28th anniversary of Fatal Fury 2 - December 10, 1992 released

LoneSage

A Broken Man
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Happy anniversary to a game most haven't played since 1993 when Special was released.

The World Warrior was released in March 1991, more than a year and a half before, obviously FF2 was inspired heavily by it.

At the time of its release, for those who were there at the time, how was the game favored to SFII? What did you think of it?


AGAIN, LEGENDARY MEN RETURN...

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BlackaneseNiNjA

The Fatal Fury Disciple
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One of my favorite games of all time. Always has been and always will be :buttrock:

I’ve done a few write-ups on FF2 vs SF2 here over the years so I won’t get into it here. FF2 is a great game in a fantastic series that I never get tired of.
 

Digmac

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Such a better intro than FFS in my opinion. Happy anniversary to a Neo staple.
 

yagamikun

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Fatal Fury 2 is what woke me up to SNK, and it will always be an important game for me.

When FF2 came out I was gobsmacked at the hyper detailed backgrounds and huge sprites compared to SF2. The interesting characters, amazing music, and some advanced mechanics (for the time) that SF2 was lacking made FF2 a standout game. That said, I still preferred SF2 at the time...until FFS came out. Developers weren't often afforded an opportunity to perfect a game's design after an initial release in the 90's (unless you're Capcom), so the massive mechanical improvements SNK made in FFS changed everything for me. FFS had the gameplay huzpa, balance, and pacing to go toe-to-toe with SF2 and it won me over completely. FFS stands as one of my top 5 favorite games of all time, and is easily still my favorite fighting game ever - but we would have never had such a great game without the solid foundation built by 2.

FF2 is an undeniably important game not just for the Neo and SNK, but for fighting games in general.

Happy Anniversary Fatal Fury 2!
 

thermaltreasure

Ninja Combat Warrior
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Never spent much time with 2, I was about three years old at the time of release but FFS is a top tier fighter and I will forever love it to death. Happy anniversary FF2
 

Niko

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Fatal Fury 2 is one of those rare cases were the US cover art is better than the Japanese.
 

LoneSage

A Broken Man
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One thing FF2 had over SFII were the scrolling stages. Andy, Mai and Terry's stages were fun looking at while fighting.
 

Alphabet

Zero's Secretary
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I discovered FF 2 late when I was an hardcore gamer of Street Fighter II on SNES and Arcade during that time. Good game.
 

Tron

Test
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FF2 did lead to FFS and i prefer that game more.Still it changed things up with the desperate attacks and all.Truth be told though when i want to play FF2 i'll usually fall back on the genesis port,i like how it plays more compared to the original.
 

Capitalistix

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That intro has so many 80's VHS trailer vibes. Love the ambiance of the early FF series
 

konrad

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For me, fatal fury 2 will always be a great game, fantastic sprites and wolfgang krauser's stage music, impressive.
 

bulbousbeard

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The best thing about the first Fatal Fury games was how forward thinking they were in terms of varying up movement (multiple planes, being able to crouch walk, dashes, etc. way before Capcom was doing it). FF2 had some interesting stage graphics but this was still in SNK's "stiff like characters have metal rods embedded in their assholes" animation phase. They really didn't get there until Samurai Shodown 2. Real Bout 1 was the first one that actually started to have good, natural looking animations.

All the early Fatal Fury games are stiff in general. They feel weird.
 

bulbousbeard

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Fatal Fury 2 is what woke me up to SNK, and it will always be an important game for me.

When FF2 came out I was gobsmacked at the hyper detailed backgrounds and huge sprites compared to SF2. The interesting characters, amazing music, and some advanced mechanics (for the time) that SF2 was lacking made FF2 a standout game. That said, I still preferred SF2 at the time...until FFS came out. Developers weren't often afforded an opportunity to perfect a game's design after an initial release in the 90's (unless you're Capcom), so the massive mechanical improvements SNK made in FFS changed everything for me. FFS had the gameplay huzpa, balance, and pacing to go toe-to-toe with SF2 and it won me over completely. FFS stands as one of my top 5 favorite games of all time, and is easily still my favorite fighting game ever - but we would have never had such a great game without the solid foundation built by 2.

