A great fighting game from the 16-Bit era with a great retro/manga feel to it.
The style of fighting gameplay that Yuu Yuu Hakusho Makyou Toitsusen uses has a much more flowing feel to it than the any of the Street Fighter games or Mortal Kombat games that were released for the 16-Bit consoles.The combo attacks have a free flowing feel to them and you can perform combos easily due to the very responsive controls.Timing is very important in this game because you can constantly land powerful combo attacks or powerful moves/special moves on your opponent and you can perform combos and powerful attacks on your enemy right after they get up(unlike other fighting games which allow an opponent who's been knocked to the ground a good chance of a counter attack if you keep spamming moves when they're on the ground)Yuu Yuu Hakusho Makyou Toitsusen doesn't punish you simply for trying to be aggresive but you'll still need to be careful and tactical with move selection and even though in this game defense is important at times(like with all fighting games)it makes it difficult for very defensive players to win whom like to exploit mechanics that allow them to win by being very defensive(such as in many of the Street Fighter games).
The fighting mechanics for Yuu Yuu Hakusho Makyou Toitsusen are simple but fun to use and allow enough depth to make the fighting tactical.
This fighting mechanics work well with either a 3 button or 6 button controller but if you only had a 3 button controller to use at the time the fighting mechanics still worked very well and it's a good feature considering the SEGA MEGA DRIVE only had a 3 button controller during the first few years of it's lifespan.The mechanics include being able to use a button for blocking,a button to back/dash which causes your character to jump back and be invulnerable to attacks until they land and either 3 or 4 different basic attacking move buttons(I'm not sure how many basic attacks each character has).Throws can be performed easily by pressing forward and A and you can even land attacks on an enemy while they're in mid air after being thrown.Every character can do a double jump(mid air jump) and perform mid air combos and desperation moves which are like super combos which can be performed after a spirit gauge gets used up by at least 50%(in this game,you start off with your spirit guage filled and after it's half depleted you can do a desperation move)but the catch is you can only perform special moves if you have some spirit energy in your spirit guage and everytime you perform a special move it depletes some of your spirit bar(this is a clever way of making the gameplay even more tactical)and you can recharge your spirit guage during battle but it'll leave you vulnerable.
The game has a sort of arcade mode,tag team mode,tournament mode and multiplayer mode.
The fighters have very diverse styles but there is some character balance issues because some characters seem to have big advantages/disadvantages over others.
The game has an nice anime/manga style presentation/visuals and I like how the character select screen shows the characters posing while next to other characters without being put into a box and it gives it a nice comic/manga style feel and a anime/manga style portrait of the character's face is shown on the screen during gameplay.Some of the environments the fighters fight in look nice from an artistic perspective,even by today's standards in September 2012 I think the forest environments in this game look stunning with nice shades of colors and beautiful scenery.Also,if you like Japanese style character designs you might like how you'll see characters with purple,blue,green hair.
The story for this game is based upon the Yuu Yuu Hakusho anime/manga series which I haven't watched/read,but it's about a deliquent boy who gets struck and killed by a car while trying to save a child's life and in the afterlife he is given some tasks by the son of the underworld's ruler and these tasks involve investigating demonic activity in the world of the living and I've heard a lot of martial arts stuff comes into the story.
Overall,this is definately a quality 16-Bit fighting game with nice presentation/visual style.