This Week In Retro: Art of Fighting 2 (Patreon)

February 3, 1994: Whither South Town?

by Diamond Feit

Hordes of developers tried their hand at making fighting games in the early 1990s but no one did it quite like SNK. Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto, two former Capcom employees who helped create the original Street Fighter in 1987, ended up helming their own projects for SNK’s NEO•GEO platform. Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting would arrive in arcades well after Street Fighter II but both games are best viewed as responses to Street Fighter I.

When the time came to make sequels, however, the market conditions had spoken: Street Fighter II set players’ expectations for what a “fighting game” should be. Regardless of Nishiyama or Matsumoto’s original vision for their creations, any follow-ups would necessarily need to better resemble Capcom’s blockbuster hit.

Hence Fatal Fury went from a game about three men ridding their city of a crime lord to an international adventure starring seven men and one woman—coincidentally the exact number of characters in Street Fighter II. A 1993 iteration, Fatal Fury Special, added the previously unplayable boss characters to the default roster, just like Street Fighter II Champion Edition did the previous year.

However, when Art of Fighting 2 debuted 30 years ago this week, it took a slightly different approach. Increasing the scope of the first game was a must; two player characters could no longer cut the mustard in 1994. Yet rather than thinking globally, Art of Fighting 2 acts locally, building upon its initial cast and remaining focused on South Town, USA.

For those unfamiliar, Art of Fighting emphasized storytelling more than any of its contemporaries. Its single-player experience, officially called Story Mode, only offered a choice of two protagonists, Ryo Sakazaki and Robert Garcia. The two men fought with identical moves and both had the same objective: Rescue Ryo’s sister Yuri from South Town gangsters.

Art of Fighting climaxes with a showdown against a mystery man wearing a Tengu mask; the spitting image of Ryo, he has no given name on-screen, although the announcer calls him Mr. Karate. Should the player defeat this final foe, the game ends on a cliffhanger as Yuri runs in to prevent Ryo or Robert from killing her captor. Yuri says “That man is…that man is our…” before the credits cut her off, leaving players to wonder about his true identity.

The attract mode in Art of Fighting 2 opens by recreating that moment, revealing that Mr. Karate is actually Takuma Sakazaki, father of Ryo and Yuri. He didn’t want to kidnap his own daughter or fight his only son but the leaders of the South Town underworld left him no choice. Now free from their influence, Takuma and Yuri both join the cast, ready to punish evil and take back the streets.

The bulk of Art of Fighting 2’s lineup returns from the first game except this time players now have their pick of any character on the roster. This freedom comes at the cost of dumbing down the game's narrative, turning what had been a specific scripted sequence of events into a jumbled tale of one martial artist taking on all comers. Mr. Big, the penultimate boss of the first game, assumes the role of last boss since Takuma now fights for good.

The staff at SNK redrew and redesigned every character from the first game for a more balanced multiplayer experience in Art of Fighting 2 while introducing two brand-new faces to the world of South Town, modern ninja Eiji Kusaragi and Mongolian wrestler Temjin. Development sketches reveal past concepts for these two included a Mexican luchador and a bearded cowboy. Ryuhaku Todoh, the very first opponent in the original Art of Fighting who infamously only attacks with one move, did not make the cut for the sequel. His daughter Kasumi would later turn up in several SNK games though, keeping the family name in the spotlight.

Art of Fighting 2 does have one significant surprise up its sleeves, a secret trial waiting beyond Mr. Big. Should any player defeat all challengers without losing a single round, men in suits will escort them to a high-rise to meet the mastermind behind all of the shadowy activities in South Town, a young man named Geese Howard. This establishes Art of Fighting as a prequel to Fatal Fury, since that game ends with an older Geese falling to his death from his penthouse.

The appearance of Geese Howard in Art of Fighting 2, paired with the "dream match" against Ryo Sakazaki in Fatal Fury Special, confirms what fans had merely speculated for the last three years: The South Town name is not generic and all of these events are transpiring in the same city. The fact that this version of Geese has yet to eliminate his rival Jeff Bogard decrees that Art of Fighting predates the first Fatal Fury by at least a decade, another revelation since nothing in the game itself suggests Yuri's kidnapping occurred in the 1970s.

