Virtua Fighter 2

"Why this is called VF2 is beyond me"

This game was released near the end of 1996 and also near the end of the Genesis era. Its nice that sega kept releasing potential toptitles but this game is not what I hoped it to be (as also was with Sonic 3d). I hoped it to be a SVP cartridge game as it could come close to the 32x which was at least playable and 3d. unfortunately it looks like a photo play game with a few frames of animations ALOT of moves cut out and why is this VF2 for christs sake?? SHUN and LION are NOT in this game and they where the major difference between VF1 and VF2... no not the moves since a lot of VF2 moves were ALSO taken out.

Lets see how this game scores.

Graphics Well after booting the game up the titlescreen looks faithfully and ok.. then select arcade mode and oh my, the characters faces are REALLY close to the saturn version and even smile when you select them.. from here it gets bad. The game is 2d with a rotating/weird moving background the characters look like they where cut and pasted from a videogame magazine issue (even worse than MK1). No zooming effects no nothing.. bad graphics... SF2 DID look better 3/10

Music Music? what music? ow that weird squeaky sounds i kept on hearing? Sure the md is no saturn when it comes to music but I swear I heard better md music (SoR, shinobi and even VR) Its muffled to da bone and if you listen well you can hear they tried to reproduce the familiar arcade/saturn background tunes.. but my nokia 3310 sounds better. 2/10

Gameplay Gameplay here is poor, its not faithful and really choppy thanks to the amount of animations the characters sport. sometimes Akira's elbow works, sometimes not. Even MK1 and Eternal Champions controlled better. 2/10

Conclusion This game is not good and its really a shame as VF is a nice series and the MD is a great console.. but there are alot of better MD fighting games out there.. get SF2 championship or MK2 if you want to play great MD fighters. If you wanted a next-gen Virtua title you were better off with Virtua racing which featured true 3d graphics and was a lot of closer to the arcade than VF2 is.

Overall 3/10 I still give this three points since it was probably the last released genesis game and no one expected it to be released at all anymore. Also playing this game makes you appreciate the fact you bought a saturn and VF2 even more... borrow or rent it for 1 day and look for yourself but do not buy it.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 04/05/03, Updated 04/05/03