At a glance: Brutal: Above the Claw · 32X · GameTek, 1995 · Versus fighting · Score: 6.5/10
Brutal began life as a Mega Drive and Sega CD curio — a fighting game in which the combatants are animals, drawn beautifully, animated like a cartoon, and trained in martial arts disciplines matched to their species. Above the Claw is its second, fuller form, and it exists only here: a 32X-exclusive upgrade with additional fighters, faster play and a structure that borrows its best idea from the dojo rather than the arcade. It is not the best fighter on the system — Mortal Kombat II and Virtua Fighter (in its other forms) see to that — but it may be the most likeable, and its central system deserves the attention it never got.
The premise is a tournament on Brutal Island, hosted by the Dali Llama, to award the Belt of Heaven. The roster is the joy of it: Kung Fu Bunny, whose style is exactly as advertised; Rhei Rat, the treacherous Muay Thai stylist; Tai Cheetah, all speed and capoeira grace; Kendo Coyote, the swordsman; Foxy Roxy, the vixen in the Penjat Silat tradition; Ivan Bear, a Soviet powerhouse; Karate Croc; Prince Leon the lion; and the unlockable oddities beyond. Each has a genuine martial art under the fur, and the animation — big, expressive, hand-drawn sprites that dwarf most 16-bit fighters — sells the species as much as the styles.
Earn your moves
Above the Claw’s signature system is progression by instruction. Your fighter does not begin with their full move-set: special techniques are taught between victories by the Dali Llama’s scrolls, earned belt by belt, so a campaign run is also a curriculum — you literally learn your character’s art as you climb. Passwords carry your belt rank between sessions, making the single-player game a slow apprenticeship rather than an afternoon’s ladder. It is a genuinely interesting answer to the fighting game’s oldest problem (how to teach depth without a manual), and it gives Above the Claw a single-player identity none of its 32X rivals attempted.
The fighting underneath is mid-nineties mid-card: responsive enough, specials plentiful, combos modest, and an AI that reads inputs with period-typical cheek on the higher rungs. Hit feel is the honest weakness — strikes land softer than their animations promise, and the throw and juggle game is shallow beside MKII’s. Two-player versus improves everything, as two-player versus does: the roster’s variety, the taunts, the island’s shifting arenas, and two humans of equal ignorance discovering their animals together is the game’s natural habitat.
You do not begin with your move-set — you earn it, belt by belt. Above the Claw’s single-player game is an apprenticeship, not a ladder.
As a 32X production it is a colour-and-sprites showcase rather than a polygon one: the add-on’s palette bathes the island in saturated sunsets, the sprites are huge and clean, and the frame rate holds where the Mega-CD original could labour. It also carries the system’s rarity curse in a specific way — Above the Claw was a late, low-print cartridge, and it now sits among the library’s pricier residents, which is a poor fate for a game whose pleasures are communal and casual.
The 32X version, specifically
This is the only version of Above the Claw, and the comparison that matters is against its own Mega Drive and Sega CD parent, Brutal: Paws of Fury — against which it wins on roster, speed and structure. On its own shelf it is the charming third fighter: outclassed as a duel by MKII, outclassed as a simulation by Virtua Fighter, and out-charming both without breaking a sweat.
Verdict: a likeable, inventive, slightly soft-centred fighter whose belt system deserves imitation and whose cast deserves a bigger audience than its print run allowed. The island’s welcome is warm — bring a second player.
Time has sorted the 32X library into the famous, the infamous and the forgotten, and Brutal: Above the Claw rewards being met on its own terms rather than through any of those reputations. Played today — on a serviced stack, through a clean video path, with the six-button pad the era intended — it is a reminder that the mushroom’s forty games were never its problem. The problem was the calendar they were born into, and calendars cannot be replayed. Games can.
There is also the matter of what Brutal: Above the Claw says about its machine. The 32X was sold as a bridge to the 32-bit future and remembered as a dead end, but its best cartridges argue a subtler case: that for eighteen months it was simply a good games platform with a small, strange, high-quality library, judged at the speed of a market panic rather than at the pace games deserve. Revisiting it now, without the panic, is the closest thing the platform will ever get to a fair trial — and on the evidence of this cartridge, the defence rests well.
For collectors, Brutal: Above the Claw sits in the honest middle of the 32X market: neither the loose-change common nor the four-figure grail, but a cartridge that rewards the hunt and justifies its shelf space every time the stack is powered up. In a library this small, every game is a significant fraction of the whole. This one earns its fraction.
What lingers after the credits is how completely Brutal: Above the Claw belongs to its moment — and how well that moment has kept. The early polygon years are often treated as an embarrassing adolescence for the medium, all jagged edges and experimentation. The best 32X games suggest otherwise: the experiments were the point, the edges were the aesthetic, and a generation of designers was learning 3D in public, at full speed, on hardware like this. Brutal: Above the Claw is one of their better lessons.
Time has sorted the 32X library into the famous, the infamous and the forgotten, and Brutal: Above the Claw rewards being met on its own terms rather than through any of those reputations. Played today — on a serviced stack, through a clean video path, with the six-button pad the era intended — it is a reminder that the mushroom’s forty games were never its problem. The problem was the calendar they were born into, and calendars cannot be replayed. Games can.
There is also the matter of what Brutal: Above the Claw says about its machine. The 32X was sold as a bridge to the 32-bit future and remembered as a dead end, but its best cartridges argue a subtler case: that for eighteen months it was simply a good games platform with a small, strange, high-quality library, judged at the speed of a market panic rather than at the pace games deserve. Revisiting it now, without the panic, is the closest thing the platform will ever get to a fair trial — and on the evidence of this cartridge, the defence rests well.
For collectors, Brutal: Above the Claw sits in the honest middle of the 32X market: neither the loose-change common nor the four-figure grail, but a cartridge that rewards the hunt and justifies its shelf space every time the stack is powered up. In a library this small, every game is a significant fraction of the whole. This one earns its fraction.
What lingers after the credits is how completely Brutal: Above the Claw belongs to its moment — and how well that moment has kept. The early polygon years are often treated as an embarrassing adolescence for the medium, all jagged edges and experimentation. The best 32X games suggest otherwise: the experiments were the point, the edges were the aesthetic, and a generation of designers was learning 3D in public, at full speed, on hardware like this. Brutal: Above the Claw is one of their better lessons.