2025/01/04 update: I made this post into a video! See it here, or read the text version below

After spending 2024 getting into lots of beat em up-adjacent or otherwise chaotic arcade games, and even working on a similarly chaotic and arcade-inspired game of my own, I decided that I was well overdue to play some actual arcade beat em ups.

The first one I tried was The Punisher, a 1993 beat em up by Capcom. After a bit of practice I got a no-death clear of it on the hardest difficulty setting, and I think it's a great first game for other new players to play if they want to get into the genre. Here's a video of my full run with live commentary from when I was playing that run on my stream:

As this is the first arcade beat em up I ever played at anything more than a beginner button-mashing level, it's almost unavoidable for my opinions on the game to be conflated with my opinions on the arcade beat em up genre as a whole. So I'll just run with it.

What I used to think beat em ups were

When I first tried to get into beat em ups, I'd sit back and try to react to enemies' attacks, just like Dark Souls or a character action game. Inevitably, I'd quickly get surrounded by enemies and chipped down by unreactable jabs.

When I asked people how I was supposed to deal with this, they told me that beat em ups were unfair outdated quarter munchers and I should play them with infinite lives in co-op and treat them as sandboxes for doing cool combos on enemies. I personally always found making combo videos in actual fighting games to be a much more satisfying way to scratch my combo creativity itch, thanks to their much larger movesets, wider possibility spaces for combos and their well-balanced restrictions to try and work around. So as I was told that beat em ups weren't interesting to play as skill-based games and I didn't think they were interesting to play as combo sandboxes either, I just stuck to other arcade genres instead.

Years later, after giving them another try with a better understanding of how they're meant to be played, I now know that everything I thought about beat em ups in the past was completely wrong.

What beat em ups really are

Beat em ups are all about crowd control. Enemies can attack you from the left or the right, because they're 2D sprites so those are the only two directions they can face. Their attacks are usually instant, but your attacks usually outrange theirs so you can punch them as they approach you, just like the old arcade game Spartan X / Kung Fu Master.

Because hitting a beat em up enemy enough times to knock them down takes much longer than jabbing an enemy in Spartan X, attacking the enemies on your left will leave you wide open to being attacked from the right and vice-versa. So enemies in these games try their best to spread out, surround you and attack you from both sides at once, at which point you're practically guaranteed to get hit.

It's your job to stop this situation from occurring, by pushing all the enemies together into a big heap and attacking them all at once. Fortunately you can grab enemies and throw them around, which in addition to making you briefly invincible, lets you grab an enemy that managed to sneak behind you and throw them back into the group.

In short, the core of arcade beat em ups isn't doing a bunch of fighting game combos or winning a series of one-on-one duels. They're about herding sheep. The enemies try to spread out, and you try to group them together.

Once I understood that, I quickly fell in love with the genre. There are lots of layers on top of that core, like attacks and weapons with different situational uses and enemies who can move and attack in different ways, but they're all just ways to spice up the challenge of grouping all the enemies up into a big ball and punching them all at once.

Even most of the genre's best boss fights tend to work this way, with bosses who are trivially easy to defeat in a one-on-one fight and rely on other enemies to protect them and give them the space they need to attack you.

Actually talking about The Punisher now

So why start with The Punisher? I think it's a great choice for a first arcade beat em up. Its difficulty is on the easier side by arcade game standards; it took me roughly 15 hours to get a 1 credit clear on Normal mode and roughly 30 more hours to get a no death clear on Hardest mode, all with next no beat em up experience. That's much less time than it took me to clear Dark Souls or a modern RPG. It's not that long!

Clearing the game with no deaths is surprisingly forgiving by arcade standards, making it a reasonable goal to go for. So if you manage to get a 1 credit clear of the game on normal mode it's not much harder to get a no death clear, then a 1 credit clear on hardest difficulty, then a no death clear on hardest difficulty. It's a very smooth learning curve by arcade standards.

Another reason I recommend The Punisher for new players is that his moveset is ridiculously powerful. He has huge fast jabs, a long-range dash attack, throws with a ton of invincibility, the option to pick up enemies off the ground and throw them, and an ultra fast dash-roll that you can steer in any direction. You can even pull out an auto-aimed gun with infinite ammo whenever any gun-wielding enemies are on the screen, making you practically invincible from the front unless you're fighting against armored enemies or a huge stack of enemies who you can't shoot all at once. Playing as such an overpowered character is a blast, and I'm not the sort of person who complains about older games feeling "clunky" in the first place but even the most arcade-averse modern player should be fine in this game.

You'd think that your fast movement and overpowered attacks would undermine the enemies' ability to surround and trap you, leaving you with a game where you can just run away from all your problems and pick off the enemies as they chase after you. There are certainly a few places where you can get away with this playstyle to an extent, but somehow, especially during the last couple of stages, the game throws enough dangerous enemies at you from enough different angles that it forces you to engage with and learn the fundamental beat em up gameplay.

The game has a few downsides, like a few very short sections with walls where you can wedge yourself into a corner to stop enemies from getting behind you and trivially punch them all down as they're forced to approach you from the front (or above or below, which still results in them walking into your jab because you outrange most of them in the Z axis) I don't think these moments drag down the game too much, as there aren't that many of them.

I'd argue that stage 2's Guardroid boss is by far the worst part of the game, as its permanent super armor reduces the fight to simply avoiding one of its attacks, running in and hitting it once or twice, then backing off before it attacks you again and repeating the process. It's nothing like the rest of the game, and frankly nothing like a beat em up. But if the absolute worst thing I can say about a game is that one of its bosses feels like a Dark Souls boss, that's a good place to be.

