Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1992: Part 2

Continuing on from part 1, there's a lot more fighting games to close off the year and that's a train that isn't going to stop rolling for a long time.

Art of Fighting(SNK): I love this game.  Like Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting has a bigger focus on the single player adventure than the competitive aspect, being more of a follow-up to the first Fatal Fury than trying to be another Street Fighter 2.

You play as Robert Garcia or Ryo Sakazaki as you travel around South Town trying to find out who kidnapped Ryo’s sister Yuri, beating down anyone you have to for some answers.  There’s dialogue exchanges before each fight and plot progression afterwards, making it the most story-heavy game from either company yet.  It’s not just fighting a series of opponents.  It’s an adventure, with minigames after every two fights to break it up.

What makes Art of Fighting different from the fighting games seen thus far is that it’s heavier in its feel and graphics.  This game is all about showing off huge sprites to their max potential and that means being up close and personal with them.  There isn’t as much mobility with this one and practically no combos.  Every hit hits hard, making every successful blow feel like a big victory before you’ve even won.  This is especially true of special attacks, which is where a core mechanic lies.

Both fighters have a spirit gauge that’s used up with each special attack you use.  Try to use one when it’s empty and it does practically nothing.  You can raise your own by holding down the punch button and drain your opponent’s by taunting them.  Taunting is essentially a means of disarming your opponent and there’s strategy in knowing when and if you should taunt or charge your spirit meter mid-combat.  It’s a kind of mind game playing that to this day I’ve never seen in any other fighting game.  I’ve maybe seen these aspects individually, like meter charging in Dragon Ball FighterZ and taunting for draining meter in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle, but never in the same game.

Art of Fighting introduced a lot of my favorite things in fighting games.  For the genre it introduced taunting and super attacks.  For me personally it introduced one of my favorite fighting game characters, Ryo, alongside my one of my favorite fighting styles, Kyokugenryu, and one of my favorite super moves, the Haoh Shoukouken.  For that I am eternally grateful.  Gold star.

Warriors of Fate(CAP): A sequel to Dynasty Wars, except instead of riding on horseback the whole time, the horseback gameplay is only a seldom seen power-up.  The rest of the time it’s Final Fight except worse.

The core of what made Final Fight’s gameplay is still here.  Enemies still take your blows in a satisfying manner, there’s depth in knowing when to strike who and throwing enemies into each other is still as fun as it was before, but the game designed around it falls flat.

I suspect Warriors of Fate was made to show off how many enemies can be onscreen on Capcom’s CPS, perhaps to one-up SNK.  You fight armies of enemies in large quantities, but that ends up being exactly the problem.  The game constantly throws the same few enemy types at you and each one has to be hit several times with your usual attacks and like Final Fight you have to wait for them to get up before you can continue the assault, sometimes when they’re offscreen and sometimes against large groups of damage sponges.  This bogs down the game considerably and the gameplay never really changes or spices things up, which is pretty bad considering this is another game that takes roughly an hour to finish.  Even the bosses are all samey and forgettable.

Maybe if you have 2 other friends to play with to take down the large swarms faster, you’ve never played Final Fight so the concept is new to you and/or you’re really big on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms you might like Warriors of Fate, but that is a very narrow demographic.

Fatal Fury 2(SNK): Street Fighter 2 being a world-shattering smash hit combined with Takashi Nishiyama himself admitting it to be better than the original Fatal Fury meant the Fatal Fury sequel would be closer to what the aforementioned world-shattering smash hit was doing.  As such, Fatal Fury 2 has 8 playable characters and 4 unplayable bosses in a fighting tournament spanning the entire world.  It is not a fair comparison to call the first Fatal Fury a Street Fighter 2 rip-off, but for Fatal Fury 2 such accusations have more to them and because of the similarities, it’s almost mandatory to compare the two, especially given what the name of this series of posts is.

There's such variety in height and body type as opposed to everyone in SF2 being jacked.

Beyond the basic premise, Fatal Fury 2 absolutely demolishes Street Fighter 2 in its presentation.  The poorly translated and not proofread manual has a little comic setting up the story with a mysterious new villain related to Geese, who is built up in the game as it approaches an exciting finale, though character endings are disappointing, single stills with one line of dialogue.

The graphics and sound is the biggest driving force behind Fatal Fury 2’s Street Fighter 2 demolition.  The stages are all gorgeous, multi-layered, parallax-scrolling works of art with lots of animated details and sometimes even interactable objects for the returning 2-lane system.  This is coupled with another absolutely banging soundtrack that flexes the kind of music the Neogeo was capable of, using sounds imitating (or perhaps derived from) all manner of instruments while Street Fighter 2’s has a synthesized-sounding soundtrack with less layers that sound closer to beeps and boops.

