Fatal Fury 2

Released in late 1992, Fatal Fury 2 was a significant improvement over the prior year's title both mechanically and visually. Taking more than a little inspiration from Street Fighter 2 this time around, the second Fatal Fury still carries SNK's signature innovative approach that took the gameplay systems to new levels and introduced fresh mechanics to the burgeoning fighting game genre. 

Gamers and critics alike were quick to praise the generous graphical update and retooled mechanics that allowed for more varied and exciting matches. The publication Game Machine in Japan sites Fatal Fury 2 as the second highest grossing arcade game of 1993, trailing just behind Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting (the third iteration of Street Fighter 2). Fatal Fury 2 was a smash hit for SNK across all releases, including a port to just about all popular home consoles at the time.

The hype SNK built around Fatal Fury 2 included a plethora of tie-in marketing materials, live action commercials, dramatizations of the storyline, soundtracks, strategy guides, VHS strategy videos and more! Sadly, all of these niceties were relegated to their home region of Japan and as such most of this material has never been translated. 

All the fan fare Fatal Fury 2 created came to a crashing halt toward the end of 1993 when SNK released what many consider to be the ultimate Neo-Geo game, Fatal Fury Special. Special is essentially SNK's "Championship Edition" version of Fatal Fury 2 which retooled the mechanics, rebalanced the cast, brought back characters from the first Fatal Fury, added new backgrounds and music, and evened out the gameplay tempo. Fatal Fury Special, along with Samurai Shodown, put SNK on the radar of just about all gamers across the world and ignited the decade long fighting game rivalry between SNK and Capcom as they competed for world fighting game dominance. Unfortunately for Fatal Fury 2, Special is such a significant upgrade that it makes the prior game effectively obsolete. You can read more about Fatal Fury Special here, but for now, let's dive into what made Fatal Fury 2 a massive success upon release.

Our story picks up about a year after the events of the first Fatal Fury. In a bare-knuckle brawl on top of South Town's Geese Tower, Terry Bogard defeated criminal overload Geese Howard to exact revenge over the death of his adopted father Jeff Bogard. Terry's overwhelming power knocked Geese over the edge of the tower, but Geese refused Terry's outstretched hand to rescue him from the fall. To the denizens of South Town, and as far as Terry Bogard was concerned, Geese Howard was dead and the King of the Fighters tournament came to an end. 

A year later Geese's half-brother, Wolfgang Krauser, organizes another King of the Fighters tournament to find and locate Terry Bogard and enact revenge on the supposed death of Geese. Not being able to resist another fighting tournament and to hopefully put a stop the legacy of Geese Howard, Terry, Andy, and Joe once again enter the fray. Or, as the attract sequence in the game says, "Again, Legendary Men Return!"

As one of SNK's 100 Mega-Shock titles, Fatal Fury 2 came loaded on a massive 106 mega bit cartridge which was unheard of in 1992. This cartridge was packed to the brim with new characters that brought the playable roster from three combatants to eight. 

• Terry Bogard: Series hero and mixed martial artist.

• Andy Bogard: Terry's younger adoptive brother and student of the Shiranui Ninja Arts.

• Joe Higashi: Muai-Thai expert and friend of the Bogard brothers.

• Mai Shiranui: Successor to the Shiranui Ninja Arts and Andy's Girlfriend.

• Kim Kapwhan: Korean Tae-kwon-do expert set on finding and challenging Terry Bogard to a friendly battle.

• Cheng Sinzan: Popular South Town restaurateur who studied with Jeff Bogard under Tung Fu Ru.

• Jubei Yamada: Judo master, friend of Tung Fu Ru (Jeff Bogard's master who was present in Fatal Fury 1), and lecherous old man.

• Big Bear: Pro wrestler who went by the name Raiden in the first Fatal Fury and no longer works for Geese's syndicate.

In addition to the expanded playable roster, SNK took further inspiration from Street Fighter 2 and created four unplayable boss characters players would have to face before beating the single-player mode. The bosses include Billy Kane (Geese's main bodyguard), Axel Hawk (murderous pro boxer), Lawrence Blood (ex-bull fighter), and finally Wolfgang Krauser (Geese's half-brother and tournament sponsor). 

