Art styles

For Capcom, you can see various "generations" of artistic styling on their fighting games, i.e. mostly Street Fighter.

1. Street Fighter I was made in 1987 on very primitive hardware by the standards of what was to come. The art looked really good for the year that it came out, but it looks primitive by 90s standards, with stiff, non-fluid animation and relatively little detail.
2. Street Fighter II was the same style as the earlier game, but the hardware was improved, and everything looked better. The character animation was both more fluid and more detailed, the backgrounds had a great deal more detail and animation, etc.
3. The Street Fighter Alpha games used the same style as both the Marvel and Darkstalkers game, and looked less like a video game and more like an animated movie, by design. The hardware was improved (CPS1 to CPS2 board). Everything was again improved; the backgrounds look wonderful, the characters look pretty good, although they're still the same size/resolution as the earlier style--but artistically they were very different. I'm not 100% sure that the frame rate or fluidity increased. The F/X stuff looked tons better too. This artistic style actually carried forward for quite some time, and overlapped with the next generation of art.
4. The Street Fighter III games were on improved hardware, the CPS3 boards. There were some graphical improvements associated with this, including a greatly increased framerate. The 2-D backgrounds from this era look really good; some of the best ever made, in fact, to this point. The size and resolution of the characters still look the same, although the art style was revised. It's still animated movie-like, however. The vs games were also on this same hardware, although they usually used Alpha-generation sprites, or newly drawn Marvel/SNK sprites that were the same style, more or less. This is also where some 3-D backgrounds started to pop up in the latest versions of the Marvel vs and the vs SNK games, although they do not, in my opinion, look as good as the 2-D backgrounds of the same era.
5. Although chronologically out of order, I think this belongs here; the high resolution UDON drawn sprites and backgrounds of the Turbo HD Remix and the Switch-released Ultra Street Fighter II game. This stuff looks absolutely FANTASTIC. I actually think I prefer this style of art to any that I've otherwise seen, although some other franchises have very similar style art.
6. Street Fighter IV is the first 3D Street Fighter game (I'm obviously not counting the EX games) although that's just the graphics, not the gameplay, which remains solidly 2D regular "Street Fighter-like." I think this game looks fantastic, mostly, but I admit to preferring the animated 2D style of generation 5. The only thing that makes this better than 2D is the ability to have alternate costumes as 3D modules.
7. Moving from the PS3 (and Xbox 360) to the PS4 allowed for higher quality 3D animation, but the reality is that Street Fighter V doesn't actually (necessarily) look better than Street Fighter IV. The art style is often more caricaturized, there are really bad clipping issues (especially in the story mode cut scenes) and a number of characters have really badly designed new looks. 

In general, I'd say that of the Capcom art style generations, I like the Alpha stuff quite a bit, although I also admit that it looks dated now. I also like the SFIV 3D models, but the UDON high quality 2D animation is my favorite Street Fighter art style. 

Because I've started talking a bit about the beat em up tangent to fighting games, its worth pointing out that beat em ups at Capcom never really advanced out of the SF2 style regardless of what hardware they were on. Maybe Captain Commando has a bit more of an Alpha feel, but I don't think so. That said, a number of beat em up (and other) Capcom characters were remade in different styles because of crossover games, including loads of Final Fight characters that came to Street Fighter or Marvel vs games. The Alpha series, and SF's IV and V have about a fourth to a third each--roughly--of Final Fight characters in them. Street Fighter III even had one.

Capcom's biggest competitor in the fighting games genre was SNK. Even other competitors who made Street Fighter II clones often did so on MVS hardware, like World Heroes by ADK, Breakers by Visco, or the Fighters History games by Data East, so I won't mention them specifically (most of them never advanced beyond Street Fighter II-like anyway.) SNK used the same hardware for the better part of two decades, so they never really increased their technical capability until they finally abandoned it after the turn of the millennium. However, that doesn't mean that every game used the same style of artwork, and different series had more or less attention to detail, realism vs cartoonishness, etc. I'm going to call all of this a single generation, although there are some notable things to point out as brackets within that generation.

1. MVS generation. A lot of different graphical "tricks" were tried, even fairly early on, like Art of Fighting's zoom feature. Fatal Fury itself has the most primitive graphics of the series, although it's not really much less primitive than Street Fighter II. However, after the release of Street Fighter II, the art style was done more in open imitation of SF2's style, and games like Fatal Fury 2/Special, for instance, look like SF2 clones in terms of style. While always somewhat stylized and comic book like, or animation-like in style, it's fair to say that most of the games of this era approached a semi-realistic look within the animation gamut. A notable exception here is the direction that the Real Bout games went for Special and 2, where they had a much more stylized, cartoon-like appearance that (I believe) was probably done in deliberate imitation of the Alpha style of Street Fighter games. Unlike Capcom, SNK didn't just reuse aging sprites, but constantly updated them and often made them better-looking over time without really changing the style over much itself. If you look at an early King of Fighters game, like 94 or 95, for instance, and compare it to a late MVS (or even Atomiswave) titles like King of Fighters 2002, 2003 or XI, or Mark of the Wolves, you'll probably notice that from a technical standpoint and a stylistic standpoint, they all look quite similar, but you'll also (I believe) quite easily note that the later titles look "better"; the artists just got better over more time and practice with the system, and were able to put out better looking works. That said, the home ports did employ some additional graphical "improvements" including 3D backgrounds (not always better than the 2D ones, but sometimes they were) and pixelation smoothing of the sprites. There was also very notable and noteworthy improvement of the character portraits after matches, during menu selection, etc. as a more comic bookish or anime approach was adopted. Anime is more than one style, however--the anime style that SNK adopted is one that is closest in appearance to western art and animation, while still having an eastern "anime" edge to it. It's less Sailor Moon and more Jim Lee, if you will. This is maybe a little hard to describe as western comic book art and animation and Japanese manga and anime art have cross-pollinated each other to such a degree that its often not easy to say what western animation looks like anymore, other than it certainly excludes the more cartoonish giant-eyes anime and bizarre emotional overreaction cues. But hopefully you can follow what I mean here.
2. After SNK's bankruptcy, all of their titles except King of Fighters basically shut down. XII and XIII were the last 2D fighters, but they feature greatly improved graphics in much higher resolution. I'd say that in most respects, they are comparable to the UDON graphics of Ultra Street Fighter II, but a bit more anime and caricaturish on occasion in style.
3. They didn't stick with that style for very long, for whatever reason (probably because somebody figured out that 3D was cheaper and faster and more flexible.) For XIV and the upcoming XV, they've switched to 3D models. These models are much better than anything Capcom have used, in my opinion; although they are still more "realistic" "western" anime in style.

Given what I thought about Capcom's styles, you'd think that generation 2 would be my favorite, and you'd probably be right. However, I think that SNK did their 3D animation (after they got the Maximum Impact series out of their hair) better than Capcom did in general, and it's hard to fault their 3D animation. With one exception. SNK has always been known as being "stylish" compared to Capcom. Stylish in this regard is a very Japanese thing, though, taking a lot of inspiration from "Japanese Street Fashion". I suppose there's nothing to call that other than "stylish" compared to Capcom, but whereas stylish would seem like a compliment, here it isn't. Japanese street fashion, to western eyes, looks like what a horde of flaming gay people would wear if they all decided that they were really nerdy and wanted to go to Comicon via some kind of goth/steampunk niche. These character and costume designs that SNK comes up with are not cool. They're not good. They're bizarre. SNK has always had that reputation, but it's gotten orders of magnitude worse in the last few titles compared to what it used to be during the "glory days" of mainline King of Fighters titles. 

Luckily, enough characters have enough history that they can't deviate too much from their look without upsetting the fans, so this mostly applies to the new characters that they keep adding rather than the older ones that they're still picking up because they're perennial favorites. This limits the amount of damage this bizarre aesthetic can wreak on the series, but as time goes on, it's probably going to get worse.

As an aside, it's worth pointing out that the King of Fighters XIII cast was one of the most conservative, traditional ones done in many years, which also limited the ability of the "SNK aesthetic" from being very prominent in that game. Yet another reason to like generation 2.

For beat em ups, Sega's Streets of Rage was obviously the main competitor to Final Fight. Those two are usually considered the epitome of the beat em up genre. Normally, I wouldn't think a comparison here would be necessary. Streets of Rage was sub-generation 1 in comparison to Capcom, while 2 and 3 were comparable to Final Fantasy and therefore to Street Fighter II in graphics.

However, in recent years, an indie publisher convinced Sega to let them publish Streets of Rage 4 out of France of all places, and they've done a fabulous job with it. I highly recommend watching a youtube video of a playthrough of it. While the art style is sometimes quite anime, at other times, it's more reminiscent of western comic book or Disney style art. In any case, at all points, it looks absolutely fantastic, at least as good as Capcom's generation 5 or SNK's generation 2, and similar in many respects to both... but probably actually better. Capcom's generation 5 still tried to just upgrade technically while copying faithfully their generation 2 designs, and SNK's generation 2 was a little too out there with caricaturish anime stylings. Streets of Rage 4 does everything that those do, except without the weaknesses. 

