Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1998

1998 was another big year for gaming.  Some of the greatest games of all time that are still revered to this day were coming out.  Resident Evil 2, Banjo-Kazooie, Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life and Spyro the Dragon and of course The Legend of fucking Zelda the fucking Ocarina of fucking Time.  It was a great time to be a gamer, particularly a console gamer.

Near the end of the year, Capcom and SNK would be introduced to one of their best friends: The Sega Dreamcast.  The Dreamcast was an incredible machine for the time, capable of 3D and 2D graphics neither the Playstation nor Nintendo 64 could pull off.  It’s best known for Soul Calibur, but the Dreamcast was practically a fighting game machine by all measures.  While the Playstation would struggle to run certain Capcom and SNK arcade games, the Dreamcast was able to handle enhanced ports of those games, including some packages with 2 games in one!  It was the only console that could run Street Fighter 3 at the time and some of Capcom’s 3D games like Power Stone would also get their Dreamcast port down the line.

3D backgrounds!

I sure hope that doesn’t mean home console gaming is going to supplant arcade gaming because there are some great arcade games this year, mostly from SNK.  Capcom seems to have slowed down their arcade game production, possibly because of the cost of making games for that beast the CPS3, and were putting more manpower into their console games, such as the aforementioned Resident Evil 2.  SNK meanwhile was still chugging along with the Neogeo while the Hyper Neogeo 64 dragged its feet.  Let’s find out who put their efforts on a winning horse.

Blazing Star(SNK)

Alex Louise Armstrong does not flex as much as that opening and the game itself follows suit.  Like with Pulstar, Blazing Star pushes the pre-rendered 3D-simulating graphics to the max with more enemies, bigger bosses and fancier animated backgrounds.  I swear SNK employed some kind of wizard to make Blazing Star look as good as it does on this 2D-based arcade system.  It’s a sight to behold and the real reason to play the game because the game design isn’t going to win any awards.

The gameplay is as simple as it comes.  You have one button for shooting, one situational button you won’t normally use and that’s it.  The gameplay spice is in the ships.  There are several different ships to choose from, each with its own unique regular weapon and charged weapon, which can increase in power with pickups.  Some ships have more concentrated fire, others have shots that spread out and one has a charge attack that only hits at close range, but does tremendous damage to enemies in front of it.

Blazing Star’s biggest problem is the same as Pulstar’s: it’s way too fucking hard.  It’s a bullet hell game.  Shots fly at you from all directions, bosses unleash clouds of the stuff and their speed and fire rate ramp up as the game goes on, all the while you’re unleashing your own hail of gunfire as the enemies explode and flash white with damage with hardly a moment to breathe.  It’s intense and fun for a while, but as the game goes on it becomes literally impossible to avoid getting hit more and more often.  Several situations flood the screen with things that will kill you on contact to a ridiculous degree, even for a bullet hell game.  Unlike Pulstar, Blazing Star lets you continue right where you left off, but with how bullshit the game becomes, you’re dying practically the moment you continue, potentially 4 or more times on the same section of one stage!  Beating this game in an arcade would’ve cost a fortune!

Maybe this is less a problem for bullet hell fans used to extreme difficulty, but there isn’t a lot beyond the visuals to make Blazing Star stand out in the genre.  The ship variety is nice, but other games at this time like the Gradius games also had ship variety and Blazing Star’s story is nonexistent until a badly translated wall of text at the end.  It’s fun to play for a little while, but it doesn’t hold my attention to the end.

Marvel vs. Capcom(CAP): Until I edit in the games before it, this is the first of the Marvel-based Capcom fighting games I’ve gotten to.  Capcom released X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes and X-Men vs. Street Fighter before now, starting off with Darkstalkers-like chain combo combat and eventually evolving into the trilogy of games that would come to define the fast-paced tag team fighter.

When I say fast I mean FAST.  Even if you aren’t playing on the turbo speed, Marvel vs. Capcom matches can end extremely quickly.  Chain combos combined with air launching for even longer combos can already bring the hurt, but an unblocked super attack can take off 60% of a health bar.  When you strike, you need to strike hard and when you defend, you have to make sure you have an opening.  It’s bombastic and downright explosive.  It’s a game with both players going full force using screen-filling attacks and it’s awesome.

The only thing holding Marvel vs. Capcom back is the lack of content.  There are only 15 fighters, a few fighters less than Street Fighter Alpha 2 and even one fighter less than X-Men vs. Street Fighter.  If you ask me, if you’re making a team game, you need a bigger character count.  In this game you fight 7 teams before facing the super powerful Marvel villain Onslaught.  This means it only had barely enough characters for a standard arcade mode and you run out of characters to play with faster than other games around this time.