Unlike other fighting game characters that all but mimicked the archetypes seen in Street Fighter 2, the characters SNK created in Fatal Fury 2 were quite fresh with special moves and actions that were worlds apart from Capcom's universe. Not only were the characters unique, they were also more diverse than any other fighting game at the time. Kim Kapwhan, for example, is the first Korean character ever in a fighting game and Mai Shiranui would go on to become not only a key character for SNK but also one of the most well-known female characters in all of video games. It's also with this game we would begin to see the signature "SNK Cool" style take shape that the company would become known for, by creating hyper-stylized character sprites bursting with personality. 

Despite the Neo-Geo having a four button set up both on the MVS arcade machines and at home on the AES, few games up to this point on used all four buttons. Fatal Fury 2 eschews the three button mechanics of the first game in favor of a button layout that is more similar to Street Fighter 2. There is now a dedicated button for light punch, light kick, heavy punch, and heavy kick. Also like Street Fighter 2, the animations and actions of these buttons will change depending on if the player is standing away from their opponent or right up on them. Additionally, the expanded buttons produce more options for jumping attacks as well. 

Fatal Fury's signature feature, the two-plane system, returns but in a fully upgraded form. Unlike the first game where the player can only follow the AI opponent but can not manually switch planes at will, Fatal Fury 2 allows the player to cross the center line at any time by pressing both light attacks together. Along with this action being a key movement option in the game, it is also an attack that will knock airborne opponents out of the air or hit standing opponents on the ground. Unfortunately, the boss character backgrounds (excluding Krauser) do not support the line-sway feature and instead have a hazard waiting for the player on the second plane if their knocked into it. 

Fatal Fury 2 introduced a number of new features as well. Some of which would go onto influence the entire genre moving into the mid and late 1990's. 

• Backdash: Double tapping back on the control stick makes your character do a quick hop backward to avoid attacks.

• Duck Walk: Pressing down-forward without a button will produce a crouching walk, but this does not duck under projectiles.

• Parry: A first for fighting games, if you press forward+light punch just before an opponent's attack lands on your sprite, you will dodge and parry their attack.

• Taunts: While not new to fighting games (Art of Fighting was the first to implement this a few months prior), pressing heavy punch from more than half a screen distance away will trigger a character specific taunt. 

• Desperation Moves: When the player about to KO'ed, their life bar will begin flashing red. When in this state the player can unleash one of the first comeback mechanics in all of video games. These "desperation" moves utilize very complicated controller motions for the time, but produce devastating results if they connect with the opponent.

• Line-Sway Options: Press both light attack buttons to switch planes or press both heavy attack buttons to do a powerful attack that will knock the the opponent into the opposite plane. 

  • If on a separate line from the opponent, pressing a punch button will do a low flying cross line attack and pressing a kick button will do a higher flying attack (this was changed somewhat in Fatal Fury Special).

All in all, Fatal Fury 2 was one of if not the most complex fighting game released to date in 1992. It was a mechanically ambitious game to be sure, but that ambition unfortunately got in the way of balance. Many special moves push the opponent way out of range if blocked making it very hard to close in on your opponent and punish their mistakes. While the strict controller inputs from the first game were made slightly easier to perform, specials are still quite hard to pull of consecutively. The physics engine also could have used more time in the oven as jumps are much too floaty and certain recovery frames on many special moves happen too quickly leading to some jerky animations that are out of step with the pacing of the rest of the animation cycles. Despite some wonkiness in the physics, the designers employed many new techniques to make the game "feel good" to play like adding in hit-stops, better impact special effects, character and screen shakes upon impact, and more. Where as Fatal Fury feels a little "squishy," Fatal Fury 2 feels solid and defined...more or less.

Playing single player compounds the aforementioned mechanical issues due to the obscene AI difficulty. Even on normal, opponents will throw out frame-perfect counters to any attack you do. While this is frustrating in and of itself, the inability to punish many moves in the game makes these perfect counters even more infuriating on block as you have no way to punish the CPU's mistakes. This isn't the last time we'll see this horrible AI algorithm either.

While the first Fatal Fury is a handsome game, Fatal Fury 2 is on another level entirely. The sprite work in this second game was redone from the ground up and was praised at the time for being one of the best looking 2D games released to this point. Character sprites are larger than those in Street Fighter 2, and are bursting with color and vibrant animation. There are numerous small animation details, like Mai's subtle breast bounce and Terry's hair gently falling back to his head when he throws off his cap. SNK would go on to become known for these small animation flourishes that telegraph character and personality over and above their chief rival Capcom. The character select screen is also of note as rather than use character face icons to denote the fighter you've selected, you choose your character by selecting their sprite from a "group shot" - with each character posing in a way that further conveys their personality to the player. While not all Fatal Fury games adopt this select screen approach, we would see it return in 1995's Fatal Fury 3. 