If I could see fighting games done the way I'd most like to see them done, then the lizardcube style from Streets of Rage 4 would be it. The ONLY thing that I can complain about with Streets of Rage 4, and I'm not 100% sure that I'm willing to complain about it until it gets even worse, is its bizarre Diversity, Inc. cast with way too many women acting like men and way too many bizarre ethnic groups. Why is the one guy a Maori? Do you know how many Maoris I've seen in America in nearly fifty years of living here? Other than a handful of students at BYU Hawaii, absolutely ZERO. Anyway, I think it's on the cusp of being a problem without quite managing to become one yet at its current state.

Anyway, I've posted this before, but here's a mockup that the lizardcube guys did of a Mark of the Wolves 2 done in their Streets of Rage 4 style. I'd love to see some fighting games get this treatment. Absolutely.

Beat em ups

Although I haven't really talked much about beat em ups except as a kind of aside, since so many Final Fight characters made their way over the years into Street Fighter, that's probably not really fair. Beat em ups came out about the same time as fighting games; maybe just a bit earlier, and their origins and development are inextricably entangled with that of fighting games too. If fighting games have a number of "fallow" years in the early 00s, the beat em up genre experienced a much longer fallow years blight; from the mid-90s until just a few years ago, honestly. Right now there's a fairly good scene for beat em ups, although to be fair, many of the titles are kind of indie and you may not have heard of them, but the revival of Streets of Rage in its belated fourth entry, brought the revival into the mainstream; it's available on pretty much every major platform right now, and has sold over two and a half million copies (that number is as of six months ago, and before the release of its DLC. It's probably significantly higher now.)

Because beat em ups were popular prior to the arrival of fighting games as we really know them, I was a huge fan of them prior to playing fighting games. While the narrative is that beat em ups suffered in popularity following the release of Street Fighter II, the reality is that probably the most popular and often considered the best one was released after Street Fighter II, and took deliberate inspiration from it. Beat em ups and fighting games followed a lot of parallel development in terms of how they should play, which admittedly could only go so far because of the fact that one is focused on 1x1 martial arts fist fighting in a duel-like environment, while the other is focused on beating up wave after wave of much weaker enemies (except the bosses) on a belt-scrolling stage. I think people stopped playing them because they weren't available anymore in arcades rather than because people didn't want them. I mean, when semi tongue in cheek fan project Beats of Rage gets a million downloads with only word of mouth, that strongly suggests that there was a market for good games of this type all along.

I already mentioned how the environment and enemies is a major difference between fighting games. The belt-scrolling stages where you fight wave after wave of arguably weaker opponents to end the stage against a boss that's comparable to you, if not stronger is the major distinction, but other things are significant too. The potential for cooperative play between more than one player is another key element, as is the use of disposable weapons like the knives, metal pipes and other things that you pick up and use for a little while before they disappear. The most iconic titles are fist-fighting martial arts games, like the most iconic fighting games, but the moves are much simpler, usually focusing on only two or three buttons. Over time, this has changed somewhat in cross-pollination with fighting games; more complex combos and special--even super moves--have entered the lexicon of beat em ups. But the originals didn't really have too many of them. Despite the fact that there were only a few buttons, there were combinations of things that you could do with them that led to more moves being available than merely two or three, of course--but the classic beat em up is a simpler game to play than the classic fighting game, at least in terms of player character moves.

From a story and setting perspective, there have been lots of different types, but the classic involves fighting street gangs in a setting of urban decay and chaos, often to go rescue one of the characters girlfriends. The first game that is usually called a beat em up in the traditional sense, although it still lacked the cooperative play feature, is "Hot-Blooded Tough Guy Kunio" which was translated into the West as Renegade. It wasn't just translated, though--it was graphically remade, and the whole rescue the girlfriend story was added. Rather than being a Japanese high school delinquent protecting his nerdy friend from being picked on by gangs from school, it was loosely based on the cult film The Warriors, released in 1979, which I don't think much of anyone saw at the time, but which has been referenced by creative types in multiple genres over and over and over again. (The music video for Shake It by Metrostation, for instance, is also based on it. K-Traxx and other EDM artists have sampled vocals from it in many places, and Renegade, among other video games, lifted the look and concepts straight from that movie too.) Renegade is an insanely influential game, but the beat em up as we all know it really was created the next year (1987) with the same creators building on both the Japanese and Western versions of the game to create Double Dragon. Curiously, the same year as the initial release of Street Fighter, which although a different kind of game, was obviously influenced by the success of Renegade in its title and concept.

Double Dragon was originally going to be the actual sequel to Kunio/Renegade, but the decision was made to give it a different cast, setting and make it its own thing, which was probably a good move. This is where the genre really finally came into its own; Double Dragon introduced the cooperative play, the continuous side-scrolling, the disposable weapons, etc. It also utilized the Western Renegade type setting and plot, including some cut scenes, and it went even further. Rather than simple urban decay as in The Warriors, Double Dragon takes place in an almost post-apocalyptic urban setting, heavily influenced by the Mad Max movies and Fist of the North Star. Much of these tropes would be copied by most of the other subsequent beat em ups. Heck, even such esoteric details as an enemy female character who dresses like a stripper and uses a whip were carried over at least into both Final Fight and Streets of Rage from Double Dragon.

Double Dragon was wildly successful; in America it was the highest selling arcade game for two years in a row, 1988 and 1989 after its initial release. By 1989, two rival franchises became probably the most successful in the genre, Sega's Golden Axe, which took the concept of the Double Dragon beat em up, wedded it to the developers love of the Arnie Conan movies, and the concept of special moves that Capcom had introduced in Street Fighter I. This game was hugely successful and spawned several sequels and spin-offs. I personally probably played more of it than I did Double Dragon, although I played a fair bit of Double Dragon in arcades in 87-88 or so. This type of game was even better served, I think, when Capcom got a hold of the Dungeons & Dragons license and created Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara in the mid-90s, using big, Final Fight-like sprites. 

Capcom, in fact, had a large run of beat em ups. Not only the D&D games, which are fantastic, by the way, but the weird post apocalyptic Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Alien vs Predator, and futuristic superhero Captain Commando. The D&D games themselves probably came about because of Capcom's own King of Dragons and Knights of the Round. But probably the most famous, and later a contender for the top series of the genre was Final Fight. Originally conceived as Street Fighter II, albeit a totally different kind of game more closely based on Renegade and Double Dragon, Final Fight brought much better graphics, smoother gameplay and much more character than any game in the genre had heretofore delivered. The arcade version is a great game, but unfortunately, it got a SNES exclusive conversion that was hacked in many ways, and pretty disappointing. It's readily available now in modern systems; you can buy the arcade version on the Capcom Classics Collection (PS2 era) or the Capcom Beat em Up Bundle on Steam, PS4 Nintendo Switch, etc. (It's interesting, isn't it, to see this classic era of video gaming make a resurgence as gamers are discovering that the direction the market went was not actually in the direction of games that were necessarily more fun. Stuff that's now twenty or even thirty years old is being rediscovered and it turns out that it's considered good design even still.)

Final Fight was enormously successful; it was the most successful video game in arcades in 1990 (it's release date is late 1989--around Thanksgiving) and the second most successful arcade game in 1991, behind Street Fighter II. It also was one of Capcom's best-selling games on the SNES, in spite of the poor conversion. It epitomized the genre in almost every respect; the urban decay, the go beat up gangsters to rescue a girlfriend, the roster of characters which includes (admittedly somewhat generic) Cody, the boyfriend, but also the girl's father, Mike Haggar, who was also mayor, and Cody's best friend Guy, a Japanese ninja who was hanging around town for whatever reason.

Final Fight characters had so much character, in fact, that they've had a somewhat startling level of longevity. Even relatively "faceless" mooks have gone on to become Street Fighter characters (Hugo and Poison, in particular) while many of the bosses have as well (Rolento, Abigail, Sodom) and both Cody and Guy have appeared in multiple Street Fighter roles. Even some characters from the sequels (Maki, Lucia) eventually made their way into Street Fighter. Also extremely curiously, Mike Haggar has never made an appearance as a playable character, even though he did so in Marvel vs Capcom 3 Ultimate. Why they didn't port him to Street Fighter IV's later updates is still a frustrating mystery to me.

Although they are significant in Street Fighter as playable characters, they also don't really contribute in any way to Street Fighter's story, however. In fact, in the General Story mode of Street Fighter IV, I'm pretty sure that not a single Final Fight character makes so much as an appearance, even. They're part of the same continuity, but somehow part of a completely parallel existence.

Final Fight was also caught up in the console wars between Nintendo and Sega of the 16-bit generation. As I said above, Final Fight got a SNES exclusive port, although it had to make significant sacrifices from the arcade version to be ported to the SNES. While it was successful as a seller on the platform, I suspect most gamers were disappointed in it. Sega, seeing an opportunity here, took their Golden Axe engine and made an urban Final Fight copycat game which was exclusive to their console, the Sega Genesis, called Streets of Rage. While graphically it doesn't really compare to Final Fight, in most other respects, it is a better game than the SNES port, if not the arcade version, of Final Fight.