In summary, beat em ups are cool, The Punisher was a great place to start, and I'm looking forward to playing more of them. I've been playing Cadillacs & Dinosaurs this week and having a blast, and I'm going to try to get into Final Fight next. In the meantime, go play beat em ups!

If you're interested in trying to learn the game, here are a few tips for getting started:

Tip: How to learn an arcade game

I'll start with a general tip for getting 1 credit clears of single player arcade games. I've seen people find the very concept of a 1 credit clear daunting, because they've only ever played the games with infinite continues and the prospect of clearing the entire game with only one or two deaths seems so far away.

The trick is to break the game down into smaller goals. There are lots of ways you can do this, but I prefer to learn the games one section at a time. First you learn to consistently clear the first half of stage 1 without dying, then the second half of stage 1, then the boss, then the whole thing all in one go, then move on to the next stage. Most arcade game ports have practice modes that let you play any section this way, and most emulators have save states that let you save at the start of each section and essentially create your own practice mode.

You can learn the whole game this way, then start going for full runs. If everything goes well you'll get the 1 credit clear, and if you keep messing up at the same spot you can go back into practice mode and work on that section for a while.

That said, this is only a suggestion. You can learn these games in whatever way is fun for you. I've seen a few people learn some difficult games simply by credit feeding full runs over and over again while slowly trying to lower how many continues they need, until they can eventually clear it without any continues at all. Beat em ups tend to be more about learning to control your character and herd enemies than they are about memorizing individual sections, so this kind of learning method could work fine if you'd rather play that way.

Tips: Getting started with The Punisher

Your jabs are strong. They've got a long horizontal reach, and just like the rest of your attacks they outrange most enemies in the Z axis too.

You mash the attack button for your autocombo, and the final hit of the combo is different depending on which direction you're holding. Holding no direction makes you kick them for high damage, holding forwards punches them across the screen and recovers faster than the other combo enders, Holding up throws the enemy a long way behind you, and holding down throws them a shorter distance. You can even hold left or right during the startup of the down ender to choose which way to throw enemies. Getting a ton of invincibility and being able to throw an enemy whichever way you choose is ridiculously strong so you probably want to use the down ender most of the time, but the others are sometimes strong too.

You can also grab an enemy by walking into them. Because enemies can only attack left or right, it's usually safer to walk into them from above or below instead. If you really want to grab an enemy who's to your left and right, your best option is probably to autocombo into the down or up ender. There's also the option of grabbing enemies who are laying on the ground by pressing the attack button.

Just to reiterate, throws are extremely strong! They turn you invincible and let you knock a group of enemies down for free. There are all sorts of evil enemies later in the game, but you can get really far by just grabbing a different enemy, turning invincible, and throwing using their body as a projectile. This is the core of beat em ups.

Pressing attack and jump at the same time does an invincible desperation attack that hits all nearby enemies on both sides. This costs a bit of health if it makes contact with any enemies, but it's much better than taking a hit. You can use it as a panic button if you're surrounded and you don't have enough time to autocombo into a grab for the invincibility, but you can proactively use them to clear space, herd enemies together, deal huge damage to armored enemies or cornered bosses, or dodge projectiles, which doesn't even cost you any health unless you touch an enemy. You can do it while dashing, you can do it while grabbing an enemy which gives you a ton of extra range, and you can do it in the air to spend a bomb instead of spending health. Bombs are great for clearing out huge crowds of enemies and dealing huge damage to bosses, and if you end a stage without any bombs you'll get a few of them for free at the start of the next stage.

Dashing is your main form of movement, because it's super quick and can be steered in any direction. Your dash attack reaches really far and can be useful against enemies with long-range melee attacks, but you don't get to combo afterwards. You can dash into your regular attacks and throws too, as long as you let go of a direction to stop your dash right before you attack.

Your jumps are quick, dashing into a jump makes it quicker, and doing a jump kick makes it quicker still. They're useful for running away horizontally, or for chasing enemies who you just threw into the ground and picking them up for another throw.

Pressing down then up + attack gives you a heavy attack, which has slow startup but deals a ton of damage, especially if you're close enough for both the physical leg hit and the shockwave to connect. The slow startup can be a liability but it really does deal huge damage, and it's especially useful against the stage 2 Guardroid boss.

Weapons are fairly similar to your heavy attack, giving you more damage at the cost of potentially having more startup. You can throw a weapon by attacking in the air. The knife is especially interesting because you automatically throw it if you press the attack button from outside of melee range, but it deals a ton of damage if you can get right up to an enemy and mash out a ton of melee hits.

And finally, you have a gun. You automatically pull it out whenever any enemies with guns or pretty boy robots are on the screen. It aims by itself, and you mash the attack button to shoot. It slightly outranges most enemies in the Z axis, so a strong tactic in most gun stages is to run away to the top of the screen, mash the attack button to shoot enemies as they run up towards you, run away to the bottom of the screen, mash the attack button as they run down to you, and repeat.

There are other strategies for specific enemies, bosses and sections, but you're better off watching other people's runs to learn those things. These basic tips should be more than enough for you to load up the game, start punching enemies before they get close enough to punch you, then throw them all into a big pile and punch them all at once. Good luck, and I hope you end up enjoying arcade beat em ups as much as I do!