Game feature: Real Bout Fatal Fury 2: The Newcomers

It's been a long time since I posted a game feature post.  And heck--I've only done three of them so far anyway--so it's time for another.

SNK released most of the Fatal Fury series on two discs called Fatal Fury Battle Archives.  The first disc had Fatal Fury, Fatal Fury 2, Fatal Fury Special and Fatal Fury 3.  The second disc had the three Real Bout subseries titles, Real Bout Fatal Fury, Real Bout Fatal Fury Special and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2.  Missing from the collection are Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves, Fatal Fury: Wild Ambition, and Real Bout Fatal Fury Special: Dominated Mind.  The last was a special variant Playstation port of Real Bout Fatal Fury Special (actually, kind of obviously) while the other two missing titles can be seen as spin-offs that are not related to the "main" series--the latter being a 3D retelling of the first Fatal Fury story, and the former being a "ten years later" sequel of sorts with an almost completely redone cast and dramatically redone gameplay engine.  Curiously, MotW is only called Fatal Fury in the Dreamcast version; it's otherwise called Garou: Mark of the Wolves, giving at least some credence to the idea that it's not really a Fatal Fury game at all, but really a tangent, spin-off, or simply a related title that SNK hoped to stake a new series on.  Either way, it's not on the Battle Archives disc, but I do have the Dreamcast version.  It's also available as an Xbox Live arcade game in the Classics section.

In any case, removing it from consideration makes picking the "best" game in the Fatal Fury series much easier.  While I do occasionally hear of folks who give a slight edge to RBS--and I can kinda see their point--I give my edge to RB2.  It's the apex of the Fatal Fury series, and the best game in the series, in my opinion.  It's got the best character selection, including most of the characters who have graced the series over the years (minus a few mostly forgettable ones like Michael Max or Axel Hawk.  It's also missing Hwa Jai who has made his triumphant come-back in King of Fighters XIII, though--which proves that some of these older characters certainly can be rehabilitated and modernized.)  The animation is bright, detailed, and reasonably well done, if a bit cartoon-like compared to more modern King of Fighters animation.  In fact, in many ways, it has a similar "feel" graphically to Street Fighter Alpha 2 or 3, which was no doubt the point.

However, in terms of gameplay, it feels very specifically like a Fatal Fury game.  By this I mean that it has a pronounced two-plane arena, which has been tweaked at this point to where it's a nice tactical addition rather than a novelty, or a frustrating "chase each other back and forth from one plane to another" routine.  It has three regular attack buttons instead of four (which in the PS2 controller takes a little getting used to, especially if you're coming off playing a more traditional layout game.  When I played this last night it was right after toying around with King of Fighters XI for a while, for instance.)  Super move charging is also very FF instead of KoF or SF-like; every character has one super move that you can do when your meter is charged.  When your meter is fully charged, it will slowly drain away.  Once it does (or once you activate the super move) you can't do it anymore.  You can also use your supermove at will once your life is lower than 50%.  If you have a charge and less than 50% life, you can actually do a super super move (technically called a P. Power move--the "regular" version is called an S. Power move).  For some characters, this is a more powerful version of their super move, for others, it's actually an all new Super-super move.

With games modes in Capcom like A-ism or C-groove--similar to how super charging works in some King of Fighters games too, for that matter--you have to pay attention to how many charges you have, but in this game, you have to pay a bit more attention to it, because of the fact that the meter drains away fairly quickly, making your supers a use it or lose it proposition.  I don't know that I necessarily like this better (actually, if I could choose, I no doubt would choose something more A-ism like) but it certainly does feel different and very unique--except to other Fatal Fury games, of course.  Heck, if anything, this is a good argument for the inclusion of Mark of the Wolves within the series, because super meters in that game work very similarly to this one.

Presentation-wise, the game is also a little bit hit or miss.  Certainly it looks really nice, and has beautiful backgrounds (although each gets only two slight variations, so it feels like there a little bit of discount usage somehow) but the lack of any kind of meaningful ending, inter-battle demos, or anything like that feels a little bit spartan compared to other games that I'm used to playing.  Especially Street Fighter Alpha 3, the game that most logically this would be compared to.  The music is mostly recycled from RBS, but it's still pretty good stuff, so I don't feel too bad about that.  SNK music in general was always a bit more adventurous; willing to try wildly different genres than what you'd expect, sometimes.  This leads to a hit or miss situation in some ways; stuff that I really really like, and stuff that I think is too bizarre for words, but I do admire their willingness to experiment.

But in spite of a few quibbles where it did things in a way where I'd slightly prefer a different way of doing things, in reality, the game wins me over easily with its colorful character selection, fine control, sufficient yet not too much tactical complexity, and general personality.  It also helps that--although in SNK games I always tend to first gravitate to Terry--that there are plenty of other characters I enjoy playing in this one.  It's one that I find in my player pretty frequently.  It's a lot of fun, it's a good looking game, it's got lots of replayability value, and it's just really quite polished.  Like I said earlier, I really believe it's the apex of the Fatal Fury series, and certainly it is if you count Mark of the Wolves as a spin-off rather than a series entrant proper.

