Great! I knew that groove was in your heart! T-T-T-T-The millionaire fighting 2001 is about to begin! Hardcore fans have been eagerly anticipating this event, and now the waiting is finally over! Check your training wheels at the door, ladies and gentlemen, this is gonna be one incredible battle that won't easily be forgotten! The time has come when the new history is going to unfold. You can feel the intensity in the air as the hopes, dreams, and hearts of these warriors are about to be put to the ultimate test of skill! What they are after is the title of the WORLD'S STRONGEST!

N-N-N-N-Now, are you ready to get it on?

Recommended by Dusty Vita on this list.

While Marvel vs. Capcom was an enchanting concoction of two disparate corners of pop culture that created a fighting game experience you couldn’t find anywhere else, Capcom vs. SNK 2 leans in the opposite direction and sets out to create the perfect mechanical marriage of the two without sacrificing any element that made them special to begin with. In fact, I’d argue that it does a more interesting job in combining the gameplay of the source material than any other crossover fighter I’ve played.

Like any good crossover, the roster is sure to satisfy basically every fan of the genre, but CVS2’s true claim to fame is it’s brilliant Groove System. By selecting one of six presets styled after Capcom and SNK respectively, the player is able to tweak the game’s feel to their liking by essentially adding and subtracting mechanics depending on the Groove. Do you like Third Strike and the exhilaration that parrying gave? Pick P-Groove! Do you yearn for MAX mode and the dizzying movement options that made King of Fighters so interesting? Try N-Groove! Are you someone like me who really enjoys the custom combo system of Street Fighter Alpha? A-Groove is the one for you. Each style also completely changes how your meter works, so in essence, you basically have 6 versions of every character in the roster that aren’t insignificantly different. With an insane number of options and even some amount of mechanical overlap between certain Grooves (for example, 3 of the 6 Grooves feature rolling as an option) There’s basically no chance the player can’t find something they’ll like.

Here’s the catch: for each team, you only get ONE Groove choice. This isn’t like MVC where each character gets their own assist that changes the composition of your team, you just get one. They could have easily opened the floodgates and let the player customize every single character to their liking, but this little restriction makes the act of building a team way more interesting to me. It’s a small yet significant way to nudge the player towards experimentation and makes the construction of each team feel meaningful. Without it, it’d be too easy to pick what feels comfortable and just assign each character a Groove that fits in with their original design.

Another small wrinkle in the team building process is the Ratio system, though this is something that works in the background compared to the immediate changes Grooves make. Before the start of the game you have the choice to customize the size of the team, with sizes ranging from 1 to 3 team members. In an effort to balance this, you’re also tasked with assigning the strength of each team member using 4 points, with each point making the character way stronger and tankier than before. As someone pretty new to the game, I can’t speak on the competitive viability of picking a small team size over a larger one, but like the Groove system, I suspect it just depends on the characters in question and the taste of the player.

The aesthetic of the game is probably the one element to the game that deserves the most “objective” scrutiny. It’s no secret that Capcom liked to reuse sprites from older arcade games for their insane crossover titles (not surprising given the size of these rosters) and while at it’s best some of the sprite styles blend together and help make the aesthetic cohesive, a lot of times it makes certain sides of the roster feel really out of place.

Outside of a few characters that clearly needed a graphical facelift, the whole vibe of the game is so cohesive that a few blemishes tend to fall by the wayside for me. Being a post-Y2K game, it’s no surprise that the whole package feels like an exercise of friendly competition more than a battle for glory. The televised tournament setting present throughout every aspect of the package ties the mood of the game together for me and calls back to the setup of The King of Fighters Tournaments present in that series very nicely.

While Capcom vs. SNK 2 is a game that admittedly doesn’t scratch all of the competitive itches I may be looking for in a fighting game, it feels so complete and confident in it’s execution that I can’t help but love everything that its going for. I think I’d go as far as to say that it's one of the best casual fighting games for this very reason. If it feels like this writeup feels more like a surface-level examination of the game’s features more than anything, it's because it nails everything a first timer would probably cling to upon trying the game, and that's why I find it so endearing.

It may not have the craziest combos of any crossover or the most consistent sprite work of the era, but it makes up for all of this by being one of the most accessible, inviting, and overall jovial packages in fighting games. It has something for everyone, and that might just be the trick to get more people into the genre I love so much. You don’t need to dumb down the mechanical breadth to appeal to a casual demographic, you just need to make a game that can make someone go “Wow, that game looks cool as hell, I should play that”.

The announcer is GODLIKE

LIVE OR LET DIE

Also OST is great. "This is true love we're making"

This is my favorite fighting game in terms of "complete package" and the best too; it has the most epic arcade mode I've ever seen in any fighting game, and depending on your score during the fights, you get Shin Akuma / God Rugal, or Akuma base / Rugal base as the final boss in the arcade, as I said it all depends on the player's performance, if you have a high score you can fight against Geese or Bison; it has probably the best set of backgrounds + soundtrack, I really love the style of the sprites of the 2D characters with the 3D backgrounds, it's very well done, it has many game modes for a FG until today, I really enjoyed playing online on the Dreamcast , has my favorite cast of characters in any fighting game, no other has Terry Bogard, Rock Howard, Sakura, Shin Akuma, Orochi Iori, Chun-Li and Ken all in one game, with 6 Different grooves to choose from, being customizable, and the Ratio system that is awesome, if you train enough, your characters are very good, even the lowest tier, it is obvious that there are dominant characters in this game, but the case here is, with the right choice of Grooves for your character and the right Ratio for each one of them (if you're playing in that mode), in addition to the necessary dedication, you get good, very good, and you feel gratified with that because it was with your own training, intelligence and dedication that you got good at this game, whether playing with 1, 2 or 3 characters on your team, they are all totally viable, and the Grooves and Ratio system only reinforce that. Another reason for this game to be 10/10 is the Color Edit mode, I kept changing the colors of the characters a lot, one of the first memories I have in any FG, is to make the Balrog look like Dudley just by changing the colors. About other aspects of the game, this game has the most hype training OST ever, the training scenario is awesome too, the online mode is good as already said, the Survival mode was really cool, and the Replay mode was very rare to get see in FGs of the time, it was good that they implemented this tool, the feeling of running of the characters too, is something that I never felt to be managed so well in another FG before, the "feeling" of everything about this one is just very good game, down to the collision particles of the moves, supers and specials, even the announcer is spectacular, the announcer, that's what I can say, THERE IS NO MORE FUCKIN' AND ICONIC ANNOUNCER IN ANY OTHER FG IN THE UNIVERSE, take that hot take there. This is one of those very few fighting games that you actually get to play in different ways for each character you choose. This game is very nostalgic for me, it was the only FG I played with my brother and my sisters too, good memories. This game has a place in my memories, it was, is, and always will be my favorite fighting game.

One of the better Capcom soundtracks with a great announcer. The roster while great, really just looked like Street Fighter VS SNK. Yes there is Morrigan and Kyosuke but majority of the Capcom roster is basically Street Fighter. The fighting mechanics are great with the different grooves. Overall a great package for a fighting game.

Enjoyment: 6.5/8
Replayability: 0.5/1
Graphics: 0.5/0.5
Sound: 0.5/0.5
Total: 8/10