 
This is alleviated in part by the big collection of support characters you’re randomly given for each match.  There’s all kinds of Marvel and Capcom characters brought in for backup.  Devilotte from Cyberbots (from which Jin also hails), one of the player characters from Forgotten Worlds, Jubilee, Thor and U.S. Agent, to name a few.  Stages are also a good handful of places from across both companies with some cameos to go with them.  One is a rock concert being held by Raptor from Darkstalkers, another is Wily’s Fortress from Megaman with the doc himself yelling at the fighters in the background and one is the rooftop of the Daily Bugle with 2 buildings connected by Spider Man’s webbing.  Capcom had fun with this one.

Jubilee is one of my favorite X-Men.

Regardless of the character count, the core gameplay is a ton of fun and it has a beautiful character art-filled presentation for what it has so it’s well-worth playing.

Metal Slug 2(SNK): The original Metal Slug was a major win for SNK, but Metal Slug 2 is where the franchise really got put on the map.  Eri and Fio join Marco and Tarma as playable characters, there are different forms characters can take on that change their weapons and most importantly there are a few more vehicles to man beyond the Metal Slug.  Bosses are bigger, stages are more varied and the whole game looks even more gorgeous.  It all culminates in one of my favorite final stages in arcade history with one of my favorite musical pieces ever.

Metal Slug 2 has all the explosive, fast-paced action the first one did, but more.

Well, maybe not the fast-paced part because holy shit that slowdown.

The first game had its bouts of slowdown, but it was never too bad and happened sparingly.  Metal Slug 2 is constantly suffering from slowdown for practically the entire game.  It’s understandable when there are several things onscreen at once, but this game struggles to keep up with scenarios the first game ran with no issue.  Having just a few enemies onscreen slows the game down some times and then other times there are the same number of enemies and the game runs just fine.  I like a little slowdown so it’s easier to keep up with everything onscreen, but this isn’t a little slowdown.  It’s a lot.

I smacked my head in disbelief with how bad the slowdown got.  The game kept looking like it was going to crash.  What happened here?  It’s another great Metal Slug game at its core and would otherwise potentially be my favorite shoot-em-up yet, but the poor optimization hurts it.

Real Bout Fatal Fury 2: The Newcomers(SNK): The name says it all: The Newcomers.  That’s all you need to know because that’s pretty much all you get.  With the exception of the new characters, who are nice additions, and a few stages that only have one lane, it’s the exact same game mechanically.  The same combat, same music, a few of the same stages and the same move sets.  It’s an updated version and yet it feels wrong to call it updated because so many of my favorite parts of the previous game are gone.

Not the visuals though.

There are no victory screens.  When you beat an opponent, you move on to the next one with nothing in between but a versus screen.  The cool announcer dialogue, the fancy transitions to stages, the full body portraits from the victory screens and all outside-battle dialogue is no longer there.  The endings can hardly even be called endings, consisting of a congratulations screen and a few brief still images of the character.  Sure the core game is objectively better, but without that extra personality to it I definitely prefer Real Bout Fatal Fury Special over this.
 
Street Fighter Alpha 3(CAP): It is curious to me that Capcom would go backwards both in the hardware and story for this one.  I thought the cliffhanger of Bison getting away in Alpha 2 to lead into Street Fighter 2 was good enough and now that Capcom had their fancy CPS3 the sky was the limit, but I guess they wanted to tread some familiar ground after the difficulty of making SF3 and they gave M. Bison one last stand before the story moved on to SF2.  Now he’s got a new super weapon called the Psycho Drive that uses his psycho power for targeted mass destruction and various characters need to stop his evil plan.
 
The story is more prominent in Alpha 3 than in any Street Fighter game before it.  There’s an introduction to your character, a rival fight with dialogue mid-way through and then even more dialogue exchanges toward the end until you defeat Bison’s super form and get an ending usually depicting Bison’s body getting destroyed, explaining why he looks different in Street Fighter 2.  The attention to story and character is greatly appreciated and one of the best parts of the game.

A boss where the dramatic battle mode is against you is a pretty neat addition.

In the gameplay, the 3 different “isms” give players more choices on how they want to handle super meter, guard crushing is now possible so you can deal with the aggravating over-defensive players and there’s a surprising amount of air juggling.  Moreso than in any Street Fighter game you can hit the other player on the way down after they go sailing from a vicious hit in mid-air, which opens up the combat possibilities even more.  With all this and a slew of new characters for an impressive selection, Street Fighter Alpha 3 is bigger and better than ever and yet somehow I don’t enjoy it as much as I do Alpha 2.