This shocking reveal wouldn't last, however, for SNK would essentially reset both timelines just months later with the launch of the company's brand-new crossover franchise. Art of Fighting's Ryo, Robert, Takuma, and Yuri—plus the Muay Thai expert King—would all appear in The King of Fighters '94 that summer, facing off against Terry, Andy, and Joe from Fatal Fury without aging in the slightest. Future King of Fighters sequels would add more Art of Fighting stars such as Eiji, Mr. Big, and Kasumi Todoh.

The arrival of KOF 94 would unfortunately bump Art of Fighting 2 into a lesser bracket of fighting titles, though the game did itself no favors by failing to stand apart from its predecessor. Even though Art of Fighting 2 features all-new graphics, music, and a couple incomers, the vast majority of the roster is identical to the original game. Making matters worse, Ryo, Robert, Takuma, and Yuri all fight using mostly the same moves. They have more variety than Ryo and Robert did in Art of Fighting 1, but like Ryu and Ken in this era of Street Fighter, they're more similar than dissimilar.

Compounding this identity problem is the lack of variety amongst the rest of the roster. The first Art of Fighting offered players a chance to scrap their way across town against an assortment of low-lives, characters who fail to stand out now that they've been elevated to co-star status. A fighting game lives or dies on its ability to deliver a colorful cast that tantalizes players into spending their money to explore their options and Jack the biker, Mickey the boxer, and John the soldier just don't make great first impressions. None of these three would ever return to the ring in another fighting game; in a 2016 interview with Famitsu, producer Yasuyuki Oda suggested including Jack and John in King of Fighters XIV but was ultimately rejected because even SNK staff members reacted to their names with confused looks.

Even to an obsessive fan such as myself, Art of Fighting 2 failed to hold my attention for long. Three years into the fighting game boom, I had an enormous number of options to choose from, both on home consoles and in arcades, diluting the appeal of this unremarkable sequel. On those occasions when I did try it, I found two issues that discouraged me from putting in a second coin. First, the aggressive CPU makes the single-player experience a real slog, expertly countering and evading attacks with timing that no human can match. I also always struggle to perform special and super moves in Art of Fighting 2, further adding to my frustration; I was well-versed in quarter-circle joystick motions by 1994—let alone now—and yet something about the inputs eludes me to this day.

Reflecting on Art of Fighting 2 30 years later, I wish things had turned out better for both this game and the series in general. In its all-too brief run, Art of Fighting established a number of unique features that never caught on with the genre at large. Every character sprite takes up a huge portion of the screen, yet the viewpoint shifts and scales throughout the match to ensure players can always follow the action. Strong blows can knock sunglasses or other accessories off, and even leave behind visible bruises or wounds on faces. Modern 3D graphics would make implementing features like these easier today than they were decades ago with 2D sprites, but it seems no one wants to show Chun-Li with a black eye.

A third Art of Fighting game arrived in 1996, jettisoning most characters in favor of an all-new lineup surrounding Ryo and Robert. Officially labeled a gaiden or "side story" in Japan, the English title relegated the Art of Fighting branding to subtitle status, instead leading with The Path of the Warrior. I cannot recall ever seeing it in arcades and have never played it for myself, not when all my favorite fighters from the series maintained their star status in KOF year after year.

Thus Art of Fighting 2 represents the true last hurrah of a series which initially stood toe-to-toe with Fatal Fury as SNK's premiere headliners. Once the amalgamated spinoff King of Fighters grew in prominence, SNK maintained Fatal Fury with a number of sequels and reboots but left Art of Fighting to rot. As of this writing the company is hard at work on yet another Fatal Fury game, City of the Wolves; the teaser trailer indicates the game takes place in South Town once again and implies that at least one Art of Fighting character might make an appearance.

To think that South Town once supported two separate fighting game franchises and today fans have to make do with only one. Chalk it up as one more sign of economic instability in America's urban centers, as even fictional characters are struggling to make rent.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.