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Summary

Vigilante drops you into a gritty, side‑scroll beat‑'em‑up where punches, kicks and the occasional nunchaku are your only tools against a relentless tide of street thugs. The combat feels raw—if you get hit while wielding the nunchaku you’re forced to fight bare‑fisted, and enemies will even try to choke you if they get too close, keeping the action tense from start to finish.

The game’s five stages march you from a cracked city street through a junkyard, across the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, into a shadowy back‑alley, and finally up a skeletal construction site. Each locale throws its own hazards—knives, chains, motorbikes and guns—so you have to stay on the move and time your attacks.

The TurboGrafx‑16 version, released in early 1989 in Japan and later that year in North America, stays remarkably faithful to the arcade original. It resurfaced on the Wii Virtual Console in 2007 and later on the Wii U eShop, giving modern players a chance to relive that old‑school, muscle‑bound mayhem.

Storyline

Vigilante (TurboGrafx‑16) drops you into downtown New York City as a lone professional martial artist turned vigilante. An evil gang known as the Skinheads, led by the hulking Giant Devil, has seized control of the streets and kidnapped a young woman named Madonna. Determined to protect his turf and rescue the hostage, the hero battles through gritty urban back‑alleys and rooftops. The game’s premise is summed up by its tagline: some New York City punks have kidnapped a girl—your girl—so you must stop them before you ever see her smile again.