Capcom Fighting Collection 2 offers a pack of cult fighting classics... and also Ingrid

It hits different when it's your nostalgia. I've been with video games since the Atari 2600 and I've enjoyed retro games since I was a kid– that is to say, I've always loved going back and playing old games and consoles. But playing my cousin's Intellivision in 1993 is an altogether kind of nostalgia from being a grown-ass man playing a "retro collection" of the games I played in my coming-of-age years. These are games I lived through. I was there.

Part of me wants to say Capcom Vs. SNK 2 isn't that old. But I know. Haruhi Suzumiya is old too.

You can sum up Capcom Fighting Collection 2 by simply saying “The Dreamcast years”, but that alone doesn’t account for how weird this period is for Capcom’s storied family of fighting games. This is the time period during which Street Fighter fades from a mainstream to a cult franchise, and aside from the lead title meant to sell this collection (Capcom Vs. SNK 2, and arguably Power Stone), this is an odd set of cult video games.

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3D experiments

In the late 90s, mainstream audiences are actively rejecting 2D video games on account of their shiny new Playstation 1s. Hardware companies are even actively blocking 2D games from release, foolishly believing that the technology has passed them by permanently.

It’s a tough time to be Capcom, the publisher that’s made its name on the best 2D pixel art in the business. (They had a lot of trouble getting Mega Man games published!) A final attempt at a 2D opus, Street Fighter III, is a total bomb. While Arika’s 3D Street Fighter EX series competently lands the game feel, it’s largely agreed that something is missing when you compare its rudimentary 3D models and animation to the heights of the 2D Street Fighter and Darkstalkers series.

There isn’t a lot for Capcom to do at this time but experiment and see what sticks in 3D, and that’s a lot of what you get in this collection. Project Justice is the second and final game in the Rival Schools series, a 3D fighting game in a hot-blooded high-school shonen manga world where everybody from the sports teams to the delinquent gangs has a representative warrior. Plasma Sword is the sequel to Star Gladiator, a game which was originally actually pitched to LucasArts as a licensed Star Wars fighting game.

(LucasArts opted to do it themselves and made the famously lousy Masters of Teras Kasi, leaving fighting game nerds like me to wonder what could have been if Capcom had been allowed to leave their mark on the Star Wars universe the way they did with Marvel’s superheroes.)

These games have even more cartoony and over-the-top characters than Street Fighter, and they both bleed genre personality and artistic detail, but it’s the gameplay that isn’t quite there yet. 3D ultimately has its own wrinkles to work out, and while these games are like Street Fighter, they feel a little more wobbly and less precise than their razor-sharp dot pixel forbears. And though these games can be played competitively, it doesn’t really feel like they were built with that specifically in mind. But they’ve got tons of unique features and are pretty damn fun— even today— so I’d call them successful experiments for their day.

(Ultimately the 2D-in-3D “feel problem” was solved by Arc System Works’ unsung Battle Fantasia, a game which simply applied 2D hitboxes to 3D models: 2D gameplay with 3D visuals. This game would directly inspire Street Fighter IV, and the rest is history.)

Power Stone is a more ambitious experiment, an attempt by Capcom to break further from the Street Fighter formula and make their next big game franchise a Smash Brothers-style casual fighter. The first game really feels like a new genre entirely: you’re closed in a small room with a rival, able to use all the boxes and furniture lying around— even parts of the architecture– as weapons, and competing to scramble for the Power Stones, which briefly transform you to an overwhelming “super” form. Rather than having players learn a wide range of techniques for their character, the focus shifts to using the environment against your foe and chasing down items. There is no list of special moves to learn, just punches, kicks, and a single high-risk dodge maneuver. This promising proof of concept was a major early Dreamcast hit, but a weak sequel likely snuffed out Power Stone’s sequel ambitions permanently.

