Ehrgeiz

Ehrgeiz is a Fighting Game made by Square Enix in 1998, the title being German for "ambition". Unlike most Fighting Games, especially at that time, Ehrgeiz allowed full 3D movement around an arena which often had several levels and/or obstacles - in fact, it used the Super Smash Bros. technique a year before the latter existed.

Ehrgeiz is noted for playing off of the astounding success of the then-recently-released Final Fantasy VII by having a slough of Cameo characters from that game. The original arcade release had Cloud and Tifa as secret characters named "Guardian" and "Summoner" which could be fought by beating the first X characters in a certain amount of time. They were playable after one or two months of real time. In addition, the final boss, Django, bears a striking resemblance to Red XIII.

Ehrgeiz was later ported to the Sony PlayStation and increased the cameo characters to include Sephiroth, Vincent, Yuffie, and Zack. The PSX version also included a brand-new Quest Mode, which was a sort of RPG-Lite (as shown in Dream Factory's previous Tobal 2) starring two side characters and invoking many Final Fantasy VII mainstays, including materia. The latter almost attempts to have a decent plot. Although it fails spectacularly in this attempt, many of the RPG section's game mechanics were later re-used in Vagrant Story, to much better effect.

The Final Fantasy VII characters are actually quite detailed, including some heavy five-years-ago flashback spoilers (if you know where to look) and a lot of moves from the actual game. Overall, it's a halfway solid Fighting Game. The real fun, though, probably lies in getting Sephiroth to lie face down in the sand waving a little flag above his head for winning a shirtless beach race.

This game contains examples of:

 * Adventurer Archaeologist - The vocation of Koji Matsuda and his protegee Clair.
 * Animorphism - Jo can transform into a wolf.
 * Artificial Limbs - Han Daehan, who has a bionic leg that can shoot missiles.
 * Combat Pragmatist - Once you unlock Clair you may discover she has an affinity for targeting a certain location of the anatomy and carries hidden blades in her arms.
 * Creative Closing Credits - You fight the True Final Boss during them.
 * Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep" - In the arcade game, Cloud and Tifa are named Guardian and Summoner respectively.
 * His Name Really Is "Barkeep" - Quest Mode introduces us to Sommeleeay the sommelier.
 * "It's too bad things didn't work out for Sommeleeay's brothers, Costoadienn and Gheyhookur."
 * Killer Yoyo - Yoko, whose main costume is a police uniform, if the reference wasn't obvious enough.
 * Leg Cannon: Han Daehan.
 * Merlin Sickness: Lee Shuwan
 * Multiple Endings - As well as each character having an ending, Han has two: one where he wins the tournament but doesn't recover his lost leg from Django, and another where he does.
 * Ninja - Sasuke and Yuffie.
 * Highly-Visible Ninja, at that.
 * Overly-Long Fighting Animation - Koji has a charged grapple that is hard to connect with, but if it does he'll spend about ten solid seconds breaking every bone in your body.
 * Overly Long Gag - Dasher Inoba's ending, which is an endless loop of him eating bowls of noodles.
 * Randomly Generated Dungeon Crawler - The Forsaken Dungeon.
 * Ryu and Ken - the Final Fantasy VII characters are generally clones of existing ones; Yuffie for Sasuke, Vincent for Godhand, and Zack for Cloud.
 * Tangled Family Tree: Godhand is a Mishima, meaning the game has a very weak connection with the Tekken series. This was a semi-cameo due to Namco distributing the arcade version of the game, and Godhand himself has moves taken from Tekken characters.
 * Whoring - Half of the characters have a very cheap and exploitable leg sweep attack. In order to win a fight, all you have to do is tap "X" repeatedly until the fight is over. You don't even need to use the d-pad, since the characters automatically gravitate towards each other.