Astra Superstars

Character: Sakamoto

Somewhat unusual and hectic airborne fighting game. Instead of jump and duck players can "sidestep" up or down. There are only six different moves and two special attacks. Special Star Attacks can be activated after gaining enough star ranks. There's also a charge special that makes the character faster and combos easier to perform. The game is fun to play and watch, but has less tactical value compared to other fighting games of that time and is rather easy to learn. The game lures into a button smashing contest, but more experienced players can probably make better use of timing and execute longer combos.

In the story mode there are three options before each fight. Apparently these options makes the opponent either easier or harder. During the first fights both the easy and hard options are shown, after that the neutral option was selected for rest of the fights. The last two bosses activated the hard mode by default. There's also a difficulty selection in the menu, I didn't find the story mode particularly hard at level 5 and finished the game without much practice or tools.

Japan exclusive port for Saturn was released in 1998, two months after the arcade original.