You'll notice that many fighting games from the early years followed exactly the same tropes as Final Fight and other beat em ups. Art of Fighting has the exact same plot. Fatal Fury has Geese knocked off of a skyscraper, just like Belger, the boss from Final Fight. Street Fighter Alpha 2 foregoes the fighting championship, and has characters moving around not unlike a beat em up in nature. 

Final Fight 2 and 3 were SNES exclusives, not arcade games, and "fixed" a number of issues that the SNES Final Fight game had had, but Sega was not resting on their laurels either, and Streets of Rage 2 and 3 are considered by many fans to be the absolute best games in the beat em up genre; Streets of Rage 2 in particular. (3 is often seen as good, but offering little than 2 didn't already offer.) In fact, the game is often considered one of the best video games of all time period, which is really saying something. It continues more of the cross pollination that was happening with fighting games by introducing more moves and more variety for playable characters, something directly inspired by Street Fighter II and its success. One designer even said that having the same kind of combo rhythm as Street Fighter II was a key design attribute that they wanted to corner. Streets of Rage 2 also had greatly improved graphics over its predecessor, comparable to Street Fighter II's in most respects. In addition to this, Streets of Rage had what was considered at the time--and maybe even still--one of the greatest original soundtracks ever bundled with a video game. (Personally I still greatly prefer Star Wars the Old Republic's.)

It's curious to me that Capcom's big rival in the beat em up was Sega, while their big rival in the fighting game was SNK. SNK also had a Final Fight-esque beat em up called Burning Fight, which is capable enough, but which lacks a lot of the character that made Final Fight or Streets of Rage so memorable. Still, it was relatively successful in Japanese arcades, at least, when launched in 1991. I'm a little surprised that a King of Fighters '94 team wasn't made of the three selectable characters, to stand next to the Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting characters. Not that the USA Sports Team doesn't have its fans, but I think this would have been a better use of that team's slot.

Burning Fight has two American policemen from NYC come to Japan in pursuit of a Yakuza criminal gang that was causing trouble at home. They meet up with a Japanese detective and the three of them are the selectable characters. Among other things, if they had used these characters, King of Fighters would have it's own character named Ryu, although he would have looked and probably moved much more like Guy.

Game Feature: King of Fighters '98

I haven't done a game feature post in quite a while, and the obvious one to do that I haven't yet is King of Fighters '98. For many, many years, the KOF was done on the same MVS hardware, and even when it briefly migrated to the Atomiswave hardware, it was still done with the same graphics. Only when we get to King of Fighters XII and XIII do we actually get improved graphics and only when when we move to KOF XIV and XV (out February) do we get fully 3-D graphics (although still with traditional 2-D play.) All of the Orochi Saga games can be "summed up" if you will in King of Fighters '98, and all of the NESTS saga games can be summed up with King of Fighters 2002. If you're not actually interested in playing the "story" of the games, you can get all of the action you want from the entire saga in the "summary" games; King of Fighters '98 has everything you can get in any Orochi Saga game, and then some. This is especially true for the "Ultimate Match" version, which added all of the (very few) characters who had appeared in an Orochi Saga game but hadn't yet appeared in '98, like the remaining bosses, Eiji Kisaragi, and a handful of others.

I have a handful of versions of this game, although to be fair, only the Ultimate Match is one that I'd ever feel compelled to come back to at this point. The first version I got was when I got my old Dreamcast, and it had the odd title of King of Fighters Dream Match 1999. I suppose SNK were a little self-conscious at feeling out of date with the title, which I suppose is a fair problem. For the PS2, I have the Ultimate Match version of the game, which also includes the original Neo Geo version of the game. And finally, I have the Neo Geo version of the game also on the Orochi Saga compilation for the PS2. There is one more final update, called Final Version, or something like that, which is what was available on Steam or now Good Old Games. It's relatively cheap, but it doesn't add anything new to Ultimate Match, just a few subtle tweaks to gameplay.

The whole point of '98 was to be a "Dream Match", i.e., there's no story to it, but it brings back all of the "greatest hits" of the Orochi Saga in one game, including teams that only made an appearance in the first game, like the USA Sports Team, or the Boss team of 96, or creating new teams out of "retired" master characters like Heidern or Saisyu Kusanagi and Takuma Sakazaki, etc. Although from a story perspective, Rugal was only the boss of the first two games, and was therefore just the taste of things to come, the developers also wisely realized that in most respects he was the most iconic King of Fighters boss, and brought him back as the boss of this game as well. Of course, for Ultimate Match, all of the bosses of the Orochi Saga made reappearances, even the mid-bosses like Riot of the Blood Leona, etc. Of course, the reality is that most of those bosses were kind of underwhelming anyway. Rugal was so good that they even brought him back for the next dream match in 2002, ignoring all of the NESTS saga bosses. In both cases, he was the supered out "Omega Rugal", complete with stripper shirt and everything.

A good case can be made that especially once 2002 got "remade" as Unlimited Match, a kind of upgrade very similar to the Ultimate Match upgrade to this game, that there was no longer any reason to play any King of Fighters game that had preceded it, unless you wanted to see the specific story cut scenes associated with one game, or something like that. I don't think that that's completely true; there are a number of things in particular that are unique to the Orochi Saga. Sometimes these are little things, like Terry Bogard's moveset, for instance, which is a bit different in the NESTS games, and other times its more in the vibe, presentation and "feel" of the game, and harder to put your finger on. 

While I can certainly see and actually probably agree with that perspective to some degree, I have a lot of nostalgic attachment to '98 over 2002 and in many ways still prefer it, especially in its Ultimate Match version. The game presents to you the two basic different "systems" that the prior King of Fighters games used; EX, which is similar to '94 and '95's manual charging of super movies, dashes, etc. and "Advanced" which was similar to '96 and '97s super stocks, rolls and other items. The Ultimate Match version also allows you to play an Ultimate Mode, where you can pick and choose elements from EX or Advanced, although honestly, I just prefer to use Advanced. Not surprisingly, it's the most like A-ism from Street Fighter Alpha 3, or the C-groove from the Capcom vs SNK games of the options presented, which is my favorite system.

You can play in teams, or you can play single player, which is more "Street Fighter" like in terms of how it plays. I usually prefer the latter, of course. The fact that there aren't any story endings means that team composition doesn't matter; the only endings are a bunch of joke animations from the characters during the credits.

The player select menus are, in my opinion, extraordinarily ugly, as are the character portraits. They are improved somewhat for the Ultimate Match, but the character portraits and end-match art/quotes are the same in every version. Shinkiro is the artist, who's normally quite a talented fella, but this is not his best work. That said, once you get playing, this matters very little. The Dreamcast version has the same menus as the Neo Geo or arcade, with the exception of course, of a very bare bones "text only" menu of console specific modes and options, which are all pretty basic. 

I've talked before about the shift to 3-D backgrounds that was happening right about at the turn of the millennium in these kinds of games, and it came for KOF'98 too. The Dreamcast version has the backgrounds redone in 3-D, although it's relatively low-res 3-D, and mostly just looks almost exactly the same as the 2-D backgrounds for most of them. (Oddly, the Osaka street scene outside of the SNK headquarters is an exception here; there are variants in the 2-D version that are not done in 3-D.) The Ultimate Match version gives us redone 3-D backgrounds, including more variants. In particular, it seems that the developers were very enamored this year of adding a bluish, washed out haze to make the backgrounds look like they take place early in the morning in the minutes right before the sun comes up but the light is still relatively strong. Almost every stage has a variant that looks like this. It also adds a bunch of new stages to the mix that hadn't yet ever been seen.

In fact, most of the stages are new to this game, even in the old Neo Geo version. A handful are from other games in the Orochi Saga series, like the '96 boss stage, or the Orochi boss stages, but most are not. In my personal opinion, this is a bit of a missed opportunity; the Ultimate Match didn't need new stages added when it could have brought forward the older stages from the games that had come before, redrawn if necessary. I think that there were some really beautiful stages that I miss not having in a game that I'm actually likely to still play anymore. The Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting team stages from '96 are in particular to be highlighted here. Sigh. In this game, stages are no longer associated with specific teams, except for the boss stages, and tend to come up randomly.

Curiously, the 3D stages, especially in the Dreamcast version, but even in the Ultimate Match version, are not necessarily better than the older 2D stages. Although in the case of most of them, it doesn't actually make much noticeable difference. The Japan Street set of stages are better in 2D. The Korea ones are noticeably different, but neither is better than the other, in my opinion. A few stages have slightly different lighting details between the 3D and 2D versions, which I think is very unusual. The characters themselves offer a smoothness indicator that can be modified, to give them a less pixelated appearance, so that they match the backgrounds a little better and don't look so old-school and clunky.

All in all, King of Fighters '98 is the best King of Fighters game, or at least it was when it came out, and remains so probably at least until 2002, although even then that's a question of opinion, not objectivity. In 1998 when it came out, it was side by side with Street Fighter Alpha 3, and that was probably the best game in the Street Fighter series up to that point. This was part of the genesis of the Capcom vs SNK series in the first place; with two of the best titles from the two most important series by each company out at the same time, it begged the question of what it would be like to have them really duking it out head to head. Although the Capcom vs SNK games are pretty good, I think that there's still definitely a kind of desire and demand to see this question answered more definitively still. And no, MUGEN doesn't really count.

