For some of us, Fatal Fury Battle Archives Vol. 2 will bring back memories of the classic red and white striped Neo Geo arcade cabinets. For others, it will just bring back memories of a time when we had arcades. Ah, but I digress. This volume of the series brings 3 Fatal Fury classic arcade games to the PS2: Real Bout Fatal Fury, Real Bout Fatal Fury Special, and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2: The Newcomers. Spanning from 1995 until 1998, this is when the series still had its classic looks, and when the series was starting to look a little more modern and polished.

Of course, the first game in this collection shows its age the most. The color palette is sparse here, so everyone is a little more simple and cartoony here. By the time you get to Real Bout 2, things have improved quite a bit, and the detail level has gone up quite a bit. As far as the average 2D fighter looked around their peak era in this time frame, this last game is pretty close to the average. This is a pretty faithful port of the arcade graphics as well.

A lot of SNK fighters seemed to go for a "casual" fighting theme for their background music. It's as if people met on the street, beat the tar out of each other, and then treated themselves to hamburgers and ice cream sundaes. So, for the most part in this series, the music is pretty laid back, and a bit catchy. Sometimes they experiment with voices in the background music, such as Duck King's odd hip-hop flavored background music. Overall, voices are pretty clear in this collection of games, so you're not going to be listening to garbled, static-laden sound effects like you might have a few years prior to these games.

Fatal Fury Battle Archives Vol. 2 features a pretty consistent cast of characters, for the most part. Terry Bogard, Andy Bogard, Mai Shiranui, and Blue Mary are just a few characters that keep making it through. The story, like most fighting games, is sparse and takes a backseat to the action.

It seems like at this point in time, the Fatal Fury series was trying to distinguish itself among the throng of 2D fighters with the idea of having foreground and background planes that you could cross into. As far as I'm concerned, it didn't do much to add to the depth of the game. But I'd have to admit, it made it stand out among other arcade fighters, and probably managed to lure newcomers to the game. The series also starts to dabble in background interactions like being able to knock your opponent into objects or out of the ring for a win. Otherwise, this is a pretty classic fighter with standard special moves, kicks, punches, and throws. You can win with some basic tactics, but the game offers a lot of different options to experiment with and master. Notable are the "fake-out" moves that you can use just to trip up your opponent. These are probably only useful against a human opponent. But lets face it, when you're up to the skill level where you can learn an extra set of fake moves, you're probably just toying around with your opponent anyway.

The three games follow basic arcade-style play where a challenger can jump in at any time. You can, as usual in SNK ports, customize your character colors. It's pretty simple to switch between the games and customize colors for each of them before you get into the game. Standard sound and screen position adjustments are also available as well as a sharp or soft focus to the overall look of the game. The menu system is pretty simple to use here, with every game available from a central menu system.

All the games in Fatal Fury Battle Archives Vol. 2 start out set to a normal difficulty. MVS will give you the classic arcade difficulty setting if you so desire. As you go up in difficulty levels, the CPU opponents predictably become faster and make use of special moves more frequently. On normal, this isn't the easiest fighter, and takes a lot of practice and patience for a newcomer to the series.

It doesn't help that the control scheme gets slightly updated in each game, so when you go forward a game or two, you may find yourself having a much harder time. It may be a difficult game simply due to the fact that there is just so much to learn for each game. Things like the aerial turnaround and the crouching walk seem to be more of a distraction than a useful thing to spend time on learning. Add in the fake-out moves and the 3 plane system, and you've got quite a bit of superfluous activity going on.

The complexity of Fatal Fury Battle Archives Vol. 2 is just as much its best asset as its worst. Not content to give you the typical light and strong punch and kick control scheme of most fighters, this game gives you a load of intricate controls to learn. Real Bout Fatal Fury, the first game in this collection is probably the worst for this. There are 3 planes to fight in: foreground, main, and background. For the most part, I ended up getting aggravated with this feature, and just wanted to "get on with the fight" when an enemy escaped to another plane. Another feature that stands out is the ability to turn around during a jump. You really have to focus on finding opportunities to use it, and not surprisingly, it got cut out in the last game in this series.

It's hard to come back to this series after all this time and say how well the controls work. You fought to a slower beat back then, and you really only get a glimpse of what they later evolved into here. Though this is some old-school fighting here, the complexity and unique controls related to each game in this series make it anything but simple. Mastering this series will take some time, but it's hard to say whether you'll want to spend the time to learn it. Either way, if you're looking for a faithful conversion of these games in the Fatal Fury series, you'll find it here. Luckily, this, along with several other SNK anthologies, is going for a reasonable bargain price.