It’s an embarrassing fact that I used to like Clay Fighter’s 64-bit entries. A lot, actually. I used to see the series as almost the peak of humour; my generation’s Monty Python.

I’m not embarrassed because it’s a bad game. I mean, it’s not great, but I love lots of games that are not great. I love games that are outright bad. Need I remind you of my soft spot for the Army Men series?

No, I’m embarrassed because Clay Fighter 63 1/3 and, by extension, Clay Fighter Sculptor’s Cut is an abomination. I can hardly bring myself to play them anymore, but somehow, I enjoyed it when I was 10. So, to illustrate this, let’s take a look at the holy grail of the N64 library: Clay Fighter: Sculptor’s Cut.

I’M A HUMAN BEING (I THINK IS WHAT HE SAYS)

I came into owning Clay Fighter: Sculptor’s Cut through my aforementioned embarrassing childhood passion for the series. Blockbuster Video happened to be liquidating some of their old games and my mother was gracious enough to buy me the game. The importance of this is that the game was a Blockbuster rental exclusive. I’m not even sure if they were supposed to sell it, but regardless, it came into my possession and has appreciated in value ever since. Its collector’s market values: that’s what’s really embarrassing.

If you’re new to the series, Clay Fighter is a parody of more popular 1v1 fighting games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and, more prominently this time around, Killer Instinct. The clutch is that everything is presented in the style of claymation. The characters are actually created through stop motion using clay figures. It works pretty well, actually, and, to be fair to the game, is a pretty striking art style.

To be clear, the game was initially released in 1997 under the name Clay Fighter 63 1/3 (a parody of the common “64” suffix for N64 games). However, it arrived after a period of heavy marketing that depicted a lot of characters who wound up getting cut from the game. Sculptor’s Cut came out the following year as a Blockbuster rental exclusive that, notably, reinstated most of the cut characters. It also polished out some of the game’s notable problems, and while it’s not exactly a perfect upgrade in all respects, it’s by most metrics the better version.

I’M BAD, I’M COOL, I’M NOBODY’S FOOL

I’m not terribly skilled in fighting games. I play them just fine, and I could tell you what a hitbox is and the concept of frames and how they relate to timing. If I focused, I could probably build a combo. I know my Street Fighter from my Samurai Shodown. But this is all surface-level comprehension that lacks a competitive background. To me, fighting games are a pretty rigid genre that has little variance from title to title, so it’s difficult to get down into the mud and explain their successes and losses.

Even with that in mind, I can tell you that Clay Fighter: Sculptor’s Cut isn’t a very good fighting game. It’s clunky, it’s overly simplistic, and its animation is garbage. I know I just finished praising the art style, but that’s a different subject entirely. It doesn’t look that great in motion.

The N64 was a powerful console at the time, but it had issues with space restrictions on its cartridges and RAM. That was true for previous generations, as well, but with the N64, we really hit the point where the console’s power was way beyond its capacity for storage. I bring this up because that’s probably the reason why Sculptor’s Cut moves and sounds so terrible. Maybe I’m being too generous.

Regardless, this resulted in a shortage of animation frames makes the game feel incredibly chunky and makes it difficult to read what your opponent is doing. Some animation frames are reused across moves, so you might confuse a special attack for something else. You’re more likely to figure out what’s about to come your way because the characters never shut up about the move they have chambered. They tend to announce things with repeated, low-quality sound clips that are often difficult to discern through the muffled audio.

“Buzz-Saw!” “Time to Kiln(?)!” “Jack Rabbit, Jack Rabbit, LEAPOFLAPPERTY!”

THE CRANE, THE COBRA, THE MONKEY!

Which brings me somewhat neatly to the worst part of the whole game: the humour. It’s mostly not great. This is the kind of game where a dog walks on screen, farts, sniffs it, then says it “smells like a clean win.” I’m not making that up; it’s one of the entrance taunts of Lockjaw.

At the best of times, it can be somewhat amusing. The way it parodies other fighting games can be somewhat effective. Other times, it’s completely juvenile, which is probably why I thought it was so hilarious back when I was 10. At the worst of times, it’s straight racist. Look, I’m not the best person to talk about racism being a white, small-town girl, but I know it when I see it.

There are no fewer than three racial stereotypes available to pick from in Sculptor’s Cut: The Zappa Yow Yow Boyz, cannibalistic pygmies, Houngan, a voodoo witchdoctor, and Kung Pow, a fabulously offensive Chinese chef.

The characters are made of clay and can be literally anything imaginable, but we went with racist caricatures.

To be fair, this was pretty in line with where humour was in the ’90s. This was still a few years before Dude, Where’s My Car? slopped into theatres. It might not pass nowadays, but that speaks more to the ignorance of the time, and that’s something that can’t be taken back. That doesn’t mean you need to find the humour in it, but I’ve learned not to bristle at it so much.

The real funny past is that there was supposed to be another character in the game, Hobo Cop. He was going to be a drunken, homeless vigilante, but Nintendo stepped in and said that was going too far. So the derelict police officer was too much, but the buck-toothed chef who fights using moves named after Americanized Chinese dishes was fine? Okay. To be fair, it would probably be hard to watch while we’re living through the opioid epidemic.

LET’S GET READY TO CRUMBLE

So, it’s bad, but it can’t be all bad, right? Okay, so Sculptor’s Cut does a few things well.

First, it includes Earthworm Jim as a playable character. Well, okay, you have to unlock him with a code in the Sculptor’s Cut version, but he’s there alongside Boogerman as a guest character from other Interplay properties. As a fan, he’s generally my go-to character, especially since he’s a pretty decent fighter.

But there is a feature of the game that fascinates me to this day. If you hit a character in a certain way in a certain position on the field, you’ll knock them into another arena. I believe Mortal Kombat 3 had a similar mechanic, as did Dead or Alive 2 (and maybe others; I’m not all that familiar with the series outside the beach), but here, the stages all branch off in multiple directions to the point where I’d almost swear that you can travel between any stage in the game by way of careful punches. It’s pretty rad.

The voice cast is also pretty tight. Featuring Jim Cummings, Rob Paulsen, and Dan Castellaneta, it’s quite a bunch. I mean, the lines they endlessly repeat are still pretty annoying, and the sound quality is complete crap, but at least it’s a prolific bunch.

I also enjoyed the theme song that was added (or re-added) for Sculptor’s Cut. It suffers from the sound compression issues complained about earlier, but it’s most comprehensible. I can still recite the first verse. Actually, if you just let the title sequence play on a loop without actually getting into the game, Clay Fighter would be an alright experience.

FOR HERE, OR TO GO?

I actually owned Sculptor’s Cut long before I picked up 63 1/3 and I think purchasing the latter was when I realized my mistake. The N64 Clay Fighter games just aren’t very good. Actually, they’re worse than that; they’re annoying. They’re like a 12-year-old that speaks only in South Park references, which you’ll probably understand if you survived ’90s North American pop culture.

It was a sad revelation that such a cherished game from my childhood is so bad, especially when I kind of like the original Clay Fighter. Don’t get me wrong, there are worse fighting games out there. Heck, I can name worse fighters on the N64. But none meld incompetent gameplay and offensive humour quite as capably as Clay Fighter: Sculptor’s Cut.

3/10

This review was conducted on a Nintendo 64 using a cartridge copy of the game. It was paid for by the author’s mom, probably, but not nearly at current market value. Yeesh.