Oh boy…Just oh boy...Fatal Fury 2. Let’s just start with the story.
So after the events of the first Fatal Fury and the death of Geese Howard at the hands of Terry Bogard. Geese’s half brother Wolfgang Krauser organizes another King of Fighters tournament in order to lure out Geese’s killer. This time however instead of being at south town like the first game this tournament spans the entire world. Blah Blah Blah Terry beats Krauser the end.
Sigh
This is a major step down from the first game. Like major. In my Fatal Fury review I stated that I liked the game’s plot because it had personal stakes for the main character and not basically being SF2. This is basically SF2 except with probably a better villain. Anyways I don’t have much to say on the story here since unlike the last game it really isn’t as much in the forefront in favor of the gameplay. But before we can get to that we have to go over the presentation so let’s get it out of the way
So the graphic definitely got an upgrade compared to last time. It’s not by much but it is noticeable with the sprite appreciably made slightly smaller to make it possible to have more room on the stages. Speaking of stages due to this being a world wide tournament there’s a much larger variety to choose from well more compared to the last game. Not that you’ll be choosing mind you the stages are still determined by the character you’re fighting. The music definitely got an upgrade with there being some tracks I’d actually consider listening to on my own time. Mainly Terry and Billy Kane’s themes however it's still not particularly great and Jubei’s theme annoys me to no end.
Alright enough beating around the bush. Let’s get to the only part that I bet most of you care about. The gameplay.
Sigh
This is gonna be rough… so basically Fatal Fury 2 has increased the number of used buttons to 4 with there now being a light and strong punch and kick buttons. Throws now being executed by holding forward and pressing Strong Punch at close range. Sounds kinda familiar but I can’t put my finger on it…Special moves are still preformed the same way and you still block by moving backwards which is something I forgot to mention in the last review then again that stuff’s pretty common knowledge but need to go over everything and all. However there is one major addition to the series in the form of desperation moves. When the player reaches a low enough health value their life bar will start flashing red which means when the player inputs a special command the player will preform an extremely powerful attack that does massive damage. However it is worth noting that not even the arcade archives version of the game tells you, you can do (or bare minimum doesn’t tell you the inputs) and I only realized it by intuition. So I wouldn’t be surprised if many players didn’t know about this. But I’ll get more in depth with these later.
We also got a massive upgrade in the amount of playable characters with there now being 8. Of course each of them having their own set of moves and playstyles but I still stuck with Terry because he’s Terry Bogard do I need any other reason?
One thing that this game does that is interesting is that it allows the player to select their first opponent on the arcade ladder. Doesn’t really amount to much but choosing which foe you want out of the way first is pretty cool. Although the player still has to fight every character in the game including themselves anyways.
Another thing that’s pretty cool is that some of the stages actually have gimmicks such as Jubei’s stage having the back lane covered by paintings and you have to break them by switching lanes and Mai’s having a stage where there are flags she can bounce off of.
The Duel lane system is also much better in this game having the player actually have a reason to switch lane as the enemy switching lanes fairly often which actually makes it worth something. Still a bit of a tacked on mechanic but at least they’re trying and that’s where the good stuff ends.
So the quickest way I can sum this up is Fatal Fury 2 is a worse Street Fighter 2 and I mean possibly as bad as world warriors. While the combo system has been fleshed out a bit and in some ways in a prototype KOF 94. It’s just what happened here. So I’m going to effectively lightning round this because This is almost 2 word document pages long.
There’s almost no hit or block stun meaning there is absolutely no combo system or pressure or at least none that’s actually worth anything. Like you hit an enemy and then can immediately grab you it’s that bad and special cancels make just about every character be safe on block although due to the lack of block stun you’re not getting much of a reward off of the plus frames anyways and it just resets to rock’em sock’em robot sim neutral anyways.
