Play Budokan: The Martial Spirit Online

Budokan: The Martial Spirit came out in 1989 from Electronic Arts, a time when MS-DOS games were often more about depth than spectacle. It wasn't trying to be the fastest or flashiest fighter; it focused on the deliberate, almost meditative pace of traditional martial arts. You picked a discipline like kendo or bojutsu and trained in a quiet dojo, a stark contrast to the bombastic arcade brawlers of the era.

You control a single martial artist aiming to become the champion of the Budokan arena. The game involves training your stats through minigames, then fighting a series of opponents in one-on-one duels. Its signature mechanics include a control system where you manually input high, medium, and low attacks and blocks using the keyboard, making every exchange a tense game of prediction. The pacing is methodical, the difficulty is punishing, and victory comes from reading your opponent's patterns rather than button mashing. It feels like a genuine test of patience and observation, where a single mistake can cost you the match.

Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse , "Alt" ,"Enter" and "Space bar".