But of the grade of games that precede the major graphical upgrades of the very late 00s and 10s years, King of Fighters '98 has to stand out as one of the best representatives, and one of the better games in the entire genre overall no matter how you slice it.

Alts

So, when I fired up Steam a month or so ago for the first time in several months and started playing around with USFIV again, one of the things that I finally broke down and did was figure out how to swap out some of the alternative character costumes with fan-made ones. EVERY character has at least one, if not multiple, alternate costumes that are super whack. Some of my favorite characters only had one or two costume that I even liked at all. So it was fun to rehabilitate the "style" of some of them by swapping out something else. Ken's bathrobe and cowboy outfits were probably the very first to go, for instance, but I've got lots of alternatives on lots of characters, with more waiting in the queue for me to get around to. Maybe. (I've already gone pretty deep on the bench with characters that I'm likely to play, for instance.) I also found another app that allows you to "turn off" certain elements of character costume models. So, for instance, Akuma's first alternative costume, which is pretty cool except for one thing; a gigantic bow made of super thick rope on his back, which looks insanely ridiculous. I took that off. Now that costume is... well, it's not necessarily great, but it doesn't offend me with its silliness anymore either.

So now I've started on a project of playing through all of the costumes. I'm doing vs CPU, and going through every color of every costume for a character, vs a random com character on a random stage, and then when I'm done, I'll play through the arcade mode with that character, and then move on to the next. This will take some time, and I'm not doing this for every character, just for "my" characters. I've done Ryu and Ken so far, and I've started Akuma. Evil Ryu and Oni are next, followed by Sagat and Sakura. We'll see if I still have mental stamina left to pursue this project after that, or if I need to walk away from it, but I do have lower tier characters that I still sometimes play beyond that. Probably nearly a dozen more. And then maybe another dozen after that that I don't really consider my characters, but which I sometimes play. And then at least another dozen after that of characters that I've never really dived into in USFIV, but which I have in other games like the Alpha series, or something, so I've always kinda wanted to.

I've talked before about it being important to think that the character you're playing is cool in some way. The alternate costume idea was a great one in that regard, because it could turn a mediocre or even poor design into a good one. Being able to mod them even further helped with this, because honestly, the designers costumes were sometimes really, really bad.

Even before we had 3D models where alternate costumes were easy to implement, a lot of home console ports did have color palette editors which did a little bit of the same thing, although not as well. Sometimes characters just changed their look and evolved from game to game to game. On the SNK side, Athena is famous for having a different outfit in every single King of Fighters game, and Kyo has a different outfit every single major series--so he's on his fourth now.

Anyways, it's just one more reminder that whomever that complete and total tool who tried to tell us that people didn't care about Magneto being in Marvel vs Capcom Infinity, because Magneto wasn't actually a character, he was just a mechanical function, is a complete moron. He's not a normal person. He's some kind of spergy, lizard simulacrum of a human, like Mark Zuckerberg. People like their characters because they're characters, and they identify with some aspect of them, and they want to see them represented in a way that they can identify with.

What's wrong with SFV?

I just finished again playing the General Story earlier today. I had a lot of costume customizations, and it had been a while, so it was reasonably fun to go through it again. It reminded me of a lot of reasons why SFV will never be one of the best games in the series, though. In fact, it seems like it's the odd numbered ones that have struggled the most, finding cult followings among the super competitive set, maybe, but otherwise being rather unremarkable in their performance in the marketplace. This assumes for the sake of argument that the "zero/alpha" sub-series is an even number, of course.

A few technical things first. Why the devil are load times sooooOOOoooo bad on the PS4? The game is native to that console, fer cryin' out loud. I don't know if its better or not on a good gaming PC with the Steam version, but the load times for SFV on the PS4 are embarrassingly bad. Just absolutely terrible. Worst in the series. SFA2 on the SNES was better.

I deleted the from my PS4 for months and then redownloaded it again. For some reason, since I've gotten it back, I've had a hard time staying logged into the server for more than about half an hour or so before I get booted and have to get back on it. And for some extremely stupid and inexplicable reason, the game wants you to be online even in totally single player experiences. Getting booted out of the general story mode because you lost your connection to the Capcom server is beyond stupid and really, really annoying. I NEVER play any online modes; if I'm not playing a story mode, I'm playing arcade. I should never EVER have to connect to the server unless I'm browsing the DLCs. This doesn't happen with any other game, it doesn't happen when I'm streaming movies, or using other devices, etc. To be fair, I do occasionally (although much less often than in SFV) get have hiccups in our video conferencing software at work too, though. I can't completely and totally rule out that my own internet service is causing the problem, although the likelihood of that being the case is extremely low since everything else works like a charm. Even so... why do I even need to be online at all?

The story mode is also pretty embarrassing, although I admit to liking some aspects of it. The plot, though... gah. Who wrote this, a fifth grader? And the dialog... Look, I know it's probably translated directly from the Japanese, but why do Japanese anime and other storytelling formats always tend to sound like a bunch of pretentious blowhards reading out of context fortune cookies at each other in an attempt to sound like somebody has some depth to them? The "comic relief" such as it is, is so cringy that it makes me feel like I need to go to the gym just to recover from the beta that's all over it. The live-action Street Fighter movie with Raul Julia, Jean Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue is widely considered one of the worst movies ever made that got a wide release, but that comes across as a masterpiece of craftsmanship compared to this story mode storytelling.

SFV is also a shockingly ugly game most of the time, although it isn't consistently so; sometimes it actually looks really good. Sometimes the ugly is technical, like the incredibly plastic looking models, and the really bad clipping and crazy spastic behavior of hair and clothes. But sometimes its just the art design. Somebody really hated Ken and Akuma, for instance, and went out of their way to make them look absolutely retarded. Meanwhile, Ryu and (most alternates of) Chun-Li look quite good. The "hot Ryu" redesign is so good that it is up there with the Mark of the Wolves Terry Bogard as a kind of "this should have been his design in the first place" kind of redesign. Recent DLC character Akira looks tremendously good. Alex looks like he has a broken leg in his normal standing stance. It's really kind of all over the map, but when you compare SFV to some of its PS4 generation contemporaries like Fighting EX Layer, King of Fighters XIV, SNK Heroines, Tekken 7, etc. it really stands out as a mostly tremendously ugly game.

Character selection and prominence was quite weird. Did Karin go and become a fan favorite sometime when I wasn't looking? She was in one game as a totally forgettable rival; she is to Sakura what Ken is to Ryu, except that Sakura isn't as iconic as Ryu and she doesn't really need a Ken. Even the UDON folks completely ignored her other than an off-hand reference that Sakura's friend from school makes. And they LOVED pulling obscure characters out and finding ways to use them for something. There are plenty of fan favorites and original world warriors that don't show up, yet we also get a lot of kind of obscure and odd characters. Even very prominent characters from the last game don't show up except as cameos. Really? No Crimson Vyper? But we get Seth come back as a girl? Seth the boss that nobody really liked, and who was one of the weakest parts of SFIV? (To be fair, not very many of the SFIV original characters are very good. Rufus? El Fuerte? Somebody should have been fired over those two.)

I will say that at least at this point in the game's lifecycle, the gameplay itself is pretty solid. Not the most exciting SF gameplay I've ever seen, but it's not overly simplistic, it's not overly spastic, and its not overly technical. It does kind of hit a sweet spot that the best Alpha and SFIV iterations did. But given that almost everything else about this game is mediocre, disappointing, or otherwise fails to live up to the promise that it should and could have, and those other games with equally compelling gameplay are still around and can be played quite easily, it's a little weird to expect us to get very excited about this title still. 

The Lost Street Fighter characters

I noticed that on the PS4 store you can buy Fighting EX Layer, and that it is 80% off from now until the some time in early September; about a week or so away. From $40 to $8 was a deal too good to pass up (it cost almost that much to add Terry Bogard as a DLC character!) so I bought it this morning (and Terry, because... c'mon, c'mon. It's Terry.) I've played it just a bit, and have some very early commentary.

