Fatal Fury: Battle Archives Volume 2 is a fine collection of games that feel far more refined than their predecessors. Although IGN sound like a broken record, they have to say that getting three classic titles for under twenty bucks is a pretty fair deal and you can't really complain about the lack of bonus content. But at the same time, IGN are getting weary of seeing the exact same structure in these SNK compilations. Hopefully future releases will be a bit different.
If you want to finish off your Fatal Fury collection, this works well. The games are old but fun and run without any dramatic hitches. Fighting game fans shouldn't have any serious concerns when picking this one up.
DreamStation writes: "Fatal Fury: Battle Archives Vol. 2 is a compilation released by SNK Playmore. It contains 3 games, Real Bout Fatal Fury, Real Bout Fatal Fury Special, and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2: The Newcomers. This is a very bare bones compilation, offering nothing other than the games with a few tweaks. While this isn't a bad thing considering the price, a picture gallery, history of the franchise, or something along those lines would have been appreciated.
The Real Bout games follow the standard gameplay made iconic with the Street Fighter series, but tosses in a few tweaks to set itself apart. The first game in the collection, Real Bout Fatal Fury introduces ring outs, ala Virtua Fighter, and the ability to move into the foreground and background, making the combat a little more fluid and causing the player to think a little more on their feet."
WP reports:
''If there's anything that the '90s taught us gamers over and over again until it rang in our ears while we tried to sleep, it was that hitting other people was a lot of fun, and the faster and more frantic the combat gets, the more fun it is. From Street Fighter II to Killer Instinct, Time Killers to Fighter's History and the dozens of stops in between, much of the decade was spent simply kicking the crap out of the other guy, whether it was a real person or a CPU opponent. Few games did it better than Fatal Fury.
Battle Archives is a series put forth by SNK-Playmore in recent months to go through the old library of NeoGeo fighting games that riddled the arcades in the early and mid-'90s. Not all of them were memorable - who would go out of their way to play World Heroes? - but the shining star was the long-running Fatal Fury series. Lasting most of a decade through nine different sequels before spinning off into the now-legendary King of Fighters series, Fury ran a strong race against high-end competitors like SF2. While Street Fighter II may have invented the genre in 1990, Fury brought a few more things to the table: substantially more speed, a robust combo system, and a pseudo-3D system using "planes" to move characters back and forth while still keeping 2D combat roots.''
The Armchair Empire writes: "One of these days I'll finally kick the nostalgia habit. My game library is cluttered with compilation collections of video games because I can't quite seem to come to grips with the fact I hardly ever play these games but I'm comforted by the fact that the classic games are there, ready to be played if the mood hits me. This is precisely why Fatal Fury Battle Archives Volume 2 finds a home on my Classics shelf."
