Original Release: Taito(?), 1985, Arcade
Nunchuk-wielding lady fights through various levels and gradually gets naked in between.
Lady Master of Kung-Fu (Arcade, Taito(?), 1985)
Where to Buy: KLOV, QuarterArcade, ebay
How to Emulate: Arcade Emulation Guide
Review by: Master-B
Here’s one you won’t see on any Taito arcade compilation packages! It’s questionable if Taito actually released this, as it appears to be an asset swap of their game Nunchakun; it’s possible pirates knocked this off and just lazily failed to remove the Taito branding. There’s no other evidence, though, so we have to assume Taito decided to horn in on the arcade porn market until otherwise determined (wouldn’t be terribly surprising though as Sega did a striptease game in 1987 called Block Gal).
Whatever the case, Lady Master of Kung Fu is a weird mishmash of a bunch of other popular 80s arcade games – Taito’s own Elevator Action and Irem’s Kung Fu Master primarily, but you also have to duck into rooms and get into one-on-one battles a la Konami’s Yie-Ar Kung Fu.
As if that weren’t a bizarre enough combination by itself, it’s also a striptease game. Yep, the Lady Master gradually loses clothing from that relaxed portrait of her on the title screen at the end of each level, eventually ending up fully nude. Well, as nude as you could get given Japanese censorship laws in the ’80s.
The base gameplay in the Elevator Action/Kung Fu Master portion is alright, if a little boring. The only time that part gets challenging is when you have to jump something, as Lady Master has a very stiff and short vertical and can’t jump forward in any way. Where the game falls apart is the one-on-one battles behind doors, which are always a clunky nightmare. Every enemy basically just retreats to the back wall and throws stuff at you, then jumps away to the other side when you get close. You have to chip away at them with one hit at a time before they jump, but the timing is finicky and you usually do very little damage with each hit. They, on the other hand, take huge chunks of your health bar off with every blow, usually killing you from full health in three hits. Oh, and did I mention there’s a not-generous background timer running in the midst of all this?
The game has seven levels in total, but Lady Master is fully nekkid after level five, so I guess there’s really no point to the final two levels other than a couple moar peeks. The game is a cynical exercise in getting kids to pump quarters into a ridiculously hard game to see pixel titties, and one that apparently didn’t work all that well considering I’d never heard of it until 2018.
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