• I played with Kairi, who's the kinda sorta Ryu clone. My first thought is that he doesn't actually have a lot of moves; two or three "unique" moves, three special moves, and three similar and kind of unimpressive supers. Maybe there's some combos or something that I don't know about that will make him more fun to play, but in general, I thought he was a bit simplistic to play and I got a little tired of him extremely quickly; he just didn't have a lot of tactical diversity to bring to bear. Against the CPU, at least.
• The game seems specifically geared towards online competitive play. Two different versus modes, one for online and one for offline are listed before even arcade mode. I've heard that the netcode is particularly good, and will match you up with players of your same skill level much better than almost all of its competitors, so that you actually have a fun experience playing online games, instead of just getting blown out by freaks who practice all of the time. But I can't comment on this first hand, merely note that the single player experience seems to be a bit lacking.
• Not only that, the arcade mode wasn't particularly interesting to play. Instead of best two out of three, it was best three out of five matches. The CPU blocks a lot, so you throw out a lot of attacks that don't do anything before you finish your matches. I had several matches end because time ran out. Not the funnest way to play either. 
• The characters have potential but Arika do absolutely nothing with them. Very little personality exhibited, and no story to speak of. Just a brief paragraph as an ending, which told me very, very little about the character. This is another indication that the competitive play is the focus for the developer. In my opinion, any game, no matter how much the devs want to focus on a multiplayer experience, that doesn't have a good single player mode is going to be one that eventually people don't play much of. No matter the genre. Look at Star Wars the Old Republic, for instance, and how they added a massive single player experience that they didn't expect to (and that they claim at least 80% of their players are focusing on). Look at Overwatch, which nobody played for more than a few months because it was all running around with bratty little kids and there wasn't anything else to do. There's a handful of exceptions here and there, and a good cooperative or competitive scene is important for a lot of games, but people better be able to just sit down with the machine and play it without relying on someone else, or they'll likely be disappointed pretty quickly. I think the devs made a mistake with their focus here.
• The game looks quite good. In fact, it just highlights how incredibly ugly Street Fighter V is in general, although that's a post for another time, because it's a big topic. The characters look fantastic, if occasionally a little plastic. I didn't see any clipping going on, and the character and stage design was just well done. The strange anime character portraits at the select screen (which also show in the win and lose images, as well as in small form at the top of the HUD) are sometimes hit or miss, but the actual 3D models are great. The stages are really good too. Some of them have a weird deja vu feel to them, like Terry's train ride through the desert southwest of "West Albuquerque", although there's probably a reason for that, because it's Terry. But why does Hokuto (and Shirase, formerly known as "Bloody Hokuto") have a giant snaky background that looks like Mukai's stage in King of Fighters 2003? Anyway, all very well designed from a visual perspective. Nothing at all to complain about here.
• There are hints offline that there is some kind of potentially interesting story here, even if it is derivative, about sealed demons breaking loose, forgotten memories, the main character Kairi turning into an Akuma-like creature, but not realizing it because he's lost his memory, etc. Sure, sure... the story seems to be ripped off from other games that already did it better in the genre; a kind of Orochi Lite, or something... but there's something here that sadly they do nothing with. In fact, you kind of don't know anything at all about it unless you look up stuff on Arika website (or other wikis), because it's not really in the game at all.
• A lot of people probably enjoy this about the game, but I found, quite honestly, the barrage of options that you have to pick before you even start playing to be kind of strange and overwhelming to someone new. What is Classic vs Progressive? No explanation given. What the devil are all these different "Gougi" modes and what to they mean? No explanation given. Again, I have an internet and a browser, so it's not like I can't get some answers out there somewhere, although the game is sufficiently low key that there's less information on it available than you'd probably like to think. 

Anyway, I certainly recommend getting it at that price while you can, if you haven't. At that price, heck, even if you only play it for a few hours total, it's probably still worth it. I doubt it's going to really creep up into superstar status, rivaling King of Fighters or Street Fighter, but it's not a bad game so far, and there are a lot of things that it does do really quite right. It's also the repository of a whole bunch of lost Street Fighter characters, the legacy of the EX spin-off series, and the fact that it has Terry Bogard as a DLC character opens up interesting crossover possibilities that I wish more of these jokers would get on board with. Let's face it, the fighting game genre isn't the top of the heap anymore like it was in the early to mid 90s, and all of the developers need to do more to keep their brands and their profile higher, I think. Or at least keep their existing fanbase excited to keep coming back for more. Big crossover games, and characters that are familiar but in a new setting, like Terry in this game, or Akuma in Tekken 7, or a female Skullomania in the SNK Heroines game is a fun concept, and fans eat that kind of stuff up. Keep doing more of it! In fact, that whole crossover potential is part of what prompted me to start this blog and the Google Sites for Karate Supers that I have. Sure, sure... I could just collect and play these games on my own. I could even record my playthroughs or something and put them on YouTube. But what I really want to do is imagine what it would be like to imagine this whole thing as the "karate supers cinematic universe" which, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, would tell stories, somewhat "remixed" or redone with occasionally very different details to them, and mix up characters who otherwise might not be seen together in the same games already.

Terry Bogard appearing with the "lost" Street Fighter characters from the EX games in Fighting EX Layer is just a tiny taste of what I'd like to see more of.

Street Fighter vs King of Fighters

The year is 1998. Capcom has released, this year, its arguably most polished—and still considered one of its best entries in the entire Street Fighter series even now, years later—Street Fighter Alpha 3. It's in between the releases of Street Fighter III: Second Impact (1997) and Third Strike (1999). Its vs series has just barely graduated from Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter (1997) to Marvel vs Capcom (1998) which expanded the roster from just Street Fighter characters to include characters from other Capcom franchises like Megaman, etc. That would be greatly expanded in the next game in the series, Marvel vs Capcom 2, but this was the first game that started the real trend of gonzo, spastic, novelty value of having such a tonal dissonance of characters all appearing in a crazy crossover game. Prior to that, the Marvel crossovers had been marginally more serious, and the Street Fighter games themselves obviously so, with a consistent tone and feel throughout. In many ways, 1998 was "peak Street Fighter" for a whole decade, while the franchise lingered under lazy, uninspired efforts, before being revived with Street Fighter IV in 2008.

Meanwhile, SNK also released King of Fighters '98 in 1998, obviously. Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 also came out that year, which although a tremendous game, had already had the spotlight taken from it to migrate to King of Fighters. While here in America, this was never really the case, in many markets in Asia and in South America in particular however, SNK was as popular as Capcom at the 2-D fighters, and the supposed rivalry between the two companies was catnip to games journalists, especially seeing as what even many years later many fans see as two of the best entries in both Street Fighter and King of Fighters came out in 1998. This fact was not lost on people at the time, of course, and both games were covered in the press, often in fact, in the exact same issue. At least one publication, Arcadia, plastered the title Street Fighter vs King of Fighters on its cover, and at least some fans, tantalized by that title, thought that that meant that some kind of actual crossover game was coming, as opposed to the magazine merely reviewing two of the best competing entries from each company in the same issue.

Whether this is literally true or not, this fan and journalist fervor is supposedly what prompted Capcom and SNK people to talk to each other and hammer out the license for what was to become the various Capcom vs SNK (and SNK vs Capcom) series of games. From the get-go, however, this concept was tainted by what was going on in the crazy, spastic Marvel vs Capcom stuff; the idea that we needed to add characters who had no tonal resonance with the others, just because the whole point was throwing everybody in a giant bag of a game and shaking it up until it broke. The Capcom vs SNK games were more serious in most respects than the Marvel vs Capcom game of the same era (2000-2002 or so) when they did finally come out in response to that stimulus in 1998, but for my money, they never quite lived up to the premise and promise of Street Fighter vs King of Fighters described in the headlines.

There are some other titles that qualify as similar in tone, of course, although most of them have already had some kind of crossover of sorts with the two flagship franchises. On Capcom's side, Rival Schools and Final Fight have always been associated with Street Fighter; Sakura appearing in Rival Schools and more recently, Akira appearing in Street Fighter V's final season. Final Fight characters were all over the place in the Alpha series already, and more of them have been more and more integrated into the Street Fighter franchise since. Although going back to 1989 already it was clear that they were going to be the same canon; the crush the car game from Street Fighter II was borrowed from Final Fight, and Final Fight's original title was going to be Street Fighter '89! Darkstalkers is a little more difficult; while the Darkstalkers titles have more or less the same vintage as the Marvel and Alpha games, and are obviously very similar to them in many, many regards, they do have an occasionally more gonzo tone than the Street Fighter games, at least. Although other Darkstalkers characters would fit in more closely with the Street Fighter cast. Curiously, as far as I'm aware, no Darkstalkers or Street Fighter character have actually ever appeared in the same game unless it was explicitly a crossover game (or puzzle fighter or something), however, and there hasn't ever been a Street Fighter vs Darkstalkers type property except for a comic book series published by UDON. I find this observation oddly compelling to noodle on. Some of the Street Fighter characters, especially Akuma, but also maybe Gill and Urien and Rose (and Menat) and more recently G (and Q) have the kind of vibe that would fit quite well in a Darkstalkers game. And with the successful relaunch of Street Fighter again, there's certainly been a call to do something with the Darkstalker characters besides an occasional cameo or cosplay alternate costume from many fans, which so far seem to have been unanswered and unaddressed. Curious and curiouser.

The King of Fighters games were always meant to be crossover games, of course, but they were primarily based around the concept of Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting and other similar characters; even characters like the US Sports team, the Psycho Soldiers team or the Ikari Warriors team were remade into a Street Fighter-like character representation. Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting characters, of course, were already in that mold. From time to time, characters who were a little more outré have popped up, like Nakoruru being a significant part of the plot of King of Fighters XIV, or some of the weird sub-bosses that showed up in King of Fighters XI, or especially all of the strikers that showed up in King of Fighters 2000. And curiously, a number of their actual bosses have always had a Darkstalkers like vibe too; I mean, what is Mukai and Magaki and Saiki and even Orochi for that matter, if not Darkstalkers in a Street Fighter-like game? The NESTS saga was less supernatural, but that only meant that it much more closely resembled the Street Fighter Alpha games, and later the G-project Street Fighter III stuff.