There is a secret boss or alternate character named Alfred in the game.  I guess he's more of a secret character than a boss per se.  He's insanely hard to play against; you can't lose a single round, and even at low difficulty, that's a challenging proposition  That last picture is him and his stage, though.  His stage is somewhere in the American southwest from the looks of it.  So are Terry's and Rick Strowd's (they actually look like the same stage, but at different times of day, and in Terry's there's a big-rig truck that's gone in Rick's.)  This game is technically a "dream match" rather than a canonical game, so I'm not sure if it even matters, but unlike most Fatal Fury games (minus 2/Special) it does look like it takes place in locations other than Southtown and instead has an international flair of sorts to it.  Franco Bash and Joe Higashi also seem to be on a ring or stage in Thailand.  The rest of them could be in Southtown, if you really needed them to be, but there's not necessarily a strong reason for believing that they should.

Technical vs casual

I've been thinking about a lot of the games in these series lately (mostly because I've gotten my PS2 down and played a bunch of them recently.  I haven't played much if any of the games I have for other systems.)  My wife doesn't really understand why I want so many titles when to her, the games all look pretty much the same.  And even my kids, who get that the games are very different, often wonder why I care about the older titles when--to them, at least--the newer ones mostly clearly make many of the older ones obsolete.  This is especially true with the King of Fighters series, where there are a number of possible obsolesence points within the series.  You could reasonably argue that the recent KOFXIII with its migration to a much more powerful hardware and greatly improved graphics makes all the previous iterations feel obsolete.  You could argue that the dream match capstone games at the end of the various subseries make all of the games in the subseries obsolete too--and you'd be a little hard-pressed to even get me to not kinda shrug and say, "yeah, you're right."  Because honestly, I almost never play KOF 94-97 anymore, especially since I can use KOF98:UM to "replicate" earlier versions of the characters through the EX characters, and it has all of the characters that ever appeared in any game in the subseries.  This isn't quite true for KOF02:UM because it's not a striker-based game like 99-01 were, but honestly I was never a huge fan of the strikers anyway.  It turns out that the only reasons I have for turning to some of those older games are to get a closer look at some of the stages again, or some other nostalgic or "research" purpose.  You could make the claim that with KOF98:UM, KOF02:UM, KOFXI and KOFXIII you are completely covered in terms of KOF titles.  There are practically no important characters or game-play options that you are really missing that way.

You could probably make similar (although not quite as clear-cut) cases for the Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, Marvel vs Capcom and Fatal Fury series too; in fact, I pretty much have made exactly that case for Darkstalkers and MvC (although I was also driven by lack of availability of ports on systems that I own to some extent too)--and I rarely play any FF game other than RBFF2 anymore too.

Part of the reason for this is that I'm a rather casual player.  I'm honestly not that good, nor am I much interested in getting significantly better at playing these games.  I don't even care to play competitively at all, really.  I'm interested in game that I can, when I'm in the mood, sit down and play for a while against an interesting but not too frustrating or challenging CPU opponent.  I don't know what the rest of the market is like, but I imagine with the mainstream success of games like SFIV or MvC3, that there's a lot of newer and casual players out there.  So I think that a developer has got to be careful to not cater to the niche of harder-core players.  Those who like really technical play that's too fast, or with complicated air juggles, or deadly-rave type supermoves that are unlikely to be learnable by casual players.  This is even true with unintentional technical issues--grapplers, for instance, that have 360° motions that are doable on an arcade cabinet with a joystick, but which are a complete pain in the butt with a standard hand-held controller of a console game.  If developers aren't careful about this, then what they've managed to do is create a game that appeals to a hardcore niche audience that values system mastery but have created massively impenetrable barriers to entry to newer and more casual gamers.

In fact, I suspect that to some extent SNK has suffered due to this syndrome.  I think much of what they have developed rewards system mastery, and excludes casual players.  And I think that's at least part of their story of struggling to find a big US market comparable to that which Street Fighter and Capcom were able to find.  Only part, as I think console availability, localization and presentation issues and more were at least as big if not bigger issues for them.

I do have to say that MvC2's popularity in the US kinda sorta refutes this, but my response to that is that while its possible to play that game very technically, you can also play it reasonably successfully as little more than a button masher too.  Not competitively against a really good player, of course, but against the CPU, or against other casual players, sure.  It's not hard to actually pull the moves off, at least.  Plus, the presence of all the Marvel characters was a big draw in its own right.

Protagonist characters

I've said for a long time that my favorite characters aren't necessarily the same as the developer's favorites, as the protagonists from the point of view of the games, or even fan favorites.  That's not always true, of course, but I do have some esoteric tastes on occasion.

