Fighting Beauty Wulong – Sensual Chaos

DreamFactory is a small studio from Japan that, for the better part of two decades, has made a diverse portfolio of beat ‘m ups and fighting games. Often working with SquareSoft to produce titles like The Bouncer and Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring (featuring multiple characters from Final Fantasy).

One of their bigger games at the time was Tobal No. 1, a fighting game from 1996. While an interesting game in its own right, its significance for the studio was how its animation would end up being reused for the next decade as the studio pumped out more and more niche titles with its small staff. Including many anime tie-in games. 

One of these was for Fighting Beauty Wulong, also known as Kakutou Bijin Wulong (格闘美神 武龍), set to be released alongside the second season of its anime-adaptation in 2006 on the PlayStation 2. The story tells of Mao Lan, a Chinese girl raised in Japan who trained in her family’s secret martial art, and her participation in the all-female martial arts tournament Prime Mat.

Like the anime and manga, the game was only released in Japan and never officially translated. Making it a curious little game that many might not have experienced. Thankfully, the language barrier isn’t much of a hurdle. It’s a straightforward beat ‘em up: most dialogue and cutscenes can be skipped, and objectives rarely go beyond “defeat all enemies on screen.”

You have your typical punches and kicks, but what’s immediately interesting is that while blocking, you can press down to crouch, which changes your attack animations as well. Punches then become a launching kick, while the X-button is a low kick to use against high-blocking enemies. Should they block for too long, you can even grab them, signifying the typical fighting-game mixups for highs, lows, and throws. There are even 360-inputs for electric punches and off-the-wall bodyslams. Meanwhile, enemies operate similarly to you, often pushing you to mix up your high and low defence and keeping an eye out for grabs, and should you hit the ground, it turns into an interesting game of reacting to or predicting their reaction to your wakeup. 

Should you take damage, the only way to consistently heal is by filling your special bar, which can be depleted to ‘meditate’ to regain very small bits of health, or to use an invincible escape move to get enemies off of you. Later on you’ll even gain access to multiple fighting stances, with different takes on launchers, grabs, and other types of attacks.

If these mechanics sound at all interesting or familiar, that shouldn’t be too surprising. Because at the helm of DreamFactory sits chairman Seiichi Ishii, who served as designer and director for both Virtua Fighter and Tekken, respectively. In a sense, Fighting Beauty Wulong plays similarly to a fighting game or one of its single-player modes, like Tekken Force. 

Because enemies can put up diverse amounts of pressure and won’t hesitate to gang up on you, forcing you to divide and conquer enemies one by one if possible. Once defeated, they drop a set of restorative items, of which Mao Lan can carry up to 5 at a time. Unique amongst these items however are the Cards which come in three colors which, when used let you do a powerful and fullyinvincible attack.

Like the healing items, enemies can also grab and use cards. So when one dies, it quickly turns into a mad scramble. If a boss manages to scoop up multiple cards, your entire battle plan shifts on the fly, creating an unpredictable and interesting dynamic.

As a result, fights are very explosive. You can easily churn through multiple engagements in seconds with the correct cards, especially when you read your opponent well and get a nice uppercut juggle in between. This is compounded by the short levels, often less than a minute in length, offering up bite-sized chunks of combat.

At the end of each stage, you can save your game, at least at first. Later on this changes abruptly, with multiple boss fights and even entire stages appearing in a row without any save points. It’s especially noticeable in the middle of the game, where you’re forced into two big battles, two boss fights, and then a forest section featuring two new enemies…all without a chance to heal or save in between. Creating a weird difficulty curve.

The bosses meanwhile operate more like a fighting game. The camera is set at the familiar fighting-game angle and they each have a moveset that matches your ownwhile also starting with a set of items. Their added depth compared to the simpler enemies makes more sense when you see that, after beating the main campaign in about an hour, you find there’s a VS-mode where you can play as all the bosses. 

There’s a lot to enjoy within this mode by itself, and one can only imagine fans of the series having a blast playing as their favourite character in anticipation of the next episode. Even outside of that timeframe though it offers a surprising amount of options with its allowance of complex juggle combos, mind games and pressure play; made more chaotic by the aforementioned powerful items and cards that players can use here as well.

Should the versus mode not be to your liking, there’s also a survival mode that pits you against increasing waves of enemies using the campaign’s combat as well as a Hard Mode. Here your health is cut by 66% and you’re now required to mix items to even save your progress, upping the pressure significantly. 

All in all, Fighting Beauty Wulong is an interesting game that blends beat ’em up chaos with fighting game-style high/low mixups. 

While it is held back by bland level design and forgettable enemies whose lack of behavioral variety makes even its brief runtime feel longer than it should… its moment-to-moment decision-making, combined with the unpredictability of item drops, gives it a spark that keeps things engaging.

In short, it’s a flawed but interesting entry in the PlayStation 2’s long list of Japan-only curiosities; worth a look for anyone interested in the stranger corners of the genre.

斬 postscript notes 斬

• Due to the language barrier, I didn’t figure out how to save until after Googling it. Turns out, you have to combine red and blue potions by dropping them together. As a result, I ended up beating Hard Mode without saving haha.
• Subsequently, Easy Mode removes items entirely, an odd design choice, while also giving you nearly triple health. 
• Though understandable due to its Japan exclusivity, the game is barely covered online. There’s exactly one review floating around on an old blogspot page, which didn’t even get past the bear fights, which, granted, is the game’s biggest difficulty spike. I also couldn’t find a single Hard Mode playthrough on YouTube either, which makes me wish I’d recorded my own No-Death run. I could’ve slapped a “World First” on it for good measure.
• This article is short and sweet. I just wanted to use the site’s (relative) reach to shine a light on a lesser-known game in hopes more people give it a shot. I genuinely had fun with it. It’s a compact, chaotic little experience that you can finish in one sitting, even as a father. And it just has that classic PS2 sheen to it.
• As for DreamFactory? Since 2015, the studio’s been down to a single developer: Seiichi Ishii himself. The studio’s last real game was Naruto Shippuden: Shinobi Retsuden 3 in 2009, followed by producing several ports of classics to both the Nintendo Wii and later also smartphones. What DreamFactory’s doing now is anyone’s guess, as every attempt to reach out sadly went unanswered.As a game, Fighting Beauty Wulong is an interesting showcase of how smart reuse of animations, assets, artwork, and sound can quickly come together to create a fun little experience. A method of development that many studios have lost sight of these days.