FATAL FURY II by Takara

  Platform: Sega Genesis
      Size: 24 Meg
   Players: 1-2 Difficulty: Medium

Fatal Fury II is an updated version of Takara's older Fatal Fury for the Genesis. The game is actually a combination of Fatal Fury II and Fatal Fury Special, both of which are Neo-Geo games.

Graphically, the game looks good. The characters bigger than before, and are well animated. The characters in this game stand up to Street Fighter II in my opinion, because they are just more comic-book looking, and have more "super" moves (see the section on control for more on this.) The backgrounds are hindered by the limitations on the Genesis' color palette, as usual. However, Takara could have done a much better job on some of them. Mui Shiranua's scene is well rendered, as well as the train-top scene you see when you fight Terry Bogard (with Mt. Rushmore scrolling by in the distance). Other scenes are not so nice, and some look downright ugly. Luckily, the action in the game is pretty brisk, and you don't have a whole lot of time to spend gawking at the background. Like its predecessor, FF2 allows fighting in the background and foreground, but since there is no scaling, it's really not useful. In fact, I found it rather annoying.

The sound is, again, limited by the Genesis itself, but isn't bad. The background music is good. It definately has that "SNK" feel to it, and although the sound quality is overall a bit scratchy, it certainly isn't annoying or poor (like the Genesis Street Fighter II family). I was particularly impressed with the voice effects. There are 76 separate voices used in this game, most of which are in Japanese, and a few that aren't, but you never understand what they're saying during the game anyway. All these voice samples lend a definite arcade feeling to this game, and although I do not speak a lick of Japanese, I still like hearing Kim Hap Hwan yell "Hishu Kyaku" whilst beating my opponent's liver out.

Control is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, there are a bunch of options, and an abundance of special moves. On the other, the moves are hard to do, and the controls aren't consistent from character to character. You can set the speed setting from Normal to Fast, although I think that setting really affects how quickly the computer will kick your butt, because the game wasn't much faster in Fast than Normal. The difference was that I was stuck trying to pull off moves and the computer was throwing my booty all over the screen. You can also adjust the time limit per match, the number of continues, and you can also configure your controller, be it 3-button or 6-button. The problem, as I see it, is that this game is not very consistent with "normal" moves between characters, as is pretty much the standard on fighting games today. Since all of these fighters have different styles, they fight in different manners. Thus, I can't always get the blow that I want from the fighter that I want. Some people might like this; it does add variety. However, I think it trades continuity for that variety, and because of that, I just wasn't all that pleased with the control.

The moves are not impossible to do, but do take a lot of practice. Most of them consist of joystick rolls and then a button press, but some are downright nasty. For example, each character has a "power move" which they can do only when their life bar is flashing. It takes a tremendous amount of energy away from the opponent if done correctly. The problem is that most of these moves are near impossible to do when you're practicing on a "ghost" player 2! Try pulling one off when someone is actually USING the controller and you WILL be punished. The good thing about the special moves in this game is their diversity. Moves range from tornado uppercuts to a move wherein Joe Higashi turns into a flaming tiger and kicks the snot out of you. Terry and Andy Bogard sport several dazzling aerial attacks, and Big Bear has an abundance of bonecrushing wrestling maneuvers.

Before I had seen Mortal Kombat II, I thought this was a top-notch fighting game. I still like it better than the old Street Fighter II, and since I haven't seen the new SSF2, I can't say how it compares. It's a fresh look at a tired genre, but now that Mortal Kombat II is here, I just can't honestly recommend you buy this game if you buy only one fighting game. It doesn't scale like the Neo version did, and the foreground/background fighting is more confusing than it's worth. Fans of the Neo-Geo classic will be best served by this game. It's good, but just doesn't stand up when put next to games like MK2.