A few other games merit some mention. The Street Fighter EX games were, of course, Street Fighter games, but they were developed by Arika, and had a reasonably diverse cast of characters that have not appeared in mainline Street Fighter. The reason for this, it appears, is that the rights to those characters remained with Arika all this time, so that even if Capcom wanted to use them (which isn't at all clear that they ever did) they couldn't have without making some kind of new deal with Arika to do so. Arika have not that long ago finally released a new Street Fighter-like fighting game of their own, featuring these characters. Curiously, they made a deal of some kind with SNK so that Terry Bogard appeared in their game, and Skullomania appeared in a strange King of Fighters spin-off. This raises the tantalizing question of including these Arika Street Fighter EX characters in with the Street Fighter and/or SNK characters as certainly plausible. 

There are a few more even more obscure but also tantalizing connections. Data East released a Street Fighter II-like game called Fighters History and Fighters History Dynamite, its sequel or upgraded version. This was released on the Neo Geo and just based on the look and gameplay of it, it's mostly a late Street Fighter II vintage copycat. These characters would fit very well. In fact, Capcom thought that they would fit so well, that they sued Data East for copyright infringement. They lost because of the scenes a faire doctrine, which in fact suggests that Capcom was right in believing that the FHD characters are basically Street Fighter wannabes. Curiously, the rights to use these old Data East characters are currently with SNK, and although they've done precious little with them, they have on occasion had crossovers and cameo appearances, including a FHD character appearing in one of the Maximum Impact King of Fighters 3-D games, and a crossover cellphone game using Fatal Fury and Fighters History characters. I'm not quite sure why they haven't introduced a few of them into their mainline King of Fighters series since they have the rights; maybe it's because they don't know that they'll retain the rights forever and don't want to be stuck unable to sell a title that they've produced. But it'd be pretty fun to see a Fighters History team or two, even if they're DLC "non-canon" characters make an appearance in a King of Fighters game.

A final one I'll note is another Neo Geo game, but one developed by another studio, Visco. This is Breakers and its update Breakers Revenge. For my money, this one is even more overtly Street Fighter II-like (with a handful of Darkstalker nods; I actually think Alsion III is a better manifestation of the mummy concept than Anakaris, for instance) yet it was Data East that got sued.

Both Fighters History and Breakers have cult followings for various reasons; the super solid gameplay of Breakers Revenge, for example, and some of the odd character designs for Fighters History Dynamite. While they are largely forgotten (if they were ever known to begin with) by the mainstream as merely Street Fighter 2 copycats, the fact that they were such clear Street Fighter II copycats, not to mention the occasional cameo of some of the characters in other games of the same type, raises the question of whether or not there's any value in adding a Street Fighter vs Breakers Revenge or vs Fighters History Dynamite angle to this crossover. Probably not, because hardly anyone is asking for it, the characters don't have as much depth or interest for the most part, and frankly just with Street Fighter vs King of Fighters alone you've got too many characters to choose from anyway. But... it remains a tantalizing feature; how do (or at least how can, the Darkstalkers characters, EX characters, Fighters History Dynamite and Breakers Revenge characters somehow get worked in to this massive crossover game that yet somehow still manages to have a consistent feel with characters that all feel like they belong there for the most part, without having bizarre characters that don't belong, like Megaman or Amingo or Phoenix Wright, or other characters that actually have appeared in crossover games? Probably mostly just to provide novelty value for the silliness of the concept of adding them, honestly.

Whew. So, where am I going with this? I don't know yet. I'd like to think that eventually I'll write a big fan fic that crosses over the Street Fighter and King of Fighters characters, with some nods towards Darkstalkers and maybe some of the other titles, but honestly, I'm not really doing anything there and not likely to in the immediate future. I am, however, putting together a more complete list of character on my Google Drive. I already had a list of mainline Street Fighter characters. I needed to add the recently announced Luke to the list, and decided, why not create more tabs and go all out? I've now done the EX characters tab, using all of the EX games, including the various iterations of Street Fighter EX and the two games that Arika published that are not Street Fighter. Next will be Darkstalkers, and then I can turn to the SNK titles. I'm doing that one last because it's by far the biggest and most difficult of them all to do.

UPDATE: I really buckled down and finished the lists after a couple of free hours. The King of Fighters rosters were—as anticipated—the most difficult to do. It also reminded me, actually, that there are a lot of really dumb King of Fighters characters. The developers, going back to the very beginning, really, have a strange fondness for introducing characters with bizarre "Japanese street fashion" outfits, although that's admittedly gotten much worse since Falcoon started working for the company. They also have a really bizarre tendency to like to enter little kids in the game, and there are tons of high schoolers and even younger kids padding out the roster. 

Whatever I do with these characters (including simply playing the games) I will very studiously ignore the worst of these.

Capcom vs SNK Pro vs Capcom vs SNK 2

It seems like it should be obvious that CvS2 is better than CvS Pro. But, if you have the Japanese import Dreamcast version of the latter, which I now do, then that's not necessarily true. I've had the PS1 version for some time, and it's notably not very pretty or fluid, although it plays quite well and is a perfectly fine game. The improvements that the Dreamcast version adds make the comparison between the two games a bit more unclear, though—it really does make it a much more pleasant if not even occasionally breathtaking experience. Let's talk about various areas where they differ from each other, and I'll talk about which one offers a better experience overall.

Character Selection. It's clear that the second game has a better character selection than the earlier version. However, this doesn't matter as much as you'd think unless you're a fan of a more esoteric character. I've actually only quite rarely played any character in 2 that isn't in Pro. My go-to characters, down to the second and third string, a bit deeper on the bench, are almost all characters that are in Pro. However, again—there's no doubt that the second game has more characters, and it also has better bosses. Shin Akuma and Orochi Rugal are simply better than the version of Geese and Bison that Pro has. But on the flipside, Pro has a more even theme and tone. While neither game is anywhere near as gonzo and spastic as the Marvel vs Capcom series had become, especially by the time MvC2 came out, there are still some characters that really don't fit the concept of Capcom vs SNK. Which, lets all face it, was really always meant to be about their iconic fighting game franchises, and specifically kind of Street Fighter vs King of Fighters with maybe a Darkstalkers, Fatal Fury or Art of Fighting character that wasn't in KOF thrown in just for kicks. The inclusion of Samurai Shodown and Last Blade characters just don't feel like they belong in this game. And of course while Morrigan was a perfectly fine fit as an unusual offbeat character but not too much so, her sprite was absolutely terrible, and has been mentioned by every reviewer who's ever talked about either of these games. (I should mention that Nakoruru is in Pro, and she seems to show up as a com player way more often than she should.)

I've got to give a slight edge to 2 over Pro, but much more slight than you'd think; only a tiny sliver of advantage.

Gameplay System. I'm covering three different things here: 1) button layout and moveset, 2) the ratio system, and 3) the groove system. While most people would say that 2 beats Pro handily on all three dimensions, I'm going to make the case that it doesn't; it either is the same, or even arguably worse. For my taste, of course.

1) Pro made the decision to switch to a SNK-like layout, using four buttons instead of the default Street Fighter scenario of six. While this meant that some moves had to be abandoned here and there, curiously, nobody's ever complained about the King of Fighters characters feeling move impoverished because they used four instead of six buttons, and nobody has really complained since the first month or two of release about the four button approach of Marvel vs Capcom 2. In fact, in an era when home ports to consoles were becoming much more important than arcade renditions of the games, you could easily make a case that a four button layout is much less awkward than the six button Capcom default. Unless you went out of your way to buy a specialty control pad, after all, you always only had four buttons on the face of your controller. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think the four button layout is better than the six button layout, and I've always been slightly annoyed by trying to figure out the best way to map the six button layout to every four-button (plus triggers) control pad I've ever used to play a Capcom fighting game, from the SNES, the PS1, the PS2, the PS4, the Xbox, the Dreamcast and my USB PC controller. Every single one of them would have benefited from being designed to be a four-button game rather than a six button game. Of course, this isn't an issue for the SNK games, all of which are four button games to begin with... if they aren't even three button games for that matter, which a few of the Fatal Fury titles are.

2) I don't like the ratio system for either game. Luckily, there's actually no reason to play it for either game if you don't like it. Pro has the Pair Mode, where you ignore the ratios and pick two characters of your choice, who are merged into ratio 2, regardless of what they originally had been in the ratio mode. 2 has a slightly better selection; offering a 3x3 mode that is like the pair mode but obviously with three instead of two characters, as well as a regular Street Fighter-like 1x1. Normally, I'd suggest that the 1x1 is essential for the way I like to play, because I don't like having to mentally switch gears between characters. This is one of my bigger complaints with the regular gameplay associated with the King of Fighters games, although most of those titles also offer a well-done 1x1 mode as well. I find, however, that picking two characters instead of three doesn't trigger that reaction in me; I guess switching between two characters I can handle, whereas switching between three is too many to be fun for me and subconsciously stresses me out or something. I can't remember the last time that I played either game using the default ratio system, and I can't imagine why I ever would again. The ratio system simply was a bad idea, and even improving it between Pro and 2 didn't make it worth using, when there are better options right there in both games anyway.

