This Week In Retro: Fatal Fury 2 (Patreon)

December 10, 1992: Again, legendary men return

by Diamond Feit

When Fatal Fury debuted on the NEO•GEO in November of 1991, it represented the first "fighting game" as we know the genre today on the system. Yet even though it very much arrived in a post-Street Fighter II world, Fatal Fury came from the creator of the original Street Fighter and played much closer to that 1987 game than its hugely-popular sequel.

The world moves pretty fast though, so when Fatal Fury found an audience, SNK would have a sequel ready just one year later. And this time, Fatal Fury 2 would serve as the Street Fighter II of that series, massively expanding upon the original game's concept and adding a new cast of characters from around the globe.

In case you forgot, or merely never played it, the first Fatal Fury took place entirely in the fictional American city of South Town. Brothers Terry and Andy Bogard, along with their friend Joe Higashi, serve as the three available characters for the players to choose from as they fight their way from the streets to the penthouse of Geese Tower in order to topple (quite literally) crime boss Geese Howard.

Fatal Fury 2 says nuts to all that and abandons South Town altogether, sending players around the world to fight up to 12 characters, four of whom only appear after defeating the main cast. Terry, Andy, and Joe all return from the first game, though Andy and Joe have relocated to Italy and Thailand, respectively. The massive grappler Raiden makes a comeback, ditching his mask and now calling himself Big Bear out of Australia. New fighters include a Korean taekwondo master, an elderly Japanese judoka, and a portly Chinese businessman.

No new face in Fatal Fury 2 would have as great an impact as Mai Shiranui, a high-flying ninja and the only woman in the game. Using her family's own unique style of martial arts, Mai can throw fans at her opponents, bound off of flagpoles to dive bomb her foes, and even light herself on fire as she dashes across the screen. Beyond her combat prowess, however, Mai also stood out for her busty figure and her insistence on donning only traditional clothing—in other words, she's not wearing a bra. When she strikes a pose after winning a match, her ample bosom bounces as she celebrates. While SNK would later introduce a number of female fighters to the Fatal Fury series, Mai's popularity would only grow as she became a sex symbol for the company, just as Chun-Li had done for Capcom. When the rival rosters finally faced off in Capcom vs SNK at the turn of the millennium, the two women were frequently drawn together in highly suggestive promotional artwork.

Fatal Fury 2 sticks so closely to the Street Fighter II business model it approaches parody, particularly when it comes to the quartet of surprise bosses. Once players knock out the eight default characters in either game, their next task is to face a returning boss from the first game, an American boxer, and a tall, thin Spaniard—just not in the same order. Both games conclude with a final battle against a brand-new character with delusions of grandeur, though in the case of Fatal Fury 2, Wolfgang Krauser fancies himself more as a monarch than a dictator.

However, Fatal Fury 2 retains its core two-plane gameplay from the first chapter, offering twice the real estate to explore on each stage as characters may now leap back and forth freely from layer to layer. Every character also has a strong attack which automatically knocks their opponent to the other plane, an easy way to put some distance between yourself and your counterpart. Certain stages even include obstacles in-between planes, allowing players to hide in the background out of view. My favorite is the Korean stage, though, as periodic passing cyclists travel through the middle of the fight and can be knocked down with a well-timed layer change.

Fatal Fury 2 also innovates with the debut of a new feature, the super move. Whenever a fighter is low on health, their life bar and portrait starts flashing red. As a kid playing in the arcades, I assumed this was just a warning to me that one character might be knocked out soon. Instead, it's an indicator that a secret technique has been unlocked and may now be executed at any time. Unlike the super moves seen earlier in Art of Fighting and now found in nearly all fighting games, Fatal Fury 2's supers do not consume any special meter and can be used over and over again without penalty. The only catch is that most of them require very elaborate commands, making them exceptionally difficult to use, but a practiced Fatal Fury 2 player becomes much more dangerous should their life bar near zero.

