ARMS is Nintendo’s newest fighting game on Switch.  Originally I wasn’t going to get this game for a while, but I found a sale where it was ten dollars off.  Doesn’t sound like much, but considering Nintendo’s first party games hardly ever go on sale, I decided to take the plunge.  ARMS has a lot of interesting fighters, so I’ll do what I usually like to do with these kinds of games.  Here’s a blog about each of the ARMS fighters!  Nintendo has said that more will show up as DLC, so I also posted my own ideas for original fighters and existing characters, too!

But first a mini-review of the game.  ARMS is essentially Wii Boxing expanded enough to be its own game.  Each character has stretchy arms, so you have more control over where your punches go.  They’ve also added nearly a dozen colorful characters and stages, and some pretty creative side modes like volleyball and basketball.  You can equip all sorts of punching gloves to your fighters, giving a lot of variety and customization.  You can choose to play with or without motion controls, which is nice.  It’s a fun game, I just don’t think it’s worth 50 or 60 bucks.  Like Splatoon, it’s multiplayer centric and doesn’t have as much single player content.  Plus I kind of wish Capcom or Namco would had made this game for Nintendo, as those two companies are great at putting that ‘arcade sheen’ on their home console fighters.  Heck, Namco even helped make the last Smash Bros. and Pokken Tournament games, and those are much better fighters than ARMS.  Anyway, enough of that, on to the fighters!

Spring Man

He’s kind of your typical main character.  He has spring arms, and wants to be the best ARMS fighter around.  Not really much interesting about him, but I do like how colorful he and the other characters are.  Each character has their own themed stage, and many of these stages really reflect the personality of the characters and some stages are more interesting than the fighters themselves!  Spring Stadium is just your typical square arena, but I do like how the edges of the field are lined with jumping pads you can use to spring up high!  Also to note is that in each stage there is a cheering crowd, and if you look closely, you’ll see the audience is wearing hats and shirts with the competing fighters on them, which is a nice touch.

Ribbon Girl

It seems like many fighting games have two characters who are very similar.  Ken and Ryu, Morrigan and Dimitri, etc.  Well Ribbon Girl is like that to Spring Man.  Her arms are ribbons and even her hair looks like ribbons.  She can double jump in the air, and she’s supposed to be a pop star and is the typical perky female teenager character.  Keeping with the pop star theme, her stage looks like a night club dance floor, and raised platforms will appear from time to time.

Ninjara

Other than having a ponytail shaped like a ninja star, this ninja character is pretty standard stuff.  He disappears when he dashes and his arms are made out of chains.  His stage, “Ninja College” is the stairs leading up to a Japanese temple.  So it’s always a battle to get the high ground.

Master Mummy

Hey isn’t there already a mummy character with stretchy bandage arms in Darkstalkers?  I forget his name, though.  Master Mummy may not be a very original name, but it is easy to remember.  This big bruiser is slow, but he won’t get knocked down after being punched.  And he can heal himself while guarding.  It’s easy to guard with motion controls, but I can’t remember how to do it with button controls.  Anyway, his stage is the spooky themed Mausoleum, and it’s a round stage with a cracked floor in the center.  If you manage to break the floor, a giant spider web will be under it that you can use to jump on like a trampoline.

Min Min

She’s fighting in the ARMS tournament to help promote her mom’s ramen noodle shop.  Min Min has long noodle arms, ramen for hair, and her stocking cap resembles a ramen bowl.  Her default boxing gloves, like the fire breathing dragon, are hard to use, however.  But she is probably my third favorite character in the game, though.  Her stage, the Ramen Bowl, is concave and resembles an empty bowl of noodles.  Around the edges are all sorts of noodle shops and it has kind of a Chinese market theme.  There is even a gong that you can punch to make it sound.  It doesn’t do anything to affect the fight, but it is a nice bit of stage interactivity.

Mechanica

Before I knew about Twintelle, Mechanica was my favorite character.  She’s a little girl who doesn’t have stretchy arms herself, but she does drive a mech that does.  She reminds me a lot of Tron Bonne from the Mega Man Legends series.  Heck, she even looks like her!  Her stage, the Scrapyard, is full of junk piled up for uneven terrain, and there are even pillars of junk to knock down!

Twintelle

She’s my favorite character now.  She doesn’t have stretchy arms, but fights with her long pigtails instead.  She’s supposed to be a rich and famous movie star with her own line of fragrances and stuff.  I just like her design.  She looks really strong and tough, and has a nice boot—ah, never mind.  She’s just cool.  Her stage, Cinema Deux, looks like a rounded driveway in front of a mansion or big movie theater.  Parked outside are four limos that you can hop on to jump higher.

Byte & Barq

They’re a robot policeman and robot dog duo.  Byte looks more like a clockwork robot with stretchy arms while Barq looks like a dog toaster on a wheel.  Barq will sometimes stick out his tongue as an extra attack, and you can also jump on Barq to gain some extra height.  It’s a bit unpredictable though, as I’m not sure if Barq will stick out his tongue randomly or if you can control it somehow.  Usually you can jump on Barq if he’s nearby, but if he gets punched, he’ll be out of commission for a bit.  When you do your special attack, they’ll combine together, too!  They really remind me of something out of Mega Man Legends.  Unfortunately, their stage isn’t near as interesting as they are.  It’s called Buster Beach, but it’s just a patch of concrete with a small raised platform in the middle.  If you look past the bleachers you can see palm trees and sand, but that’s it.  I think a better stage for them would’ve been a busy city street or something.

