Little Fighter

Characters

There are a total of 24 playable characters, 11 of whom are initially playable:

Template: Weak and featureless character, originally used as a base for all others.

Deep: Yellow swordsman. A beginner-friendly character, his melee attacks are quick & powerful, but he lacks range & mobility.

John: Defensive magician. He conjures magical spells to heal and keep enemies at bay, but has extremely poor damage against large groups of enemies.

Henry: Musical archer. Besides shooting arrows, he can play the flute to manipulate gravity. He is quick & simple to use against large groups, but vulnerable in close combat.

Rudolf: Navy-blue ninja. He throws ninja stars and uses gimmicks like invisibility, duplication or transformation. Like the archer, he is incredibly fast, but vulnerable in melee combat.

Louis: Armored grappler. A slow and awkward character, notable for his ability to burst out of his armor and thus transform into LouisEX when he is near death.

Firen: Fire mage. He can easily keep a group of enemies at bay with his fire spells, but he is heavily reliant on mana and difficult to use skillfully for combos.

Freeze: Ice mage. A single touch of his claws or ice sword will freeze foes and energy balls alike. An excellent character for both beginners & advanced players.

Dennis: Lean fighter that relies heavily on kicks. He can pressure his foes with homing energy balls (a barrage of small energy balls or a large tracking energy ball) or a flurry of powerful kicks. Reliant on combos to deal heavy damage.

Gameplay

Little Fighter 2 is a fighting game. Each player chooses a character that comes with unique abilities. Attacking another character causes the attacked player to lose HP (health points), represented by a red bar on the heads-up display. Each character also has special attacks that can be activated by pressing a certain combination of keys. Most of these special attacks use up MP (mana points), represented by a blue bar on the heads-up display.

Occasionally, items may fall from above into the screen to assist players. Items range from a bottle of beer/milk, restores mana/health to a variety of weapons that can be used in combat. These include knives, baseballs, boulders, boxes, and baseball bats. All weapons take damage in combat and will eventually break.

Game modes

VS Mode allows human and computer players to fight each other in a setting of the player's choice.

Stage Mode, like in many classic beat-'em-up action games, allows the players to fight their way through five stages, with bosses here and there. You can choose a stage and difficulty at startup.

Championship Mode sets up a tournament bracket to determine a winner. You can choose to fight individually, or with a human or computer partner.

Battle Mode is a team-based mode involving two sides commanding mass customisable armies of computer players.

Demo Mode creates random teams of computer-controlled 10 heroes, creating a zero-player game and allowing the player to be in observer mode

Difficulty can be set to Easy, Normal, Difficult or CRAZY! for all modes except demo. The code can be used in VS and Stage Mode. There is also a small online game feature which enables you to connect and experience any of the modes listed above with another person.

Version 2.0 added Playback Recording, a new mode that allows for playback of recorded gameplay. It also added Survival Stage, a new independent stage in Stage Mode, in which players fight their way through as many waves of opponents as they can before they die.

In the remastered version of Little Fighter 2 players are able to connect directly through the Steam matchmaking system, no longer requiring port forwarding which was required if players wanted to play with someone not on their local network.

Reception

The November 2007 edition of PC World magazine described the game as addictive and easy to play.

Legacy

Hero Fighter and Hero Fighter X

Hero Fighter is a free web-based beat 'em up created solely by Marti Wong. This game is still under development but an alpha version was released in the end of July 2009. The game has seven characters: Drew, a boxer good at close range; Lucas, a swordsman who is a balanced all-rounder; Shawn, an archer; Jenny, a defensive spear-wielding fighter (introduced in Version 1.04); Gordon, a mid ranged axe-fighter (introduced in Version 1.05); Jason, a boomerang and dagger thrower; and Taylor, a magician specialises in healing and creating clones.

Little Fighter Online

Little Fighter Online (also known as LFO, Chinese: 小朋友齊打交 Online) was developed and published by U1 Technology under direction from Oscar Chu and Marti Wong. It's based on Little Fighter 2 and was popular at launch in Hong Kong, but has shown a rapid decline in popularity since. The game servers started operation on 22 October 2004 and closed on 27 January 2016. Players complained about bugs, lags and susceptible to players cheating. Version 14 was the last version ever released and players have stopped playing due to instability and unreliability. On 22 October 2004 the game was issued in Hong Kong, followed by a release in Taiwan on 15 June 2006. It contains over 100 controllable characters and over 500 skills for players to collect.