Power Stone 2 pushes too a bit far into Smash Brothers’ territory— four players, auto-scrolling stages, boss enemies, and even more items, losing all connection with its head-to-head fighting roots– and for its efforts becomes so similar to Smash that it can only come off as a low-quality knockoff. The maps are bigger than the original game, yet the characters are slower; absolutely sluggish compared to the original. It takes serious time to move from one end of a room to the other, and the game seems to beg for either a dash move or analog controls. Meanwhile the maps feature massive, constant stage hazards that overshadow the fight, forcing the players to focus their attention entirely upon surviving the level rather than actually fighting each other. Too chaotic to appeal as a real player-versus-player fight, and too slow-moving to provide the raucous party fun of Smash, Power Stone 2 hits a dull medium that doesn’t satisfy in any direction.

The rough draft and the swan song

Meanwhile the 2D Street Fighter brand is still ticking, kind of, but who knows for how long. Though it’s not a mainline Street Fighter game, the historic Capcom Vs. SNK project— a dream match that had been brewing for 20 years— basically has the weight of one.

Capcom likes to lead with a rough draft and build from there, and Capcom Vs. SNK (here represented by the slightly fixed-up Pro revision) is pretty rough, alright. Beyond the the initial novelty of new 2D pixel art— including the SNK characters drawn by the Capcom team— lie the weird restrictions of playing the actual game. For starters, the game uses four buttons, leaving Street Fighter characters not quite feeling like themselves. In an ongoing problem with late Capcom 2D games, there’s also a major style clash between sprites borrowed from wildly varying sources (like the famously never-redrawn “1994 Morrigan”), leaving this game and its sequel without a unified character aesthetic.

In the team spirit of King Of Fighters, Capcom Vs. SNK also introduces a “Ratio” system— likely drawn from its own Gundam Vs. games*— where each character has a set “power level” in points, and you’re only allowed to build a team using four points. Typical protagonists like Ryu or Terry are two points, bosses like Bison or Akuma are three points, and bit characters like Yuri or Blanka are one-pointers.

Unlike in the Gundam games— where, of course a high-end prototype Gundam has more and better guns and armor than a humble mass-production Mobile Suit, and the whole meta of the game is built around this idea— ratio doesn’t really work out in Capcom Vs. SNK. One-point characters actually have pretty good HP and damage, to the point where stacking four of them isn't a terrible idea, while the three- and four-point characters are at such a disadvantage that they may as well not exist in practice.

Team composition feels severely limited, as the ratio rule effectively crosses characters off the list as you make your choices. One of the joys of fighting games is picking your fave no matter who, and it spoils the dream match element a little bit when you can't team up characters freely.

CVS1 is also the most “Y2K”-looking game I think I’ve ever played. If you didn't live through it and you’re wondering what Y2K aesthetic was like, it’s literally all in this one video game. Weird curved bars, Impact and computer font, flying arrows everywhere. Synthesized announcer voices. Monochrome on sky blues. It’s also got some really innovative background art and stage intros that are worth seeing for themselves. CVS2 tops it with its overall slick look, cool music, and unforgettable radio DJ voice, but there’s something about the experiments in this old game, like when the garbage fire in an alley magnifies a fighter’s shadow to cover the side of a ghetto apartment building.

The sequel to Capcom Vs. SNK, instant classic that it is, reverses everything I just complained about. It reverts to the Capcom-standard six buttons, adding lots of new moves to fill out the SNK characters and restoring Street Fighter characters to their full functionality. The “ratio” system becomes the “free ratio” system, in which players can adjust the cost of each character on their own, keeping the general idea of the ratio system intact without restricting players from using their favorite characters.

But the most interesting thing Capcom Vs. SNK 2 does by far is to massively expand the previous game’s “groove” system, by which you can choose to play the game with Capcom systems (more like Street Fighter Alpha 3) or SNK systems (more like KOF ‘95.) CVS2 adds four new grooves to the existing two, meaning each character effectively has six meaningfully different variants. Like their predecessors, the new grooves are based on specific Capcom and SNK titles: for example P-groove plays like Street Fighter III, and K-groove is a weird and explosive mash-up of Samurai Shodown and Mark of the Wolves.