Kid Cobra

He has a skull helmet and snake-like arms, and he’s a skateboarder, er, ‘snakeboarder.’  So his character is all over the place and not one of my favorites.  But I will say I love his stage!  It’s called Snake Park, and as a skateboard park, in the middle is an empty pool with lots of hills and valleys.  But on each side are little tops, called “Snakeboards” that you can ride on.  Kind of reminds me of the tops from Sonic 3’s Marble Garden.  It’s also kind of like Beyblade.  While on these tops, your speed greatly increases and you can bump into the other player.  I both cheer and wince when I’m on this stage because while it’s fun, it also changes up the fights enough that it can get hard sometimes.  But it’s still really cool.

Helix

This is an experimental blob guy with DNA strands for arms.  He’s pretty tricky to use as his default boxing gloves are a bit awkward and he doesn’t really jump that much, just elongates his body.  He kind of reminds me of the blob from ClayFighter for some reason, too.  I love the crazy noises he makes when he gets hit or wins a match, though.  His stage, the DNA Lab, has lots of test tube pillars to break, and kind of reminds me of Devil’s Lab from Final Fantasy 6 for some reason.

Max Brass

Lastly, Max Brass is the final boss.  Even when you play as him, you have to fight him in the end.  Which doesn’t make sense, but storyline isn’t a big priority in ARMS.  Max Brass is a huge hulking musclebound dude with a fist on his helmet.  His stretchy arms are made up of championship belts.  Even his stage, the Sky Arena, has championship belts lining the ring.  He has the power to fully charge his gloves when he’s low on hit points.

And those are all the fighters in ARMS right now.  Nintendo said they may add more as DLC, but we’ll have to see.  Just because I like to use my imagination sometimes, I came up with my own ideas for possible DLC characters.  Some are original, and some are from other games.  Some of my original ideas include a pizza man with stretchy melted cheese arms, or a meatball monster with spaghetti arms.  Of course, the noodle arms thing has already been done.  Maybe I was just hungry when I came up with those ideas.  Hey, I didn’t say they were very good ideas!

Another idea I had isn’t really an original character, but have you ever heard of the toy Stretch Armstrong?  It was an action figure with stretchy limbs.  It came out in the 1970s, but I know they re-released it in the 90s as well because he got a new pet dog named Fetch Armstrong who was a weiner dog who could stretch, too.  My brother Jeff had Fetch when he was little.  Anyway, I thought it would be fitting to have Stretch (and maybe Fetch) to be in ARMS.  Maybe as a toy promotion, huh?

So aside from ‘original’ characters, I also thought of some characters from video game companies who would be good candidates for ARMS fighters.  So I’ll conclude by going over those ideas as well.

Nintendo

Nintendo themselves has some pretty fitting ARMS contenders in their roster.  The first I thought of was Lanky Kong.  He was a playable character in Donkey Kong 64, and he was an orangutan with stretchy arms he could use to punch long distance baddies, among other things.  With a DK themed jungle stage with the Kong crew cheering in the background, I think Lanky would be a good fit for ARMS.  It would be cool to give Lanky some attention since DK64 was the only game he appeared in.  Plus, it wouldn’t be the first time a DK character would be in a boxing game, as DK himself was a secret character in the Wii version of Punch-Out!

Another idea I had goes WAY back into Nintendo’s history, when they made toys in the 60s.  One of those toys was a stretchy grabber hand called Ultra Hand.  Ultra Hand has reappeared in games like WarioWare and even had its own game on the Wii called Grill Off with Ultra Hand.  Of course, since it’s just a toy, you’d have to have a character to operate it for ARMS.  The obvious choice would be someone like Mario, or maybe go back into more classic territory with Mr. Game & Watch.  But I think a better fit would be Nintendo’s own fanboy character, 9-Volt from WarioWare.  His colorful design would fit perfectly in ARMS.  His stage could be from WarioWare or even a room filled with other classic Nintendo memorabilia.

Capcom

So I mentioned before that I think ARMS would’ve been better if it were made for Nintendo by an arcade fighting veteran like Capcom or Namco.  The obvious character from Capcom to be in ARMS would be Dhalsim from Street Fighter, but I came up with someone else.  Spring Man!  But wait a minute, you might be thinking, there’s already a Spring Man in the game.  Well, yeah, but in real life, people can have the same names as one another, so why not here, too?  Anyway, Spring Man was a boss from Mega Man 7.  He had long spring arms he could use to punch Mega Man from a distance.  His stage in ARMS could be modelled after his level from Mega Man 7, with lots of springs to hinder and help you.  One cool thing about Spring Man in MM7 is that if you used the electric weapon against him, he would turn into an electro-magnet and pull Mega Man toward him.  It would be cool if in ARMS, if you punched him with an electric glove, he would do the same thing and pull metal characters like Mechanica or Byte & Barq toward him, too.  And it wouldn’t be the first time Spring Man showed up in another game, as he was a playable racer in Mega Man: Battle & Chase!

Namco

And lastly, Namco has a classic arcade character with stretchy limbs, too.  His name was Bravoman, and he starred in a goofy side scrolling super hero game.  The arcade version was only in Japan, but TG-16 owners may remember his US release.  It’s not a very good game, but it is memorable for being so wacky.  Bravoman has made appearances and references in games like Namco X Capcom and Soul Calibur.  And even recently, a few years ago an online comic company called ShiftyLook made comics and cartoons based on Namco characters, and Bravoman was one of them.  The book collection of Bravoman comics even won a children’s book award in Canada, and the Bravoman web cartoon was very well made, and even had some famous voice actors in it like Rob Paulsen.  It’s a shame that ShiftyLook is no more now.  But whether Namco uses the classic arcade Bravoman or cartoon Bravoman, I think he would be great in ARMS.  Especially if they could get Rob Paulsen to voice him!

And that’s all for now!  Let me know what you think of my character ideas, and tell me your favorite ARMS characters, too!  Later!  –Cary

Tags: Game Reviews