special moves (Amy can use her hammer to flatten enemies in cartoony style, Bean is capable of using bombs, Fang has his cork guns, etc.)
However, the game suffers from unstable difficulty spikes, as the game gets hard at some points (Bark is where it got hard for me). Metal Sonic is a pain to try and beat, but the final battle with Dr. Robotnik is bad because if you lose, it's game over. No continuing, you go back to the start if you want to try again. This is an obscure title, but not one of the best.