Coupled with a very large roster of 48 characters, CVS2 is a wide-open game that offers the player the freedom to play exactly the way they want… though as with any such game, some choices are just better than others and a powerful top tier quickly came to dominate all others in competition. Go online and get some matches against A-Groove Sagat/Blanka/Bison, if you dare. For better and worse, it's a portrait of the era in fighting games compared to today's extremely tuned output: in the 00's wildly overpowered characters created a meta-game all their own.

And CVS2 had better leave players with a lot to mess around with, because it didn’t look like Street Fighter would be back for a while. Rumors circulated at the time that CVS2 would in fact be the last Capcom 2D fighter, and with the kinds of super-advanced 3D games coming out at the time, that was starting to sound plausible. But we'll get back to that.

By the way, here's Alpha 3

Somewhere in there, Sega released the arcade-to-home-back-to-arcade port Street Fighter Alpha (Zero) 3 Upper, which adds features and characters that had been added into the various and extremely packed home versions of Alpha 3. That’s the version of SFA3 we get here: though it’s not the one competitors like due to the removal of some game-defining bugs (as with CVS2 in this collection) it does add guys from Supef SF2, like T.Hawk and Fei Long, to the fun. (Ingrid and Yun, who were added to the PSP port of this arcade game, are not present.) These extra characters don't have the level of detail of a regular character, with choppy animation that appears to me to be cut-pasted in from their original game and touched up to meld with Alpha's anime look.

I’ve always preferred the more conventional Alpha 2, but a lot of people consider this a high water mark for the series, and a segment of those probably appreciated being able to play it without having to worry about getting hit with a 90-second infinite air juggle combo.

Rumors that Capcom was done with Street Fighter around this time might have something to them, as from 2004 Capcom USA came to own the rights to the series up until very recently (it is likely Capcom Japan took back the rights after the flop of Street Fighter V).

Capcom Fighting Evolution: the “dark ages” game

What was referred to as “the fighting game dark ages” by Street Fighter fans is really only a dark age for Capcom’s fighting games. By the mid-2000s fighting games were firmly a niche, cult genre, but plenty of major and minor developers were still cranking them out, particularly in Japan. Arc made its first big splash with Guilty Gear XX, Sega and Namco were still in heated competition via Virtua Fighter and Tekken, SNK’s games were experiencing a weird afterlife, and the cheap Naomi arcade board got a lot of minor games like Melty Blood on the map.

Provided you were not ideologically married to the output of just one company— as much of the nascent fighting game community was at this time— there were actually plenty of fighting games to play. This went double if you were willing to cross the Japanese import divide.

A certain lost Capcom game lived and died in this time. Capcom Fighting All-Stars— a title I’m frankly disappointed isn’t on this collection— was an original 3D fighting game starring various Capcom characters including Strider Hiryu and Haggar from Final Fight. It location tested in arcades one time and was never heard from again. All we have is video of it. CFAS was ambitious (first Capcom game with “cutscene super moves”?) and doesn’t look half bad, but response from that one location test put the game in the trash before anyone else ever got to try it.

The Capcom crossover game that replaced CFAS during this time was a quickie release called Capcom Fighting Evolution. Destined for bargain bins from the start, Capcom Fighting Evolution (aka Capcom Fighting Jam) has the developer working with what they’ve got: a “new” fighting game made out of almost entirely recycled art assets. Reminiscent of (and borrowing quite a bit of animation from) CVS, CFE brings in a few characters from each of its own games over the years for a fight with the one surviving original character from CFAS, Ingrid. (The character design was cute enough that there was apparently demand for Ingrid totally without context: a few figures and so on even exist.)

To call CFE underwhelming is about as kind as I can manage. Capcom has reused assets throughout its time in fighting games at this point, sometimes egregiously so. But CFE manages to finally stretch the goods too thin, reaching a point where even the most forgiving genre diehards were offended by the reheated meal on offer. Remember that this game followed up the massive Capcom Vs. SNK 2.

