I am a big fan of the series, I enjoy the humor and quirkiness. I do agree with you it’s not on par with RBS and Garou ( I would put them a notch above this too), but it is fun and different. I am in no way an expert though and
@Stefan knows more about the storylines than I do, and fills me in sometime, but he has encyclopedic knowledge about everything.
The second closest Round 1 to me near Camden, NJ has Power Instinct 5 (and Salamander 2), I wish the nearest Exton, PA had it as well, and I would bother to go to Round 1 more. I did get to spend some time with it one time with Jonny Maximum
@Jon and got to the final boss. We were over the bridge and were going to check out another arcade in the same mall since we were there and that arcade was closed and looked like it sucked, so it was a nice surprise.
I have pretty much every port In the series (and Purikura too) I can think of, I got the megadrive version of 1 around February this year, I don’t see that around too much. I do think the SNES version is superior but this version does have Genny graphics and sound which differentiates it, not to mention other modes.
I wish 2 came out on the Saturn with the Meg cart instead of the suspect PS1 port, it would have been nice for it to be more arcade perfect than what we got. I still play 2 on my PS3 though. It would be nice to have all the backgrounds and no loading when the characters changed.
Personally
2>MM PS2> MM> 5 (only because I haven’t played it too much> 1 > GonF. GonF is “darker” to me so I could see the appeal, it’s just not as much for me.
Here is a video that goes more in depth on the regional differences between the US and Japanese version, I don’t know why they even bothered making the changes