There’s no real hard knockdowns outside of Dizzying so you can’t run Okizeme (applying pressure to the opponent as the are recovering from being on the ground). Enemies will practically get up immediately and this is made even worse due to the lack of movement options in the game. Like I’m not asking for anime fighter movement here I just want a forward dash of some kind. There’s a back dash so catching opponents is a pain. There’s no sort of jump height control and overheads are a luxury if they exist at all so trying to do jumpins isn’t all that effective because you are begging to get anti aired.
Not to mention remember those super moves from earlier. I get that they’re supposed to be last dich effort moves but at least Terry’s is downright awful. It’s starts up at a snail’s pace and has like no range. Sure it does half a lifebar but who care about that if you’re never going to land the fucking thing.
And remember how I mentioned Dizzying (getting hit so many times that you’re stunned for a few seconds) I despise Dizzying in general but holy shit I have never ever been dizzied so much in any other game.
And every single issue is made even worst due to this being one of if not the slowest fighting games I have ever played! Like it takes an eternity to do just about everything and combine with low damage across the board. You get an absurdly frustrating experience.
I finally had enough once I got to Billy Kane with his cheap advantages due to being a boss. I normally love bullshit fighting game bosses and at first I thought it was because of those bs perks that I was getting irritated especially that get out of jail free staff spinning move he has. But no it’s because of the game mechanics themselves.
Due to the the lack of movement and pressure I couldn’t really do anything most of the time. I pretty much just started to spam jump heavy punch and praying that it worked which it actually was to a degree. Now I am partly to blame for playing on the highest setting but even dropping it down to normal mode didn’t help due to the blasted game speed.
After a bit of fighting Billy on normal, I finally decided to throw in the towel and I’m glad I did because there were 2 more bosses before Krauser and I don’t think I would have had the mental energy to even think of taking them on.
Fatal Fury 2 has to be one of the worst fighting games I’ve ever played. I put it down there with Blade Strangers and that game barely works. But that’s a topic for another day. At least the first Fatal Fury has some charm to it. I really hope Fatal Fury Special is better.
So after the events of the first Fatal Fury and the death of Geese Howard at the hands of Terry Bogard. Geese’s half brother Wolfgang Krauser organizes another King of Fighters tournament in order to lure out Geese’s killer. This time however instead of being at south town like the first game this tournament spans the entire world. Blah Blah Blah Terry beats Krauser the end.
Sigh
This is a major step down from the first game. Like major. In my Fatal Fury review I stated that I liked the game’s plot because it had personal stakes for the main character and not basically being SF2. This is basically SF2 except with probably a better villain. Anyways I don’t have much to say on the story here since unlike the last game it really isn’t as much in the forefront in favor of the gameplay. But before we can get to that we have to go over the presentation so let’s get it out of the way
So the graphic definitely got an upgrade compared to last time. It’s not by much but it is noticeable with the sprite appreciably made slightly smaller to make it possible to have more room on the stages. Speaking of stages due to this being a world wide tournament there’s a much larger variety to choose from well more compared to the last game. Not that you’ll be choosing mind you the stages are still determined by the character you’re fighting. The music definitely got an upgrade with there being some tracks I’d actually consider listening to on my own time. Mainly Terry and Billy Kane’s themes however it's still not particularly great and Jubei’s theme annoys me to no end.
Alright enough beating around the bush. Let’s get to the only part that I bet most of you care about. The gameplay.
Sigh
This is gonna be rough… so basically Fatal Fury 2 has increased the number of used buttons to 4 with there now being a light and strong punch and kick buttons. Throws now being executed by holding forward and pressing Strong Punch at close range. Sounds kinda familiar but I can’t put my finger on it…Special moves are still preformed the same way and you still block by moving backwards which is something I forgot to mention in the last review then again that stuff’s pretty common knowledge but need to go over everything and all. However there is one major addition to the series in the form of desperation moves. When the player reaches a low enough health value their life bar will start flashing red which means when the player inputs a special command the player will preform an extremely powerful attack that does massive damage. However it is worth noting that not even the arcade archives version of the game tells you, you can do (or bare minimum doesn’t tell you the inputs) and I only realized it by intuition. So I wouldn’t be surprised if many players didn’t know about this. But I’ll get more in depth with these later.
