Black Tiger (Arcade)

In 2013, Capcom released Capcom Arcade Cabinet for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 which included some of their earliest arcade games from the 1980s. Rather than just including them all as one big package though, players were able to buy small packs of games if only a few of the games interested them. To try and hook people into this approach to game distribution, the PS3 version decided to include one full game free of charge, that being the sidescrolling platformer Black Tiger. One would think this free sample would be strategically picked, a game that wasn’t too well known since Capcom would likely want to sell anything popular inside one of the content packs but still a quality title so that players might be more willing to take a chance on the less exciting looking offerings. However, despite looking quite nice for an 80s arcade game, Black Tiger is a rather rough action game to actually play.

Black Tiger stars a musclebound hero of the same name heading into a kingdom taken over by a powerful Black Dragon and its many monstrous minions. Funnily enough, in Japan the game goes by Black Dragon, referring to the antagonist, whereas the loincloth-wearing protagonist ended up being the headliner overseas. However, it might be a case where the Black Tiger name was decided on and then thrown onto the hero after since there are no tigers or related iconography to be seen in-game.

As you make your way through the many regions of this fallen kingdom to defeat the dragon’s servants and work your way to the main fiend himself, you’ll find the levels to be rather large in scope, stretching out both horizontally and vertically to make some stages practically maze-like. Arrows on the wall will try and orient you some but they are almost more like street signs than true guidance, simply indicating which routes are available as you reach junctions so that you can orient yourself and recognize familiar spots more easily. Whichever path you go down will inevitably be rich with enemy opposition, and Black Tiger certainly has a problem with how it places its baddies.

The platforms you navigate will often have creatures running across them that provide a fair fight, sometimes you’ll want to hit something out of the air before leaping so that your safe landing is guaranteed, and the pillars scattered about that you’ll find yourself climbing up might have creatures hanging on or near them, requiring you to either clear the way before hopping on or awkwardly trying to fight while climbing. However, these enemy placements aren’t helped by the company they keep, the game trying to frequently force you into a tight spot to land cheap and easy hits. The ground ahead may look safe, but suddenly a man-eating plant bursts from the ground, sometimes killing you and other times instead afflicting you with a poison or control reversal which makes your death slow but pretty inevitable if you don’t have a potion on hand. Falling rocks will appear suddenly and without warning to instantly wipe you out unless you have the best armor available. Certain unkillable enemies like the spinning skull coins are placed to be navigated around, but the game then places flying foes or ones that throw plenty of projectiles your way so that you’re sometimes asked to decide what you want to be hurt by rather than being able to successfully evade it all.

Black Tiger far too often places the player in a pickle where damage will be practically inevitable, sometimes the only escape option being to dive downwards to an earlier part of the level and lose a lot of your forward progress. You do gradually gain health upgrades over the course of the adventure, but the enemies scale to be stronger so they can take off more health so the benefits are somewhat undone and you are worse off if you haven’t been able to build up the experience needed to get those upgrades before the enemies increase in strength. Level timers prevent any grinding up the points that serve as experience, continuing after running out of lives will wipe out your points to make it harder to build them up to the next life meter upgrade, and sticking around to fight enemies for points can often place you at risk of losing more lives and quarters, but the checkpoints are at least reasonably common to help you overcome the difficulty gradually, enemies even staying gone if you defeated them.

Devious enemy placement is the big problem hanging over enjoying Black Tiger, but the game at least tried to properly equip its hero for the dangers ahead. When you attack, you actually have a few things going on all at once. The first is a whip-like strike that goes far ahead of your character, the flail’s reach able to let you fight foes who are up to a little over two character lengths ahead of you. This straight line strike would be practically useless for a lot of the airborne or mobile enemies though if not for the support it receives from Black Tiger’s other attacking method. When you fling your flail out, you also somehow toss three daggers in a fan in front of you. The three daggers will fly the full length of the screen before disappearing, so even though they’re weaker than the flail they have a reach advantage you can exploit. Two of the daggers are thrown at an angle too, the two knives flying in slightly different diagonal paths to help cover foes who are flying just out of reach. This aspect of your attack does allow for fights to take advantage of the ample vertical space without always being heavily skewed against you, but it does feel like these knives were thrown in during development because they realized how underpowered you would be otherwise, and it still doesn’t completely eliminate the issues with a lot of hazard placements or enemy attack strategies.