 
The biggest reason for this is the music.  I’ll give them credit for trying something new, but I hate the hard drums and techno grunge style of music Alpha 3 goes for, especially compared to the practically perfect music from the previous Alpha games.  The only place in the game it works is the final battle against M. Bison because the dark rainy stage combined with Bison’s ruthless personality fits well with a grunge-sounding track.  Maybe you could say it works with Birdie’s character as well.  It does not work with Sakura, Ken or Rainbow Mika.
 
On the subject of Bison, Alpha 3 has a major slap in the face with his battle.  If you lose, you get a bad ending and can’t continue.  This is a non-issue in releases today with save states, rewind or a menu option that lets you skip right to it, but imagine how that must’ve been for players before such ports.  Sure, the final boss is actually pretty easy once you get his AI patterns down and there is a code in the arcade version to skip to the final battle, but I doubt many people were privy to that in the primitive years of the internet so it’s a huge dick move.

Tip #1: wait for him to use his super!

Stages are more boring than in Alpha 2 as well.  They’re barely animated and lack detail you’d come to expect from Street Fighter.  No standout visuals like the cyclists or Capcom cameos this time.  Alpha 3 is the most content-rich Street Fighter game so far and I recommend it because of how substantive that content is, but among the Alpha games I still put 2 above it.

 
The King of Fighters 98(SNK)

KOF 98 is probably the most well-known game in the franchise and the most popular.   What is lacks in plot it makes up for in everything else.  All but a handful of characters from every KOF game up until this point are included, which makes for what might actually be the biggest selection of fighters in any fighting game at the time of its release.

All the new stages are the best yet and have an impressive sense of depth.  Having learned from KOF 97, every team has music consisting of new renditions of their themes from previous games and there’s even ways to trigger more than one team’s theme, like a new rendition of the Women’s Team’s KOF 94 theme.

Not unlike Real Bout Fatal Fury Special, there’s no story, but even then there are many special character introductions and the game gives players a little something at the end of the single player mode.  There’s no dialogue, but there’s a cutscene introducing the final boss and an arcade ending calling back to the ending of the original shit-ass KOF game, followed by a montage of well-rendered character artwork over the credits.  Depending on what team you used, you get a different bit of team artwork at the very end and there are several to get.  Not just for the standard teams, but for teams of characters with some kind of connection, like team compositions from previous games or all three members wearing a certain accessory.  They aren’t as good a reward as a team-specific ending, but they do add some replay value and there are a lot of them.

The single player experience is good as a break after the storyline 97 concluded, but it’s not what you’re there for.  It’s designed to allow a ton of KOF characters to fight each other, story be damned, and it succeeds in that mission with flying colors, making for the best KOF game up to this point to play with others.

 
Shock Troopers: Second Squad(SNK): Second Squad goes in a bit of a different direction from the first Shock Troopers.  It’s clear SNK was still wanting to show off more pseudo-3D sprite work and Second Squad puts more stock in that in its almost toy-like art direction, bigger emphasis on sci-fi weapons and big bullet hell bosses.  It animates beautifully and it pulls off a lot of those impressive faux-3D visuals, but due to the stylization, it isn’t quite as weighty or gritty as the first one.

None of that is inherently bad.  Shock Troopers: Second Squad does everything the first one did right: tight controls, a serviceable story, different routes to new levels and lots of things exploding prettily by your hail of gunfire.  There are only 4 different characters this time and no team mode, but the tradeoff is rideable vehicles.  They could have just re-used the assets of the first one, but they tried something different instead while not losing why the first one was so great.  I put Second Squad on the same level of quality as the original.
 
The Last Blade 2(SNK): The Last Blade 2 feels like the conclusion of a duology.  The story continues where the first one left off, where Shinnosuke was defeated, but his giant hell portal still needs to be sealed by a sealing maiden.  As such it makes sense that the characters and mechanics are largely untouched.  The only differences are a few new characters, notably Hibiki, new stages, rival battle dialogue exchanges like in the Street Fighter Alpha games and minor gameplay tweaks like air recovery.  The two modes of play, lengthy cutscenes, smooth animation and excellent music compositions haven’t lost their touch.  The first game was great and this continuation matches its quality.  They are best played together.
 
Jojo’s Venture(CAP): Before the anime took off and Viz started translating the manga in its entirety, the only part of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure we got in English was part 3: Stardust Crusaders.  It was in the cultural zeitgeist in English for quite some time in addition to already being the most iconic and popular part in Japan.  Its recognition in English was thanks to a set of 2 OVAs (each adapting one half of the story), Viz translating the manga in increasingly hard to find volumes and this fighting game from Capcom.
 
