Capcom vs SNK 2

I've had two copies of this over the years; I played it for a long time on the old Xbox, actually, in its "EO" form, although I never had any interest in the EO functionality. I have it now on my PS2, since my Xbox has gone to the Happy Gaming Ground in the sky. This game came out, depending on your perspective, either at the beginning of the nadir of Capcom's fighting game history, or perhaps at the very end of their peak. Regardless of what you think of the trajectory of Capcom's fighting game development in the very early part of the Millennium, there are certainly some aspects of this game that I can complain about (and I will; stick around to the bottom of the page!) but overall, I have to also congratulate it on being one of the best games in the Capcom line-up, certainly one of the best at the time it came out, and one that still (mostly) holds up as a good game today. Some of the things that some people complain about with regards to the game are specifically reasons why I like it, especially compared to the more or less contemporaneous Marvel vs Capcom 2. For instance, many thought that the roster, while having loads of options, was way too heavily skewed towards only a couple of franchises, and that the game could more fairly be called Street Fighter vs King of Fighters rather than Capcom vs SNK. This was even more true in the first installment than here in #2, however, as many of the characters added for 2 were from other franchises, including some Last Blade and Samurai Showdown characters on the SNK side, and Rival School and Final Fight characters added on the Capcom side. Personally, I don't necessarily care for these characters, nor do I think that they fit very well with the theme, vibe, and tone of the rest of the game, however. Honestly, Street Fighter vs King of Fighters and maybe Fatal Fury was all that I wanted from the game anyway. The overt, over-the-top, blatant silliness and spastic hyperactivity of Marvel vs Capcom 2 was a major turn off to me, and even if it hadn't been, having this one be a more toned down and "straight", if not exactly necessarily serious, alternative was welcome anyway. Having the ability to use these characters intermixed with each other was just tons of fun, and I enjoyed it immensely. Mostly, the character selection was really good, and while I would have swapped out a few that we got with a few that we didn't here and there if I had been in charge, I really don't have much to complain about with it either.

It didn't hurt that the gameplay was really, really good. While the bizarre ratio system of the first game is present, you can ignore it completely if you want and play 3x3 matches where the ratios are flattened to the same level, or even simply play best two out of three 1x1 matches, which is, of course, my favorite way to play fighting games, and nine times out of ten, that's how I played this. There were two grooves in the first game, Capcom and SNK, which more pedantically could be called "Alpha 3 A-ism" vs. "King of Fighters '94". That's expanded to six in this game, grooves C-A-P-S-N-K representing Alpha 3 A-ism, V-ism, and X-ism in order for the C-A-P grooves, and King of Fighters '94-95, King of Fighters '96-98, and Samurai Showdown (with a Mark of the Wolves feature added in too) for the S-N-K grooves. While the choice is nice, especially for people who prefer slightly more esoteric system mechanics, after trying all of them out for some time, I decided that life's too short for me to play with anything other than C-groove.

While the game is technically a dream match, so they could do all kinds of weirdness with the story, such as it is, they used this as an excuse to bring back some of the most iconic bosses from either series; Shin Akuma on the Capcom Side, and Ultimate Rugal on the SNK side, him being slightly redesigned visually, but exhibiting his most "bossy" set of moves from the games where he really was an ultimate challenge and one of the main sources of the expression "SNK Boss." But here it's welcome as an appropriate end game challenge; on reasonable difficulty levels these characters are hard to beat, but not insane. You have to qualify to fight the hardest of the bosses by having earned sufficient points during your collective matches. If you don't, you actually get different characters and a different stage for your end game boss battle; for instance, you might qualify only for regular Akuma and Rugal on a less dramatic stage. These two boss stages are fantastic looking; one of them is the roof of a Japanese castle in the rain, the other is the roof of some building, but the focus is more on the flames and devastation of the city around it in the background.

