Water Margin - Megadrive Longplay - Hidden Gem Chinese Beat'em Up Bootleg Bonanza (Piko, 1990-1999)

Oh boy, get ready for a full strange story. It's 1990 Hong Kong: a small software house called King Tec Information Co., Ltd. releases a game I suppose being a bootleg. The game is titled Shui Hu: Feng Yun Zhuan, that is Water Margin, tales of Cloud and Wind (supposedly). This game is a beat 'em up based on a pivotal mandarin book with the same title.
The game was a ragtag bunch of Capcom mechanics and sprites.
Piko bought the rights to this game, and released it on Steam. The released has been polished, but still we can see the main character are based on Knights of the Round sprites, as well as many enemies, with the addition of stuff coming from King of Dragons. The mechanics simply aren't there. The controls fails utterly, the hitbox and the hurtbox are a complete mess and one of the character have jumping attack and running attack basically unplayable. Also, the axeman enemies, with those teleporting attacks, are plainly stupid.
I took the steam version, and I discovered that is a simple emulator rebranded and equipped with a rom; so I uploaded said rom to the megadrive cartrige... and it works.
All in all is a fun curiosity, and to a beat em up fan like me it's worth a couple of games. However, from a critical standpoint, it's a sad mess. What a bummer.
As usual, this one (as all my playthroughs) use NO savestates. In my opinion, playing this way yields a footage more attuned to game and level design than save-state powered runs. When i feel like editing videos, i'll do a review, not a playthrough.
Mega SD cartridge recorded on Mega Drive Model 1 Pal , with Retrotink2x and Avermedia Live Mini. Played on CRT with a Saltek 6 button controller.