Jojo’s Venture, as this first version is known in English, is a bit different from the other Capcom fighters up to this point.  There are no punch and kick buttons.  Instead there is a weak, medium and strong attack button in addition to a special button.  The special button is essentially the stand button and acts as a stance switch by bringing out your character’s stand.  Having a stand out is a stance switch that changes your attacks, but as the stand takes damage, a meter drains and once it goes out, your stand is disabled for a time, meaning you probably shouldn’t spend the whole fight in stand mode.  Super attacks are largely simplified, requiring a standard special attack motion with 2 buttons.  I don’t know if this is the first game to do it like that, but it’s the first one I’m aware of.

The combat is solid and standard Capcom fighting game fare outside of the control scheme, but what I really love about this game is how well it uses the license.  My problem with Street Fighter 3 was how little there was for visual flare outside of a solid combat foundation and the lack of storytelling.  Jojo’s Venture is like an apology.
 
The single player content is great.  It isn’t hard to translate Stardust Crusaders into a fighting game story because the manga is about a group of manly badasses traveling around the world fighting people with crazy powers until they reach a final boss.  That is pretty much what Jojo’s Venture does by recreating scenes from the manga using both the in-game sprites and artwork lifted from the manga with plentiful dialogue to explain what is going on, putting the power of Capcom’s CPS3 to good use.  Sometimes the story is adjusted to fit the chosen character as needed and the villains have stories that go in a completely different direction, but it does a great job of presenting the overall spirit and plot of the manga in addition to giving players a fun world-spanning adventure.  It’s awesome.

In the gameplay there’s even more detail and references for fans to love.  Characters all have their moves from the manga (Polnareff even has a reference to part 4), characters have 2 different taunts also from the manga and the attack calling and “ora ora ora” is a lot of fun, but it gets even more fun when two certain attacks clash and it becomes a button mashing contest to come out on top.

If you get finished off with a super attack, a portrait from the manga of your character goes flying and to this day that might be my favorite super attack finish effect in any fighting game.

The one thing that holds it back is the same as Marvel vs. Capcom: the character count.  There are only 12 playable characters, one half the heroes and the other half the villains.  There are two hidden characters, but onlyy one is ever used in the stories and with the huge variety of different villains from the manga and the higher character count of other fighting games at this time, it’s a little disappointing how this game has less characters than Super Street Fighter 2.

Jojo’s Venture gets a lot of mileage out of the characters it does have, since many of them fight or get in scuffles with each other over the course of the manga, and the unplayable bosses N’Doul, Death 13 and Vanilla Ice (called Iced in this game) add a few extra opponents to the story.  It’s just that when the story centers around fighting a wide variety of stand-using adversaries I expect a wide variety of stand-using adversaries.  Not just 9.

They could’ve done more, but Jojo’s Venture is still my favorite Capcom game of this year.

The Winner

Since SNK literally had double the number of games Capcom came out with this year, and because part of the reason is because I don’t have access to more of Capcom’s games, it wouldn’t be fair to judge who wins 1998 by which company made the most good games.  Instead I’ll determine the winner by comparing Capcom’s 3 games to the 3 best SNK games: The King of Fighters 98, The Last Blade 2 and Shock Troopers: Second Squad (sorry Metal Slug 2, but you need an energy drink).
 
Powerful contenders all.  Capcom’s Street Fighter Alpha 3 does well in everything but music, Marvel vs. Capcom has a solid core combat, but not much else and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure has the best-told story of the year, only hindered by a limited character selection.
 
SNK’s Shock Troopers: Second Squad does everything the first one did with a few trade-offs, KOF 98 has the biggest character selection yet, but no actual story and The Last Blade 2 is the perfect follow-up to the first one, but doesn’t do a lot to innovate from it.
 
It was a tough decision to make the call for this year, but in the end I’m going to have to go with Capcom.  It’s a crazy turn of events when Capcom is the one going deeper on the stories of their games.  Capcom delivered on the single player content as well as the core gameplay content this year and while SNK was no slouch in that either, Street Fighter Alpha 3 had a more substantive story than Shock Troopers: Second Squad and about as much as The Last Blade 2, while Jojo’s Venture had the best single player mode yet.  KOF 98 was the most fun game to play and had the most gameplay content, but Capcom’s games had the whole package.
 
I know there’s going to be a lot of debate on this call and I welcome dissenting opinions.  Next year is 1999, the year of two fighting games, one from each company, considered two of the greatest ever made.  Who will earn victory for their company?