Fatal Fury 2

Review

by Kyle Knight

Fatal Fury 2 still needs some work, but shows a great deal of improvement over the first game. Having eight characters to play is much better than the measly three the game gives us, or the totally unacceptable two that were in Art of Fighting. Fatal Fury 2 is SNK's third fighter, after Art of Fighting and the first Fatal Fury. It's a wonder that it took SNK two games before coming to the conclusion that putting few characters in fighting games is a poor choice. You're going to fight a series of CPU controlled opponents anyway, and their design and animation frames are already done. Why not make them playable?

The graphics have been touched up quite a bit. Characters are drawn well, and the animation is much smoother than in the first one. Generally characters move fluidly, although there are still some isolated cases of moves not having enough frames to look smooth. Throws in particular tend to suffer this problem, as they look almost like stop motion frames instead of fluid movements. But generally character animations are well done.

Stage designs are top notch. Just about every stage in the game has day and evening versions. The first match of every fight occurs during the day stage, and the second match takes place in the evening stage. Most stages also have breakable elements, ranging from the mundane to the positively cool. Jubei's stage is particularly memorable in this regard. There are a series of freestanding art panels between the foreground and background planes. They shatter when a character is hit through them, or when a character rolls through them. But it's possible to shatter one, roll through, and continue the fight in the background plane with the panels preventing you from seeing anything behind them. Not practical, but cool nonetheless. Most of the stages also make use of multiple layers of parallax scrolling to convey a sense of depth.

The game has improved somewhat on its predecessor's sluggish pace, but still moves relatively slowly. It's much less of an issue however than in the first game, and only the most twitch-oriented gamers will complain about it. The controls are tight and responsive, making special technique execution fairly easy. Desperation moves are difficult to pull off, but that's more by design than anything else. After all, they would lose their special character if they were as easy to do as regular moves. Fatal Fury 2 also isn't as unbalanced as its predecessor. While Terry Bogard is still the best character overall, the characters are generally well balanced. Even the boss is more balanced. Wolfgang Krauser is a hard boss to beat, but he's nowhere near as hard as Geese Howard was in the first game. He's also nowhere near as cheap.

Fatal Fury 2 is a good game, and is what the original Fatal Fury could have and should have been. Had this game been released the same year as Capcom's Street Fighter 2 instead of its predecessor, Capcom might not have had the years of dominance in fighting games that it enjoyed. We might think of Fatal Fury as the classic modern 2D fighting game instead of Street Fighter 2.