Black Tiger does try to be a little ambitious in its design though, integrating role-playing game elements into its arcade platformer design. Besides points serving as your level up system, you are also able to collect money from fallen foes or by opening treasure chests you find. The treasure chests are fairly common but require keys to open, and unfortunately it seems like a lot more chests contain traps than goodies. The gold you gather is a special form of currency called Zenny that would go on to be a staple of Capcom franchises, serving as the money system in series like Monster Hunter, various Mega Man spin-offs, and the Breath of Fire RPGs. The Zenny here is used when you find petrified old men, some of these fellows thanking you for freeing them by providing gifts or advice while others run a storefront with weapon upgrades, potions, and armor. Weapon upgrades will stick with you even if you die so they’re definitely what you want to invest in, especially since late game enemies take a few hits to kill and will take even longer to put down if you aren’t fully upgraded. Armor, on the other hand, is rarely a wise investment unless you know a boss fight is ahead or you’ve bought everything else you can. When you take damage and have armor it will break off instead of you being hurt, but many things can shear it right off you even when it’s at the highest armor class available. Since reviving only gives you low tier armor it’s also an upgrade that won’t stick with you during the adventure, and the fact the game’s power scaling undermines its usefulness makes it a poor investment unless you’re swimming in Zenny.

One special way to earn Zenny is by entering little dungeons you can find where you have one shot to try and grab all the bonuses you can and escape alive. Old men and beneficial treasure chests are common in these small segments and the enemies are often a bit more reasonable here despite guarding the better treasures, so if you can find a dungeon it’s almost always worth a look. Regular parts of the levels can hide secrets too though, breakable walls containing special items or healing if you can stumble into finding one.

Sadly, if you do make it all the way to the Black Dragon battle, it’s going to prove to be an underwhelming one, because you have already fought two dragons before it that fought you in the very same way. The game’s boss battles are not only repeated but have some strange issues with hit detection. Whether you’re fighting one of the dragons or the lizard swordsmen, identifying when your attack will actually deal damage or when it will pass harmlessly through the boss is no easy feat. They do have specific regions of their body you need to strike but it’s difficult to determine how to make hits register reliably. There are ways to exploit the bosses to gain an edge, but they also can deal heavy damage by touching you and can corner you for easy damage if things don’t happen to swing your way. It can feel like a boss’s difficulty is tied more to their movement and your equipment going in rather than the attacks being thrown out by either side, so it’s hard to say they’re universally difficult or too easy when this shifts based on something in flux.

THE VERDICT: While there are many moments in Black Tiger where your attack method is a solid fit for the way enemies are placed, there are just as many where something might suddenly appear that deals heavy damage or leaves you in a bind. The tight spots you find yourself in when you’re ambushed or ganged up on by agile foes make it easy to lose lives and armor, and while growing your strength through weapon upgrades and earning points is a nifty idea, the enemies scale in step with it to make it more about not falling behind rather than gaining advantages in battle. Repetitive boss fights play into the same issues of easily finding yourself in a jam at times, so while Black Tiger does have moments where you’re able to platform about and destroy monsters in fair fights, victory seems more a matter of persistence and ample pocket change due to traps and tough foes.

And so, I give Black Tiger for arcade machines…

A BAD rating. Most of what I have to say about Black Tiger is bad because the moments in between where things are going well aren’t too exceptional. Your flail/knife combo and the platforming levels work together for small stretches and you might even be a bit too well equipped for some of the simpler encounters, but then things turn out to be insufficient when the game starts dropping rocks on you or has plants spring up underfoot while you’re still trying to fight some flying foe shooting projectiles at you. Your purchasable upgrades are only ones that bump up your strength or defense and the defense ones are gone the moment you take a hit, but since the enemies scale in step with you it doesn’t really feel like you’re making progress so much as avoiding falling behind in power. Some tells for the ambushes so you can potentially see them coming and bosses who are more of a battle rather than hoping your hits land before the boss bumps into you would do a lot to make the action platforming here feel much smoother. Black Tiger couldn’t be too easy since it’s an arcade game that wants the player to feed in quarters to continue, but having more situations where enemies are placed in difficult areas but still give the player the means to approach them properly or respond with something besides picking between different damage types would make it feel less like you’re being deliberately drained of your credits.

There were certainly worse titles in the Capcom Arcade Cabinet’s collection they could have presented as the freebie such as Avengers, but Black Tiger did at least have one clear advantage of playing the rerelease over the original. In the arcade you’d have to keep paying to play, but Black Tiger in the Capcom Arcade Cabinet lets you continue playing for free. The checkpoint system’s kindness means forward progress is possible albeit gradual and cheap ambushes become a bit easier to swallow when the stakes for failure are barely present. It doesn’t change issues like the boss fight construction or the power scaling, but at least Black Tiger was showing how the collection could help you better experience an old game even if that old game wasn’t a very good showcase of Capcom’s early work.