The backgrounds in Fatal Fury 2 are beautiful and highly unique for the day. Whether you're riding a large wooden raft down a rushing river, taking a train across the northern mid-west region of the US, or fighting on a gondola as you meander through the canals of Venice, the backgrounds in Fatal Fury 2 employ a generous use of parallax scrolling that create a sense of movement and momentum that was unheard of at the time. Despite the movement in the backgrounds, it never distracts from the gameplay. Moving from the first game to this second game, you can tell just how much the pixel artists on the team matured in just over a year. It's an incredible leap forward in overall fidelity, detail, and imagination.

Much like the first game, the storyline cut scenes in Fatal Fury 2 play into the now world-wide event that has become the King of the Fighters tournament. After each match you get a quick view of Richard Meyer (capoeira master from Fatal Fury 1) sitting among a crowd inside his Pao Pao Café from which the camera pans into a TV hanging behind the bar and you see your character's victory portrait and their unique win quote. There's even a little fan-fare that plays here as well to cheer you on in your victory. While these scenes aren't needed, they are a nice touch and help to flesh out the world these characters inhabit in ways other developers hadn't yet explored in fighting games. 

To complement the stunning presentation, the sound team at SNK really came into their own during the production of Fatal Fury 2. Each stage's music theme carries influence from the real-world cities and countries they are based on and all are absolute bangers. Outside of a few tracks, the general themes introduced in this game would go on to be reprised not only in subsequent Fatal Fury games but even the long-running King of Fighters series. Even in 2022, these music tracks are still used by SNK and have become just as iconic as the characters and themes they represent. The sound effects are also punchy and thick, with good bass and "crunch" to them. 

Fatal Fury 2 is a significant upgrade to the first game - it's everything a sequel can and should be. But as I mentioned before, the sheer ambition of this title left a bit to be desired when it came to balance and physics - which really hold the game back from being enjoyable over 30 years later. This is compounded by the fact that just nine months later, SNK would release this game's replacement making Fatal Fury 2 more of a curio to check out that is but a foothold on the way to the greatness that is Fatal Fury Special. Still, there's a lot of innovation on display here and taken from a strictly historical context, Fatal Fury 2 is not only one of the most important games on the Neo-Geo, it is one of the most influential and important fighting games ever developed. 

Fortunately, if you're looking to play this game on real SNK hardware, a copy of Fatal Fury 2 won't run you into the poor house. A complete Japanese AES copy can be had for as little as $50 in 2023 with a US version sitting around the $300 mark. MVS copies are dirt cheap along with the Neo CD release. 

There were numerous ports to popular consoles of the day, each with their own developer and varying degrees of faithfulness to the source material. The Sharp X68000 version is the king of the bunch, but was released on this expensive home PC only in Japan. Takara's SNES port is considered to be very faithful to the original, of course in downgraded form, and their Mega Drive port is also a solid representation of the source material. The Mega Drive version also includes a nifty cheat code that changes the speed of the game making for a very unique way to play that introduces juggle combos and resets that are impossible to perform in the SNK original or any of the ports. 

In overall consumer grade quality, though, the PC Engine port is the most faithful as it comes on CD and uses an expanded memory module called the Arcade Card. This allowed the team at Hudson Soft, who ported the game, to include larger character sprites with a surprising amount of retained animation and better sound quality than the ports to the 16-bit systems. Additionally, the Game Boy saw a port, as was common at the time, although it is highly compromised and basically a different game all together given the huge gulf in hardware capability. 

Like most classic arcade games in the modern era, there is no shortage of ways to play the Neo-Geo version of this game. That said, the Mega Drive port is highly unique and I feel that if you want to revisit this game in the modern era, that is the way to go. If you're into retro game collecting, you'll quickly discover that the Mega Drive/Genesis port is the most expensive version of this game from any region where it was released. 

At the end of the day, we live in a world where Fatal Fury Special exists; and that, my friends, is where I recommend you spend your time and money. Special is such a significant upgrade that it makes Fatal Fury 2 not only redundant but obsolete in every conceivable way. If you want a copy of Fatal Fury 2 for your AES or MVS libraries, get this one after you've secured Special and many other must-have Neo-Geo games. In terms of value, Fatal Fury 2 has long since plateaued and is one of the most common games on all Neo-Geo hardware variants. If you're looking to complete your Fatal Fury collection in any format, Fatal Fury 2 will be an easy, "cheap" pick up.