3) I suppose some people like the number of grooves that 2 offers over Pro. I can certainly see that, especially if you're a fan of a particular groove that is unique to 2 rather than Pro. 2 has six grooves; C-A-P-S-N-K. C is almost exactly the same as A-ism from Street Fighter Alpha 3. A-groove is similar to the V-ism of Street Fighter Alpha 3. P-groove is most often compared to the Street Fighter III games, because of the presence of parry. Although parry was difficult to pull off in III, and it's even more difficult to master in this game. If you're really good at it, it's probably the best groove, but I'm not, so I don't care for it. S-groove has the manually charged super meter, and Desperation moves when you're health bar is red, similar to the earliest KOF games. N-groove is similar to the advanced mode that later KOF games started to develop, including 97 and 98 (and maybe 96? I'm drawing a blank now on that one.) K-groove is an interesting mashup of Samurai Shodown features and Mark of the Wolves features, making it a unique groove. This choice is great if you like one of the new grooves, or like playing around with optional things in the system and having lots of choices. There's even a groove edit mode where you can create your own grooves. However, after trying all of them out for a bit, I now only play C-groove on 2. I have no interest anymore in any other groove, although if for some reason I had to pick another one, I'd go for N. Pro only has two grooves, and although they don't have the same names, they are identical to C-groove for Capcom and S-groove for SNK. Since I can't imagine that I'd ever pick another groove again other than Capcom/C-groove, and it's present in both games and works exactly the same in both, the additional choices of 2 offer me nothing that I actually want.

I'd say that the button layout is a very slight advantage to Pro over 2 and a similarly slight advantage goes to 2 over Pro for offering the 1x1 and 3x3 over the 2x2 of Pro. Neither has an advantage in groove selection, because both offer me the only groove that I'm still interested in playing ever again. On this dimension the two games, therefore break even.

Presentation. In terms of the sprites, they are basically the same for both games, and there are, honestly, issues with them. The handful of redrawn Street Fighter sprites (just Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li and M. Bison, I believe) and the obviously newly drawn SNK sprites all look pretty good. Ironically, by the time even the first of these came out, many of the SNK characters had migrated to improved looks; Kyo's NESTS saga look was a big improvement over his Orochi saga look, for instance, but it's the latter that got drawn in the Capcom style. Regardless, that's all nearly top of the line for the era, and can't really be complained about. The rest of the Capcom sprites, however, don't look nearly as good. Everyone always points out how terrible Morrigan looks, and while it's true that she has the worst looking sprite in the game, many of the older Alpha vintage sprites really aren't that much better. Not only that, they really aren't drawn in the slightly more serious style that the SNK characters and redrawn Street Fighter characters are. A few new characters (and by new I mean drawn from much older games) from the Capcom side got ported to 2 that weren't in Pro, like Maki, Kyosuke or Eagle, and they also had to be redrawn in the newer style. The Alpha sprites look fine in their own game, but they are somewhat more cartoonish than the style that the SNK and redrawn Capcom sprites are in, which causes further graphical confusion; they just don't all look like they belong in the same game at all. (To be fair, this is also true even for some 3-D models that are in the same game. SFV has characters that look ridiculous next to characters that look really good. The newly released Akira in particular simply looks like she shouldn't be in the same game at all as the totally whiffed up Ken model.) However, while this is an issue, it's equally an issue for both games, so I can't give either game a leg up in this regard. Other parts of the presentation are different however.

While I don't think either game has really very memorable music, Pro's music is substantially better than the really generic Eurodancy soundtrack of 2. In general, I'd say Capcom was really whiffing on their music selection in this era too; this is the era of Marvel vs Capcom 2; the worst music ever featured in a major fighting game, and Street Fighter III. (To be fair, I'm really only familiar with the Third Strike music. But I didn't like most of that either.) Neither game is anywhere nearly as ridiculous as MvC2 (and yes, I realize that the music has grown on many fans. I'm not one of them. If anything, I find it even more obnoxious the more time passes. But I have other reasons for not really loving that game too.) I think 2's music is comparable in its weird badness to Third Strike, whereas Pro's music is comparable in its pretty generic run-togetherness to Alpha 3. Ironically, I once really liked the music to Alpha 3, but after hearing the really well-done remakes of the classic Street Fighter themes, plus the equally cool stage scenes that Overclocked Remix did (both for the HD Remix of SF2, and on their own before even) and the OST for Street Fighter IV, that Alpha 3 has not aged well in comparison. I still think that both Alpha 3 and Pro are fine for the era in which they came out, and they at least don't distract from the game, like MvC2 does, but they really aren't all that good either.

Otherwise, the look and feel of the stages is also very much better in Pro than in 2. Now, I didn't appreciate this as much for many years, because I only had the PS1 version of Pro, but with the Dreamcast version, it's obvious that many of the stages in this game are literally the absolute best 2-D stages ever produced, while the 3-D stages from 2 (and MvC2 for that matter) are probably the worst stages produced in general. Now, I don't necessarily hate 3-D stages in their own right. I think later 3-D stages, like those in KOF 2002 UM or KOF 1998 UM, for instance, look great, and there's some other really cool console port stages of what were originally 2-D stages in the arcade versions for some games that I also quite like. But I certainly don't think doing stages in 3-D just because you can is an improvement, and the stages in 2 are just awful, with only a couple of exceptions (the two boss stages, as it happens.) Really well-done 2-D stages have aged quite well, and have a kind of timeless beauty to them now that the early 00s 3-D video game design simply doesn't have. That era really kind of is a wasteland of very ugly, blocky polygon graphical design that looks terrible almost across the board, no matter the type of game. Curiously, though—it's less the technical limitations of the era that make the stages so unlovely as it is simply the design of them. I've got to give the edge, and it's a more substantial edge than we've seen before in these comparisons, to Pro over 2.

Total. Now, exactly which of those dimensions are most important to you may vary from what are most important to me. And some of my preferences there are obviously fairly subjective. Although I'll note that with the music in particular, I hear people make repeated mention of the "this is true love we're making" track of the London stage, and I've got to think that they've just developed a nostalgic fondness for an ugly track, the same way many have for "I'm gonna take you for a ride" from Marvel vs Capcom 2 rather than because it's an objectively good song or anything. But for my money, I'd have to say that it adds up to me being more likely now to play Pro than 2. Now don't get me wrong. I played a lot of 2 over the years, and I played probably a bit less of Pro when I had it only on the PS1. But now that I have the Dreamcast version, even with the Japanese, which I can't read a lick of, I just think that I prefer playing that one and probably will for the foreseeable future. All of the "improvements" made to 2 over Pro ended up being improvements that I don't really value that much, meaning that in most respects I can consider it an improvement from an academic perspective, but my own personal experience is actually a downgrade.

Story Summary: Art of Fighting series

The Art of Fighting game came out not too long after Fatal Fury. Like that one, it takes place in Southtown (albeit earlier than Fatal Fury) and features two playable characters, Ryo and Robert, who go through town fighting against gangsters and ruffians on the lookout for Ryo's kidnapped sister (Robert's girlfriend) Yuri. This makes it much more like Final Fight in terms of story, albeit more like Street Fighter or Fatal Fury in terms of gameplay. It turns out she's been kidnapped by Mr. Big, who looks kind of like a typical 70s pimp.

There's a secret boss after Mr. Big, though... Mr. Karate. He's a guy who wears a mask, and he's got Yuri kidnapped. And the then the game ends on a cliffhanger after you beat Mr. Karate, right after Yuri starts to tell you who this masked Mr. Karate really is.

And this is where the story really starts; in the first game, it's pretty straightforward and pretty much the same as Final Fight; just go through town beating up some bad guys and find the kidnapped girl, beat the final boss, and she's saved. Hurray. But what we find out when Art of Fighting 2 starts is that actually Geese Howard is the real culprit. He's killed Ryo's mother, and sent Takuma Sakazaki (Ryo and Yuri's father) into hiding. Mr. Karate is, himself, Takuma, playing some game where he's trying to protect his children by working with Mr. Big, yet also keeping Yuri in his pocket so Geese can't reach him. Anyway, whatever exactly the plot of gang activity was that was going on in the first game (it's never explained exactly what it is other than "gangsta stuff", basically) was foiled by Ryo and Robert, another tournament takes place in the second game. This time, you go fight "young Geese". When you beat him, he simply flees to Japan, plots the murder of Jeff Bogard, who's been poking around investigating him, and presumably he's been chased out of Southtown for the time being, only to reappear some ten years later during the Fatal Fury game.

Of course, when Ryo appears in Fatal Fury Special, he's not aged, and when both the Art of Fighting teams and Fatal Fury teams appear in King of Fighters, they're the same age that they are in their own respective titles. This is because the King of Fighters takes place in an alternate time line. While it makes off-hand references to the events of the series to which they come from, no timing of any kind of implied.

There's a final Art of Fighting game, and while it also features both Ryo and Robert, the protagonist of the story is now Robert rather than Ryo. He runs into a girl he knew as a child, who's father is missing, and he runs around in the Sonoran border region of Mexico looking for her, and fighting with bounty hunters, and others who are all in it for some alleged cash prize. Her father was kidnapped and killed by Wyler, who's a boss I'd like to see make a comeback sometime. Together they've developed some kind of flawed super soldier serum, who turns him into a Mr. Hyde monster. 