Sadly, it's here that I need to turn to the complaints that I have about this game. Some of them are artifacts of the time that the game was made, but most of them were the results of decisions made by Capcom that could have been otherwise. The backgrounds are all 3-D, like they were in Marvel vs Capcom 2, and like that game, they are generally uninspired, boring, often downright ugly, and look not only very dated, but integrate poorly with the sprites in the foreground. I actually like most of the stages in the previous Capcom vs SNK game better even though I only have the PS1 version of it where they are signficantly downgraded from the arcade and Dreamcast version; they are good old-fashioned 2-D artwork stages, but there's a kind of timeless beauty to them that jumping on the 3-D bandwagon before 3-D graphics really looked all that great yet does not have. In fact, in general, although the journalistic press was always complaining about Capcom's reliance on 2-D graphics, probably adding pressure to upgrade in some way, the reality is that some of the their better games actually look significantly better today than other games that were seen as 3-D graphical marvels of the time, like Halo or Vice City. Old-fashioned isn't necessary grognardy and stodgy, and new-fangled is often just kind of faddish, or still having growing pains. I wish that the stages from the first game were usable, and a few new ones in the same style had been added. It would have looked tons better, actually.Then again, although we didn't know it yet, the problems with gaming journalism were no doubt already in place back in 2001, and even if they weren't, it doesn't mean that journalists didn't have their own biases and opinions that may or may not have really been relevant relative to the market they were writing for. I mean, c'mon--I noted that for movie critics way back in the 80s even.

That said, the sprites are a bit of a mixed bag too. While the SNK characters obviously had to be newly drawn and look reasonably good considering the lower resolution of the sprites relative to the backgrounds, only a few of the Capcom characters were new to this type of game and had to be newly drawn: Eagle, Maki and Kyosuke, for instance. A handful of others were anyway: Ken, Ryu, Bison and Chun-Li. The rest of the characters had to make do with their aging Alpha series spries, and generally look less impressive. The worst one, which every review mentions, but you kind of have to because it stands out so badly, is Morrigan, who had the oldest and crudest sprite, from the very original Darkstalkers game. I know that drawing characters is time consuming and therefore consumes a fair bit of development cost, but it would really have been better had they splurged just a bit and redrawn the last third or so of the characters that hadn't been yet. Also in the presentation department, the music is sadly extremely forgettable and sounded dated as soon as it came out. It kind of sounds like "turn of the millennium stock library of VGM clips" with only a very small handful of minor exceptions. Like with the backgrounds, this is a step back from the first game in the series, although the first game wasn't exactly burning the stereos of fans with the awesome tracks either. The cut-scenes and even the opening animation also feature embarrassingly and comically inept English grammar. I don't know why they didn't have Capcom USA review that before releasing it; it couldn't possibly have been very difficult to have done so. I think that this is part of the culture of Capcom, though--Yoshinori Ono, who later went on to become the godfather of Street Fighter's revitalization a few years after this, once said that presentation doesn't matter if the gameplay is good. He contrasted Japanese development practices vs American practices with what sounds like just a touch of smugness by calling American developers more concerned with style than substance, basically. While there is some truth to this, it's also a very shortsighted viewpoint that only someone operating in Japan, where the competitive arcade culture is still a thing, would ever say. In a market that has migrated to home consoles and people mostly playing by themselves, presentation and a bunch of modes that keep single players with something interesting to do is paramount in making a successful title that sells and will still be played and remembered a few months after its release. In fact, that attitude is almost certainly a significant contributing factor to the flop that was the Street Fighter III franchise. Which, actually, Ono also worked on.

These unfortunate decisions mar would could otherwise have been a truly incredible game and keep it from really being a contender for best in the genre. It was a contender several years ago, but after the release of Street Fighter IV and some of the other more recent titles, it will have to cede that consideration, and have the regret that knowing that a little bit more polish could have resulted in a truly timeless masterpiece. Even so, it's a great game, and still one that I remember very fondly, even if I don't necessarily play it all that much anymore. But when I do fire up my PS2 every once in a while, this is certainly one of the first games that I turn to.