FF2 is an undeniably important game not just for the Neo and SNK, but for fighting games in general.

Happy Anniversary Fatal Fury 2!

This isn't giving Capcom enough credit. Keep in mind that FF2 and FFS's stages didn't even have line scrolling, so they were arguably less sophisticated than what Capcom did in 1991. Also, even though there's a lot of parallax in FF2, if you actually look at the backgrounds, some of that shit is dead simple with basically no detail or shading at all. I think people are giving it a little more credit than it deserves. SF2 has some spotty graphics, but some elements of the backgrounds are actually pretty detailed.

SF2 has way more frames of animation for most moves than FF2 and FFS too. The movement is much smoother and more natural too. At that point SNK games still felt janky.

There's also something off with FF2 and FFS where I feel like the artists didn't exercise enough restraint. Why is the stupid chick sprite forced into EVERYTHING? It's just so goofy.
 

kingcuckmelon1

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I only had FF1 on the Genesis at the time, when I saw FF2 in the arcade it literally blew my socks off. The colors were the thing that most stood out to me
 

ShaolinAce

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FF2 did lead to FFS and i prefer that game more.Still it changed things up with the desperate attacks and all.Truth be told though when i want to play FF2 i'll usually fall back on the genesis port,i like how it plays more compared to the original.

Totally. The genesis port is really surprisingly fucking good its crazy. I think its the best playing fighter on the system.
 

Capitalistix

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Totally. The genesis port is really surprisingly fucking good its crazy. I think its the best playing fighter on the system.

Ive always considered fighting games not on their native console/hardware inferior to the point of obsolescence, but Ive heard so many good things about this game in particular, Im going to track it down and give it some time. Ive always wanted a decent fighter to play on genesis
 

BBH

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Fatal Fury 2 was such a huge leap over Fatal Fury 1 in terms of quality, but the problem is that Special pretty much completely obsoleted it in terms of gameplay.

The only things that really make Fatal Fury 2 unique:

- Sick intro
- Cool cutscenes before the bosses showing Krauser whooping everyone's asses from FF1 that didn't make it
- Bonus stages (that are extremely boring)
- Different endings (that you have to 1CC just to even see!)
- Easier AI
- CONQER THE WORLD

And that's it. The biggest problem with FF2 is the complete lack of combos in the game, how you're not allowed to hit anyone when they're already in hitstun. Even more baffling is that they let you buffer normal moves into special but are never allowed to combo anything. Matches just turn into weird pokefests, when someone makes a major mistake like whiffing a DP, all you can really do is throw them (or possibly do a DM) for maximum damage. Fatal Fury Special adding combos made the game so much more fun - yeah it has balance issues, characters like Kim and Joe can dizzy people really easily with walking standing A combos linked into other attacks, but... it FEELS better. And of course you've got double the characters (if you count Ryo).

Fatal Fury 2 was cool for what it was at the time but it's hard to go back to it now.
 
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joe8

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Happy anniversary to a game most haven't played since 1993 when Special was released.

The World Warrior was released in March 1991, more than a year and a half before, obviously FF2 was inspired heavily by it.

At the time of its release, for those who were there at the time, how was the game favored to SFII? What did you think of it?
I never played it in the arcades at the time.
I have owned the MVS version, but I never played it much either, as I also had FFS on MVS.
FF2 had very similar graphics to FFS. And FFS had more fighters to choose from, including Krauser, Geese and Ryo.
I've never been a huge fan of the FF series (never liked the plane switching thing), apart from Mark of the Wolves. But I liked the early 90s arcade ambience that the first Fatal Fury had.

Back then, I was into SF2, because you could play it at home on a SNES, and then take those moves to the arcade. You would be confident that your game would last a long time on one dollar (which was one quarter in the US). You couldn't really do that with Neo Geo (but most of the skills you learnt from SF2 on SNES were useful for any 2D arcade fighter). There were SNES ports of the most popular games, like FF, AOF and Samurai Shodown. But it was only the earlier games in those series, and the gameplay felt different.
 
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GutsDozer

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The promo art is so good.
 
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