The most interesting thing the game does is recreate Ingrid as a 2D sprite— which doesn’t work out— as well as bringing in cast from Red Earth/Warzard, another rare game that few outside Japan have ever played (but is on Capcom Fighting Collection 1.) For all of Capcom’s asset reuse over the years, CFE is their only fighting game that genuinely feels cut and pasted together, with the style clash between different games overwhelming, impossible to look past. Hideous paper cutout likenesses of favorite characters lurk in the muddy backgrounds, the easter eggs of the old days going horribly wrong.

Each character in CFE plays like their source game, which leaves characters like Ryu and Guile (limited to Street Fighter 2 rules) terminally boring. The game neither looks nor feels right, and fails to exceed its predecessors, justify its existence, or leave a mark of its own twenty years later. It’s best placed here, in a collection of much better games from a few years prior, as evidence of Capcom’s dark age.

Street Fighter IV would release for console four years later. A different age would begin.

The package

The team that’s been putting out these collections has been on target for the last few years, adding the exact features hardcore fans want (namely online play with rollback, and a proper training mode) to emulated versions of the games that play as close as is possible to the original arcade versions.

From a competitive standpoint, most of the ports of 90s fighting games that people played back in the day, from SNES Street Fighter 2 to PS1 Street Fighter Alpha 3, were too compromised to be competitively valid. For these old games’ communities, it’s the arcade version or nothing.

This goes double for games made for older n0-lag pre-HD monitors/TVs. But the lag time inherent to modern HDTVs is not a problem the collection can really solve, rather than supplying some scanline filters to subtly blur the pixels as they would have been on an old CRT TV. Still, if it’s good enough for the Wazzler, you should be alright.

The downside of sticking directly to the arcade versions is that you don’t get the kinds of long-term extras that were included in the original home versions of these games, just the arcade game. Single-player fans don’t have much to do with this collection aside from beat the games to see their endings and chase achievements. (One of these, rather lazily and cruelly, is “beat every game with every character”, which for this set would mean beating the games over a hundred times.)

There’s that and the gallery, anyway. I must single out the gallery mode for praise, in large part because most players are going to completely miss it. Packed full of character sketches, illustrations, and other production materials, the gallery mode in this game is a major treat for any fan of Capcom’s legendary art team.

Capcom has also changed the rules of a few of these classics for online ranked play in order to save newbies suffering. Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper, for example, is a slightly updated version that never left Japan and which was rejected by the competitive community for removing infinite combos and other bugs. Capcom Vs. SNK 2 likewise uses the bug-fixed “EO” upgrade for ranked, in which, among other things, the famous and newbie-obliterating “roll cancel” bug has been removed. I kind of get where they’re coming from with this, given the overwhelming newbie-killing nature of the bugs we’re describing.

(Imagine getting punched out of the air one time and having that lead into an unbreakable combo which, over the next 60 seconds, drains your entire life bar. Or imagine a Blanka using the ball attack over and over again because, for reasons you do not understand, he's invincible when he does it.)

I get this, but there should probably be a "no holds barred" lobby for the folks who want the sicko stuff. At a point, wider community interest will fade and they're going to be the only people playing this anymore.

What's next?

As I mentioned with my remark about Street Fighter 4– which you can buy for four bucks on Steam right now with all DLC included– there isn't much left in Capcom's fighting game library to authoritatively re-release at this point. The only missing Dreamcast Capcom fighters are Tech Romancer (likely not in this collection due to the mecha designs being owned by Studio Nue) and Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (again, licensing reasons; if it's re-released again, it will probably be sold by itself.)

I could see one last collection with the Street Fighter EX titles, the first Star Gladiator and Rival Schools... and maybe Fighting All Stars this time? C'mon, just let me see it! I don't even care if it's bad!!

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*An endnote: Yes, the Gundam Vs. series started at Capcom with Federation Vs. Zeon and eventually became a permanent fixture in the Japanese arcade fighting scene. (Which is pretty much dead, with Gundam Vs. having survived it.) The devs eventually splintered off from the company and became Byking (Gunslinger Stratos). Of course, the current Gundam Extreme Vs. series is done in-house at Bandai/Namco.