Real Bout Fatal Fury 2

"A solid, if cliched, SNK fighter..."

Let's take a trip back to 1993...Street Fighter 2 was still in it's infancy. And creating an unprecedented amount of buzz in arcades. So much buzz that rip-offs and copy-cats were inevitable. Enter SNK. Enter SNK with Fatal Fury. Heavily "inspired" by SF2, SNK created it's first, true two player fighter. And at the time, Fatal Fury was pathetic in every aspect when compared to SF2. Who knew that six years later SNK's Fatal Fury series would end up surpassing the SF series in both quality and freshness. RBFF2 is the latest in the series, and takes everything that worked in past Fatal Fury's and adds *just* enough to justify itself. So what makes FF NOT SF2? Good question. And there's not much difference when you get down to it. RBFF2 is exactly like SF2, it just has more gimmicks. The first being "line changes". The "lines" are actually just two different planes you can fight on. The fore-ground, and the background. This allows you to completely dodge projectiles and gives more strategy to the players. The second difference is FF's "Desperation Moves". DM's are just big-time special moves that can only be done when your near death. They take off insane amounts of energy, and have equally insane joystick motions. You can also pull these off when you max-out a small meter at the bottom of the screen. Which builds with every offensive move you perform. Other than that your looking at SF2. Same engine, same best-of-three rounds wins.

GRAPHICS: Superb 2-D goodness. The only problems come from the fact that RBFF2 is the result of *many* sequels. And the older the character, the less animation they have. Too bad. The newest fighters move beautifully compared to the rest. If they just add more frames to every fighter this could have been perfection. ****

SOUND: SNK puts *a lot* of time into their soundtracks. And it shows. The character select screen has the *best* theme I've heard in a while. ****

CONTROL: Perfect. It's SF2. Everyone's been there and done it twice. The only problem is with the Desperation Moves. The joystick motions for those things are IMPOSSIBLE. Especially when your in the heat of battle. And when you consider all the prequels that lead to RBFF2...this should have been fixed. ***1/2

REPLAY: Very high. The characters are diverse and the action can be intense. Unlike SF2 sequels, the new characters are in just as polished and interesting as the old class. ***

Real Bout is definately a must play. It's the seventh FF game, and amazingly, SNK has yet to take a step backwards. RBFF2 proves that there's still life left in the 2-D fighting world.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/01/99