After spending more than a year immersed in Street Fighter II, Fatal Fury 1, and many other fighting games competing for my time, I welcomed the arrival of Fatal Fury 2 with open arms. While I lamented the loss of some of its signature features from the original game, such as two-on-one fights and its insistence on telling a story, by and large Fatal Fury 2 struck me as a much-improved vision of what Fatal Fury could be.

How did it compare to Street Fighter II, a game that had practically taken over the world by December 1992? I won't pretend that SNK outdid Capcom's blockbuster, but Fatal Fury 2 certainly has all the little flourishes that made me a NEO•GEO fan. Every character has their own voice and personality, and every stage is bursting with mystique. At that time in my life I had barely traveled outside of the United States, yet here was a game giving me glimpses of glitzy dining boats in Hong Kong, raging waterfalls in Japan, and an intricate clockwork tower in London.

Nothing encapsulates the NEO•GEO-difference better than the final stage of Fatal Fury 2. Having circumnavigated the planet and bested all comers, the player finds themselves on a flight to Germany to face a man decked out in a full set of golden armor with a long red cape. The match opens with a shot of a cathedral roof as Mozart's "Requiem in D Minor" fills the air; the camera pans down to the two fighters standing in front of a full orchestra playing with gusto. Übermensch Wolfgang Krauser shrugs off his armor and announces in a booming voice, "I'll chisel your gravestone, sleep well!"

While Fatal Fury 2 borrows a lot of concepts from Street Fighter II, that's not the primary reason I compare the two games. Just as Street Fighter II rewrote the Street Fighter formula and became the template for all future entries in the series, so did Fatal Fury 2 replace Fatal Fury as the mold from which SNK would forge new fighting games. Not only would Fatal Fury 3 and the Real Bout series look and feel closer to Fatal Fury 2 than the original game, but when SNK launched The King of Fighters in 1994, that crossover franchise would likewise have much more in common with Fatal Fury 2 than any other SNK game. Among other things, the first few KOF games allowed players infinite access to super moves whenever their health bar ran low and blinked red.

In this sense, Fatal Fury 2 stands as SNK's first "real" fighting game. Even if it wasn't the first game of the genre to appear on the NEO•GEO, it had the longest legacy and the largest influence on SNK's handling of the genre in the years that followed. Indeed, if we primarily think of fighting games when we remember the NEO•GEO platform, the genesis of that reputation absolutely lies here with Fatal Fury 2 more than Art of Fighting, World Heroes, or any other prior release.

Ironically, given its mammoth legacy as SNK games go, Fatal Fury 2 had a relatively short shelf life. Despite being ported to nearly every competing console, making it one of the more widely available games in the series, SNK would essentially replace it less than a year later with Fatal Fury Special. Just like Street Fighter II: Champion Edition iterated upon the vanilla release, Fatal Fury Special adds new fighters, unlocks the computer-only bosses for all to use, and today stands as the definitive version of what Fatal Fury 2 hoped to achieve. Which means whenever I'm in the mood to revisit this monumental game that shaped the genre for years to come, I end up playing Fatal Fury Special instead because it's just a better time.

This means that the bulk of my Fatal Fury 2 memories and fondness were hyper-condensed into a matter of months before the explosion of Mortal Kombat and the arrival of Fatal Fury Special drew my attention elsewhere. And while I played those games in a variety of locations over the years, nearly all of my Fatal Fury 2 experiences came in a small card shop near my high school, a woefully undersized space that somehow always housed two or three full-size arcade cabinets, one of which was usually a NEO•GEO to maximize game selection. It included a headphone jack on the front that allowed me (and only me, probably) to better appreciate the rich soundscape. Turns out that Mozart guy really slaps.

So if I'm being completely honest, while I maintain Fatal Fury 2 is a title with historical significance, when I think about that game, what I'm really doing is remembering that tiny oasis where I spent an uncountable amount of time and money hiding from reality. Thanks to Fatal Fury 2, 25 cents not only bought me an escape, it treated me to a whirlwind world tour of places I could only dream of, introduced me to larger than life people, and drowned out all my other problems with stereo sound.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.