Although Wyler is a bad guy who killed this girls father, at the end, his mind is broken and childlike, and she decides that she needs to stay and take care of him (I don't get it.) Robert shrugs and leaves, heading for the airport. 

Curiously, alone in the world of fighting games, here we actually have the resolution of a romantic plotline. Yuri and Ryo come to see Robert off at the airport, and then after he exits stage right, Ryo pulls a ticket out of his pocket, gives it to Yuri, and tells her to go get him. Yuri then follows Robert into the sunset. Every other potential couple is locked in the indecisive phase.

I think this may be a feature of Japanese storytelling, though. Ranma ½, the only anime that I've ever liked, does this too. The entire 7 season run of the series is based on an "everyone knows that they're supposed to get together" (except for the rivals, of course) but they never really actually do. While it's not my favorite genre by a long shot, I have watched a number of rom-coms with my wife, and I actually do think Pride & Prejudice is a true classic of English literature that everyone of English heritage should read. It's hard to imagine any of them being satisfying if they spend all this time on set-up and then refuse to give you the payoff at the end. 

Anyway, I don't know that the Art of Fighting series is worth checking out if you haven't already. The gameplay is generally much more primitive than even the earliest King of Fighters games. I will give Art of Fighting 3 generally some credit for having absolutely beautiful backgrounds and stages (although the zoom feature often makes them appear unattractively pixelated) and for having an interesting tangent story that does something different than all of the other SNK stories, really. Other than that, the story is only marginally more interesting than Fatal Fury, if it is indeed more interesting, and is notable only for the introduction of characters who were later real standards in the King of Fighters games. However, it's Terry, not Ryo, who became the de facto mascot of SNK, and while the conceit of King of Fighters was bringing together the heroes from a number of games in the same title in a crossover jamboree (the Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury teams being the most notable here), they also had their own protagonist(s) and villain(s) that were unique to King of Fighters. The Art of Fighting team, like the Fatal Fury team, ultimately end up becoming sidelined, and even come and go to some degree. (Although Terry and Ryo always make an appearance, at least. The rest of the cast sometimes rotates a bit.) Yuri makes an interesting pivot from being merely damsel in distress to being an active participant before it's all done.

But mostly the story offers little that can be useful. I think Final Fight's "go beat up bad guys and rescue the damsel in distress from gangsters" storyline is better, even though that's a beat-em up, not a fighter. The cliffhanger reveal that Mr. Karate is actually Takuma Sakazaki, Yuri and Ryo's own father, is more of a headscratcher than an interesting and compelling plot twist. It never really makes any sense why kidnapping Yuri is supposed to help with anything at all. Mostly, I think it's important to establish the relationship between the Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury characters, although given the time depth that's supposed to separate them, that becomes an interesting aside rather than something important.

In the KOF Maximum Impact line, Ryo is older and is now Mr. Karate instead of Takuma. At least in his alternate costume, although he does have a "classic" look too. This lends a little bit more credence to the idea that the Maximum Impact games are actually supposed to be a continuation of the Art of Fighting => Fatal Fury series, although since they go a completely different direction than the Mark of the Wolves game, I have no idea how that's supposed to work. Mark of the Wolves also features a character who's part of Ryo's karate tradition, and supposedly Ryo's protege, with the 70s blaxploitation look and bizarre name of Khushnood Butt (sometimes Marco Rodriquez), furthering the ties between the two series. 

It'd really have been nice to see a bit more of the two series tied together in Mark of the Wolves 2, but after SNK went bankrupt and the new SNK Playmore had to reacquire their own I/P from Eolith, or whomever ended up with it, and the hardware underwent major revision, that game was shelved. It was (supposedly) about 70% done, but since it was going to go on the old MVS hardware, one can pretty confidently assume that it'll never be revisited again at this stage, unless someone else does it.

The artists who did the Streets of Rage 4 reboot asked fans what they'd like to see them do some fan art mockups for, and Mark of the Wolves 2 was what was picked, though, suggesting that there's still some demand out there for this stuff. They turned out a pretty nifty mock up (see below) which seems to open the possibility, no matter how remote, that maybe some continuation of the Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury stories will yet happen, through a revised Mark of the Wolves 2, or some such title.

Character Focus: Terry Bogard

Since I just did a summary of the Fatal Fury series, it seems appropriate to focus briefly on Terry Bogard, the star and protagonist of that series, and my favorite of the SNK lineup of characters to play. In a KOF playthrough, I almost always turn to Terry first and most, and he's the character I'm most comfortable and familiar with of the SNK lineup.

That said, he's had a lot of changes over time. Not just to his look, but moves come and go in bizarre fashion. Some of his appearances have a move list twice as long as some of his other appearances. For his pretty radical redesigned look, which appeared in Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves and was used as well in King of Fighters 2003 and XI, he didn't have one of his signature moves: Rising Tackle. He's still a great character to play without it, but missing it was very strange.

Speaking of which, Rising Tackle is usually a flash-kick motion to execute, but for some of the later Orochi saga games, and King of Fighters 98 in particular, it was a dragon punch motion. Then it went back to being a flash kick again in 99 and beyond. So weird.

While Terry's initial backstory is that he was driven by the need for revenge against Geese for the murder of his father, Jeff Bogard, he kind of evolved into the voice of cool, chill, laid-back wisdom from the cast; the one everyone saw as a legend, who gave encouragement, etc. Although this may be a weird Japanese-ism, he doesn't appear to have been too smooth with the ladies. Blue Mary obviously had a thing for him, but it doesn't appear that they actually ended up together for long after all, according to Mark of the Wolves anyway, where no mention of her is to be found. Although to be fair, in SNK fighting games, everybody already has a coupled up relationship with someone else, or they never actually seem to close the deal (Art of Fighting 3 Yuri and Robert being the only exception I can think of.)

Terry also is obviously connected to his brother Andy Bogard and his friend Joe Higashi. The three of them are the OG Fatal Fury team from the King of Fighters, also known sometimes as the Italy team, because I guess that's where Andy prefers to live, or something. He's had some other team-ups too, though: in 99 when teams were four people, Mai was on the team, for instance. In 2000 and 2001, it was Blue Mary, but alternate strikers were all over the map: Geese Howard being particularly associated with Terry, for instance (Duck King, Billy Kane and Ryuji Yamazaki being other alternates associated with the team.) In the Ash Crimson saga, the teams got significantly mixed up; Terry's Fatal Fury team in 2003 had Terry, Joe and Tizoc. In XI it was Terry, Kim and Duck King. XIII and XIV were back to the classic line-up.

Because he's been turned into this friendly, laid-back kind of personality, he seems to be friendly enough with everyone on the Fatal Fury roster, and most of the King of Fighters roster, except for overt villains or their henchmen. Billy Kane has evolved over time into being more of a rival than an enemy.

And of course, his closest associated character in recent years is Rock Howard, since after Geese's death, Terry took him in and raised him.

Anyway, I've got some concept art of Terry. His classic look actually has more variations than some realize; in the earliest Fatal Fury game, his jacket was a jacket with rolled up sleeves to below his elbow, not a vest with ripped off sleeves. Later, some of his Fatal Fury appearances had a regular t-shirt under his vest with an actual sleeves, although his classic look is sleeveless. His leather bomber jacket and no hat or ponytail Mark of the Wolves look (sometimes called Wild Wolf) is his most notable alternate, and lots of Terry fans somewhat reluctantly (because it's not classic) admit that they like it better. I'm not reluctant at all about it; the only complaint I have about the bomber jacket look is that he never seems to have his Rising Tackle move. People don't seem to love his KOF XIV look, but it seems like a slightly redesigned variation on his very original look to me.

Anyway, here's some alternate concepts that SNK have developed. Some of them are pretty cool. Some of them are stupid beyond belief.

The classic look to the far left. Next to it is the Mark of the Wolves look, with the addition of a ball cap. All of the rest I've never seen before, but I think that they're actually really good. I'd happily use all of them as alternates.

Some variations on the original Fatal Fury 1 design. they ended up turning into the KoF XIV design below.

The classic look and some really bizarre alternates, below. I actually don't mind that green jacket thing. A kind of male cosplay of Blue Mary, I guess. Blue Terry? I think that it might have been an alternate costume in Maximum Impact 2, but I never played that game. The big belt pouch on the classic is a new addition that isn't a terrible idea. The far right two concepts have ridiculously big belts. But then, so did Blue Mary. The American flag look is ridiculous, of course. The black, gray and red one is... I dunno. I need to think about it to see if it grows on me or not. Probably not, though.

The Mark of the Wolves costume (albeit in a pretty stylized style) along with some of the worst alternatives I've ever seen. What is he, a Vegas performer in the 70s here? A stripper who can't make up his mind if he's going for a cowboy or a fireman persona?

I like the concept of a good alternate, and as the Mark of the Wolves design shows, even a really bold new direction isn't necessarily a bad new direction. However, most of these designs are... not all that great. The top bunch are all designs I could get behind, however. Some of these designs look like what ended up coming out as weird alternates in KOF 2006, which was called Maximum Impact 2 in Japan. In fact, that game is famous for—mostly—the bizarre alternate costumes. Other than that, it was a kind of predictable and boring Tekken clone with some SNK characters.