Where Fatal Fury 2 doesn’t quite demolish Street Fighter 2 is in the gameplay.  There is now 2 dedicated attack buttons each for punches and kicks, but aside from that the game flow isn’t a major departure from how the first Fatal Fury played and the first Fatal Fury was not made with multiplayer in mind.  Fatal Fury 2 still has the fun of figuring out where, when and what to strike with to get good hits in, but it also feels a bit slower.  There’s a certain sluggish weight to everything.  A basic jab has a brief half second of cooldown instead of Street Fighter 2 letting you rapid-jab and many heavy attacks take a noticeable moment to work.  You don’t have quite the snap reaction tools you do in Street Fighter 2.  This is something you can get acclimated to by thinking of it as a game where you have to think ahead and be planning moves slightly in advance, but for some players it just means there isn’t a feeling of one-to-one control, something integral to a fighting game.  Even I have to admit there’s more of a flow to how Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition played even among its jank.

Fatal Fury 2 isn’t a Street Fighter 2 killer, but it’s a Street Fighter 2 serious wounder and shows SNK catching up by outclassing it its every aspect outside the gameplay.  The slower pace of the combat being only passable is the only thing holding it back, but even when I got frustrated, the exciting world tour adventure and memorable characters full of personality kept me playing and made for a very memorable experience no other game gave me, so Fatal Fury 2 is my game of 1992.

Street Fighter 2 Turbo: Hyper Fighting(CAP): Yet another version of Street Fighter 2 except this one makes improvements that are much less substantial than new characters or the ability to have mirror matches.

The “Turbo” part of the title references that they upped the game speed and that works more to its detriment than benefit if you ask me.  Speeding up the gameplay is pretty much all they did to the core gameplay and this game was not originally made for that game speed, making an already kind of janky game even jankier.  There’s a reason upping the game speed of a fighting game is nowadays an option you have alongside other modifiers for yucks, not for serious play.

The increased speed makes playing through the single player a more aggravating affair.  Before, you could observe what the computer was doing and strategize accordingly, but now everything goes fast and your opponent’s computer processing speed keeps up with it so it pulls off things with such speed and precision that it’s nigh impossible to tell just what happened to make you lose unless you slow down the footage or the game itself and that defeats the entire purpose of the increased game speed.

Content-wise there isn’t a lot, but Turbo does give several characters more special moves to use, most notably Chun-Li’s Kikouken and Edmond Honda’s Sumo Smash.  Extra tools in a character’s arsenal goes a long way for a fighting game, but not long enough to make this version of Street Fighter 2 very noteworthy.

Can you tell this is from the newest version?

Super Sidekicks(SNK): Another soccer game.  I’m beginning to think the Neogeo’s popularity in South America wasn’t just because of the whole tariff thing.  Unlike the lame, underwhelming Soccer Brawl, Super Sidekicks is the soccer equivalent of Football Frenzy and Baseball Stars 2.  It looks great, sounds great, is easy to play for the casual players and has the depth to keep you coming back even with only a two button control scheme.  Soccer is a much more straightforward game so you aren’t even at much of a disadvantage if you don’t know the rules of the sport this time.

There are a couple of odd quirks that take some getting used to, however.  When you don’t have the ball, the player you control is whoever is closest to the ball and in a game like soccer, the ball is darting all over the field, resulting in constant shifting of player control that can be disorienting.  Once you have the player you’re controlling, you have the option of sliding into the player with the ball to trip them or you straight-up body check them.  Ramming into the other player is satisfying and if you land it you almost certainly have the ball, but sometimes you get a foul for it and there doesn’t seem to be any way to do it in a manner that determines if it’s a foul or not.  Maybe it’s a random chance to make using it a risk.

Those are minor quibbles in the grand scheme of things.  Super Sidekicks is yet another solid addition to the Neogeo’s library of quality sports games that soccer fans will love playing with some friends.  The Neogeo must’ve been the place to be for arcade sports gaming.

The Winner

I’ve stated for previous years that quantity isn’t everything.  Even if SNK’s flood of game releases far outnumbered Capcom, Capcom could’ve still come out on top if their games outshined all of SNK’s.  That didn’t happen at all.  The best game Capcom came out with was Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition, which made significant strides from the original SF2.  After that, Capcom’s selection was unremarkable while SNK came out with treasures like Fatal Fury 2, Art of Fighting, Baseball Stars 2 and Ninja Commando.  It’s not even close.  SNK wins 1992.

Don’t worry Capcom.  Maybe next year you can win if you up your arcade game production and bring your A-game to make some of your own treasures to outshine SNK… Right?