Way of the Warrior

One of the many fighting games that tried to copy Mortal Kombat.

Released for the short-lived 3DO, Way of the Warrior was one of the first Naughty Dog creations.

During the early stages it received good previews, but in the end it was panned by critics. The fact that it was released on the 3DO (which had controllers that were difficult to use) did not help at all. Nevertheless, it is considered better than most Mortal Kombat imitators of the time.

The music was composed by Rob Zombie, implying that the game has a lot of Awesome Music. It also has an interesting plot overall. But the game-play was plainly disastrous, a fact hard to overlook.

Way of the Warrior has left a lot of people with a bitter taste in the mouth, thinking about What Could Have Been had the game had smoother coding.

Even so, Way of the Warrior was considered good enough to give Naughty Dog the chance to keep producing games, which ended up in video-game jewels like Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, and Uncharted.

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Tropes used in Way of the Warrior include:

• Bonus Boss: With some trouble, you could fight Palette Swaps of Fox, Dragon, and Major Gaines; beating them would net you a fight with Gulab Jamun.
• Convection, Schmonvection: One stage is set on a platform floating on a pool of orange Jell-O lava.
• Dem Bones: Kull. Also the announcer, a talking skull.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The ninja character bears the descriptive moniker of... Ninja. Fun fact: he was portrayed by Jason Rubin, one of Naughty Dogs' founders.
• Follow the Leader: From Mortal Kombat, of course. Supposedly, this game was made to secure seed money from publisher Universal for the creation of Crash Bandicoot in exchange for a Mortal Kombat killer.
• Jump Physics: The characters leap like they're on the moon.
• Not Drawn to Scale: The game tried to mimic Samurai Shodown's scaling backgrounds and combatants depending on their distance from one another, but there's very little consistency in how the fighters get zoomed. At one point, one character will tower over another; the next they will be evenly sized.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: High Abbot.
• Underwear of Power: Gulab Jamun.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Dragon and Major Gaines.