While my own fan faction moves glacially slowly (I've been tinkering with it for four? years and still don't have much to show yet) I'm feeling a bit more motivated than normal right now, so I'm thinking again of who I want to use and who I don't.  Part of that is the Marvel movies--The Avengers in particular.  I've spent plenty of time talking about why I think American style superhero stories and karate supers are analogous, and when I get excited about one, it almost inevitably leads me to the other.  The other is that after considerable time not even thinking about it at all, I'll probably actually pick up either an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in the next few months (and then store it until Christmas, but that's neither here nor there.)  Although it'll be for "the family" meaning mostly the kids, frankly, the younger boys are as excited about getting Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 as they are any other title.  And if they're doing that, then it's no big deal for me to pick up Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition (which is already very cheap), King of Fighters XIII (which will be before Christmas, I bet) and even Street Fighter x Tekken or something.  This all is, of course, turning my attention back to my long-neglected fan fiction efforts.

So, who are the characters I really like?  As protagonists, I mean?  Terry Bogard is probably my absolute favorite of all the characters in all the games.  And as the main protagonist and hero of the Fatal Fury series, as well as a very prominent member of the King of Fighters series, he's a natural to include.  If I'm going to use Terry, I also want to use Blue Mary.  I'm also including Alice Bogard--who isn't really even a character in any version of the game that I know of other than some pachinko game in Japan--just because she's a nice foil for Terry in many ways.

Because NESTS is going to be important to the story, K' (and probably Maxima and Kula) will be important.  They also become important characters for bridging the Capcom and SNK divide on the "good guys" side, since I'm combining NESTS and Shadowloo.

Orochi is also important, in many ways because the Orochi storylines are not only pretty cool and iconic for the King of Fighters series, but also because they have exactly the same "feel" as a kind of Darkstalkers vibe, which means that I can use the concept as another bridge between the Capcom and SNK universes.  This means that Kyo will probably play a significant role at some point--even though I'm actually not as big a fan of him personally as SNK clearly is.

I can't ignore the street fighters, and Ryu (teamed up with Ken and Sakura, I think) make a great protagonist team.  I'm always wanting to set Chun-Li up with someone, and I'm not sure who's the best candidate (given that the SNK fighters already seem to come pre-paired off, for the most part.)  I also like Guile as a protagonist character, plus he gives me an easy connection to the various military style characters from SNK.  In fact, given that Guile works with Chun-Li, he also gives me an easy connection to the very many law enforcement type characters too--Heidern, the Ikari warriors, Kevin Rian, Mary, Seth, Vanessa, and more.  Cammy, as an agent type character, also fits in there, and I've always thought she was an interesting character to write about.

I'm not quite sure what to do with some other characters who I also like, but who don't have an obvious story waiting to be told.  Athena, for example.  I think Mai is over-rated and over-exposed (in more ways than one) so I'll probably pass on making her an important part of any story.

For villains, I'm actually having an easier time combining them.  As well as Geese's organization, which will be important because my version of Southtown will feature as the main setting for the stories, I've got three basic supervillainic organizations.  NESTS, which includes Shadowloo, is ruled by Bison, who is presumed dead after the events (more or less) of SFA3.  The events of SF2 will kinda be folded into my narrative, so he'll obviously have to come back.  Other important leaders of NESTS include Igniz, Zero, Krizalid, Vega, and Sagat.  Both Cammy and K' are defectors from NESTS, from an earlier AI programming experiment, and from a cloning experiment respectively.  I love how that one's all nice and intermeshed between SNK and Capcom characters.  The second is the Hakkesshu, or Orochi cult.  These are the guys who want to raise Orochi as a new god amongst humanity.  I don't really like a lot of the characters from the original Orochi sagaline (Chris? Yashiro? Shermie? These are supposed to be the ultimate villains?  Give me a break.)  I'll keep Goenitz, and otherwise look for alternative Heralds--including Urien, Jedah and Krauser.  Jedah will in fact be the ringleader, and his stage from Darkstalkers 3 with the god-fetus will in fact be Orochi, struggling to be born by stealing the psychic animus of humanity--especially their "negative" emotions.  Of course, this is also the source that powers Bison's psycho drive.  Instant conflict between the two organizations.  Brilliant!

The People of His Distant Land, or the Past, or whatever they call themselves, are another great organization (even if they can't seem to settle on a name.)  Using Saiki, Mukai, Magaki and with minor members Shion and Botan, I've already got a great core from the King of Fighters series.  There's a strong Darkstalkers like vibe to this group already, so I'm going to include Morrigan and Gill as part of the ruling caste too.  Gen and Rugal will be involved somehow too because--well, mostly because why not?  It also explains why Rose and Adel seem to be manipulated by this organization so much.  Because they want to steal Orochi's powers, they obviously oppose both Jedah and Bison's group.  And of course, the heroes don't want any of the three of these organizations to achieve their goals, because it would be Bad News™.