Originally Hokuto no Ken (Fist of the North Star) when released in Japan, Black Belt has Riki (you) saving your Japanese girlfriend, Kyoko, out of her "beautiful Japanese mess" from Wang (the instruction manual is hilarious). It won't be that easy, though, as you have to fight your way through Wang's army of "small guys", "medium guys", and "big guys". So Riki dons his white gi and black belt, making enemies explode with a touch of a hand or foot to rescue the one he loves! Kinda wish you took those karate lessons now, did ya? As exciting as making your enemies explode sounds, the game quickly gets repetitious the moment you start. The only thing saving the game from becoming horribly crappy are the boss fights, but since they're so damned frustrating themselves, that's not really saying much.
Featuring a grand spanking total of six chapters, you'll wish there were less due to all the repetitive kicking you'll be doing. As soon as you begin, you'll immediately be attacked by enemies coming out from both sides of the screen, if you've played Kung Fu Kid, My Hero, or Vigilante, then you'll get what type of game this is. Standing in one place and kicking them (you can punch, but it's not as effective) won't do much, the enemy will just keep reappearing no matter how many you kill. Not only does this get repetitious very quickly, but due to how fast they reappear, you can't even move more then at least two inches without stopping and having to fight them off again. The actual enemies themselves, from Kung Fu men, wrestlers, ninjas, and black women (that's what it actually said in the manual, I kid you not), aren't really hard, but what makes them so difficult to deal with sometimes is how quickly they can surround you. This can get frustrating because you can get knocked around quite a bit between enemies before getting a hit in, you can lose a lot of health this way. Thankfully, you have a couple items, two actually, to help you through these boring fight fests. During moments in each chapter, you'll see one of the two items fly by from the top of the screen, one is usually a food item, which is obviously for your health. The other is a Japanese letter which will give you limited invincibility, it'll wear off when the tune accompanying it, stops.
Luckily, you don't have to tirelessly fight through the same looking enemies for the entire chapter, there are mid bosses (or "medium guys", as the manual calls them) to break up the "exciting action". And you actually have to put more effort into fighting them, you can't just walk up to them and kick them.....actually you can in most cases, but you'll lose a lot of health if you do that. Like the one kung fu master sword thrower in the first chapter, just plain walking up to him will get you stabbed a bunch of times, so you'll have to high jump your way towards him. Then there's the jujitsu man with claws in the third chapter, it's almost impossible to attack him face to face, so you'll have to wait for him to jump over you and attack him from behind as he lands. And then there's the two flamethrower carrying women in chapter 5, you have to do a lot of dodging between the two with all the flames flying all over the place. These could've been the main bosses, as tough as some of them are, but they're NOTHING compared to the main bosses (the "big guys").
These boss fights can be ridiculous in terms of difficulty, if you mess up just a little bit in most of them, then you're completely screwed. Like the third chapter boss, Gonta the sumo wrestler, he has one attack where he'll start jumping, and if you ever end up under him when he does that (which happens a lot), he'll kill you in two hits. If that wasn't bad enough, you have to literally do all kinds of moves and try all kinds of positions to find their weak spots, because they aren't that obvious. The worst offenders have to be Oni and Rita, in these cases it's like (as much as I don't want to use this, but it fits) finding a needle in a haystack, it's just that ridiculous. When you first fight Oni, it'll feel like he has no weak spot at all. Every time you approach and attack him, he'll counterattack your every move, you'll lose in a matter of seconds. I eventually had to search the Internet to find a decent strategy to defeat him. While Rita is not as hard, it'll take you a while to figure out how to defeat her. When I first fought her, I was puzzled as to why her life bar didn't shrink every time I hit her, but then I figured out that I had to hit her in different places with different attacks. One good thing about the boss fights, though, is watching your player perform finishing moves on them when you actually defeat them. Like when Riki rapidly punches Ryu to the ground, or when he rapidly "sumo punches" Gonta off screen, it's a pleasant and humorous sight to see after suffering through each fight.
Now when they released Hokuto no Ken over in the US as Black Belt, they did a makeover to it's graphics, making it hardly look like a Fist of the North Star game and instead making it resemble a kung fu B Movie. Don't know if it was for better or worse (I've only seen a couple screenshots, not actually played the original), but the graphics are just average. The characters look okay, are decently animated, and somewhat tiny looking. Riki, in his white gi, looks constipated every time he moves and the other "small guys" look like a bunch of army soldiers marching whenever you see them on screen. The mid bosses are more animated, though, and I'd say has much better looking animation then the main bosses. Like one of the kung fu masters who has a stick and continually swings it over his head, or the jujitsu man in the fourth chapter with the tiny claws that spin around every time he jumps.
When you get to the bosses, the characters suddenly become bigger, which is a nice change from seeing all those tiny characters. But Riki still looks constipated during this transition and looks more stiff then usual. The bosses look pretty dull and unoriginal, like Gonta, a sumo wrestler, or Wang, the last boss, who just looks like your averagely dressed kung fu guy. The backgrounds are even more dull, like the seashore with the very tiny buildings across the river (you see this twice in the game too) or a wall with leaves and trees sticking out from the other side, you end up looking at the same damn thing for the entire chapter as you slowly move along. Some of the boss backgrounds are pretty nice though, like Gonta's ring with items and armor sitting in the background, or Rita's, with a detailed picture and statues of some guy, and a fireplace in the middle. There's also a butt ugly background I didn't like, Hawk's city backdrop. It just looked unfinished and the graffiti in some areas looked terrible.
The music is the best thing the game has, it's probably the only reason I force myself to play through the game sometimes. Everything is very catchy, all of the tunes have a revenge type feel to it, which kinda fits nicely with the theme of the game. One impressive thing I thought while playing through the chapters is how well the two tunes, the tune you normally hear throughout the chapter and the invincibility tune, blend together. One moment you'll be listening to the main tune, and then when you grab the Japanese letter, the invincibility tune will just blend in and out with the normal tune without any awkwardness. The boss music is also very good, it gives off a "someone is going to get their ass kicked/Eye of the Tiger" vibe. Sound effects are basically absent in the game, a punch/kicking sound, an exploding/cracking sound (when the enemies explode), and a weird "growth" sound you hear when you gain an extra life. That's just about it, and frankly, it feels like that's what all the game needed.
You can get through the entire game in about twenty minutes, once you know how to defeat the bosses, that is. But since the game has a combination of repetitious chapters and frustratingly hard boss fights, I think many will just give up by the time they reach the third boss due to how incredibly boring and hard it gets at times. With the music being the only noteworthy thing in Black Belt, you're better off playing something like Kung Fu Kid, which I didn't really enjoy, but it's still better then suffering through this.
Overall Rating: 3/10