We also got a massive upgrade in the amount of playable characters with there now being 8. Of course each of them having their own set of moves and playstyles but I still stuck with Terry because he’s Terry Bogard do I need any other reason?
One thing that this game does that is interesting is that it allows the player to select their first opponent on the arcade ladder. Doesn’t really amount to much but choosing which foe you want out of the way first is pretty cool. Although the player still has to fight every character in the game including themselves anyways.
Another thing that’s pretty cool is that some of the stages actually have gimmicks such as Jubei’s stage having the back lane covered by paintings and you have to break them by switching lanes and Mai’s having a stage where there are flags she can bounce off of.
The Duel lane system is also much better in this game having the player actually have a reason to switch lane as the enemy switching lanes fairly often which actually makes it worth something. Still a bit of a tacked on mechanic but at least they’re trying and that’s where the good stuff ends.
So the quickest way I can sum this up is Fatal Fury 2 is a worse Street Fighter 2 and I mean possibly as bad as world warriors. While the combo system has been fleshed out a bit and in some ways in a prototype KOF 94. It’s just what happened here. So I’m going to effectively lightning round this because This is almost 2 word document pages long.
There’s almost no hit or block stun meaning there is absolutely no combo system or pressure or at least none that’s actually worth anything. Like you hit an enemy and then can immediately grab you it’s that bad and special cancels make just about every character be safe on block although due to the lack of block stun you’re not getting much of a reward off of the plus frames anyways and it just resets to rock’em sock’em robot sim neutral anyways.
There’s no real hard knockdowns outside of Dizzying so you can’t run Okizeme (applying pressure to the opponent as the are recovering from being on the ground). Enemies will practically get up immediately and this is made even worse due to the lack of movement options in the game. Like I’m not asking for anime fighter movement here I just want a forward dash of some kind. There’s a back dash so catching opponents is a pain. There’s no sort of jump height control and overheads are a luxury if they exist at all so trying to do jumpins isn’t all that effective because you are begging to get anti aired.
Not to mention remember those super moves from earlier. I get that they’re supposed to be last dich effort moves but at least Terry’s is downright awful. It’s starts up at a snail’s pace and has like no range. Sure it does half a lifebar but who care about that if you’re never going to land the fucking thing.
And remember how I mentioned Dizzying (getting hit so many times that you’re stunned for a few seconds) I despise Dizzying in general but holy shit I have never ever been dizzied so much in any other game.
And every single issue is made even worst due to this being one of if not the slowest fighting games I have ever played! Like it takes an eternity to do just about everything and combine with low damage across the board. You get an absurdly frustrating experience.
I finally had enough once I got to Billy Kane with his cheap advantages due to being a boss. I normally love bullshit fighting game bosses and at first I thought it was because of those bs perks that I was getting irritated especially that get out of jail free staff spinning move he has. But no it’s because of the game mechanics themselves.
Due to the the lack of movement and pressure I couldn’t really do anything most of the time. I pretty much just started to spam jump heavy punch and praying that it worked which it actually was to a degree. Now I am partly to blame for playing on the highest setting but even dropping it down to normal mode didn’t help due to the blasted game speed.
After a bit of fighting Billy on normal, I finally decided to throw in the towel and I’m glad I did because there were 2 more bosses before Krauser and I don’t think I would have had the mental energy to even think of taking them on.
Fatal Fury 2 has to be one of the worst fighting games I’ve ever played. I put it down there with Blade Strangers and that game barely works. But that’s a topic for another day. At least the first Fatal Fury has some charm to it. I really hope Fatal Fury Special is better.
Angel_Arle
1 year ago