Considered by many as the overshadowed sequel in the dawn of its predecessor's undeniable success, Final Fight 2 deserves at least some credit for its efforts. It does practically reuse the same formula story-wise and gameplay-wise from the first entry in the series, but changes have been made to keep Final Fight 2 from being a simple remake of the previous game with different characters and levels.
Released in 1993, Capcom put out a sequel to their 1989 smash hit Final Fight, whose fast-paced, addictive gameplay and cool characters sucked the quarters out of kids' allowances everywhere. It was a massive step in the right direction for beat-em-ups, and with the Street Fighter II (along with its numerous updated versions) being all the rage at the time, it was clear that fighting games were emerging as the latest gaming craze. And that made Final Fight a must - everyone just loved playing as Haggar, Cody and Guy as they cleaned up the crud-covered streets of Metro City, leaving the corpses of thugs and entire families of Andores everywhere in its wake. And it certainly enjoyed enormous success in the pioneering of the beat-em-up as Street Fighter II did for the fighting games. So how do you top a four year-old game that's been showing some considerable age? You make a sequel that plays just like the game before it, with some minor updates and changes to keep the experience fresh. And while some changes were made for the better, there were some missteps - but that doesn't stop Final Fight 2 from being a great beat-em-up to mash through.
As a direct sequel, the story picks up a little more time-specific than the ambiguous "sometime in the 1990s" from the first game. While you don't have to have played the previous one to understand this game's story, it does help to know who the characters are and the basic premise of it. Time has passed since the destruction of Mad Gear, and peace has been restored to the city since then - in other words, Mike Haggar's friends finally got lives - Cody went off to take a vacation with Haggar's daughter, and Guy goes on a journey to train and find himself. Some may find the disappearance of the classic trio rather disappointing, but the new characters make up for it - especially if you weren't really into the older characters to begin with. This time around Haggar - still living it up as the mayor of Metro City - gets a distress call from Guy's friend named Maki Genryusai saying that Guy's fiancée Rena (who is also her sister) and his sensei Genryusai (and her father) have been kidnapped by Mad Gear, who apparently has secretly regrouped in a plot of revenge. Haggar agrees to work together with her - seeing how Guy stuck his neck out for him after everything from the first game, he bails out of his office and dons his crime-fighting outfit once again - in other words, he just yanks off his shirt. An old friend named Carlos Miyamoto, a South American friend of his, also gets in on the action - and so the three are off to Eurasia in search for Mad Gear.
While it isn't the most original story I've heard, it isn't exactly cookie-cutter material either. It's actually rather passable to an extent if you're not the kind that actually expects a decent story out of a beat-em-up - it's easy to follow and sets the premise of the game, which does the job right. With Haggar as the only returning character from the previous game, the new characters fill in the holes rather nicely - both character-wise and in terms of gameplay. Haggar's the tough mayor who seeks justice and peace in his city, as everybody should know. But then there's Maki and Carlos, whose backstories aren't really so bad - in fact, they're really fleshed out. You should probably know that there's two versions of Maki Genryusai - the Japanese and American take on the character are vastly different. In Japan, she's revealed as a hot-blooded troublemaker and the head of a brutal motorcycle gang, but in America, she's portrayed as the crime-fighting, violence-hating action heroine. Either way, she is an interesting character who is deeply concerned for her family's lives - and that is a pretty good motive to travel around the world beating up bad guys at least twice her size. Compared to Maki, Carlos is a pretty mysterious guy - while he does claim to be paying off a debt that he owes to Haggar, you as the player really wouldn't know what his origins with Haggar really are simply because you've never seen him before in your entire life. To put it short, Haggar's the all-around tough guy, Maki's the speedy bike chick, and Carlos is the - who's that guy again? It would have been nice to see Carlos as fleshed-out as Maki, or as a different, more appealing character altogether, but at least he's good at fighting - which is important. What's good is that there's three characters and not two like in the original American version of the first Final Fight, which only had Haggar and Cody with Guy nowhere to be seen. It was nice to have three characters this time around without the feeling of being cheated because a character was missing. This is also the first SNES game in the series to have two players be able to play cooperatively through the game, and it should be given credit for that because that feature was absent in the previous game.
Either way you look at it you're going to be traveling all over the world in many different countries, and that'll take you at at most ten minutes if you're aiming to blow through it and die quickly. Take it seriously and expect at least an hour of arthritis-inducing action. The game's rather short like the first one, but since there's so many rooms and bosses it sure does feel longer. You'll be heading off to countries like Hong Kong, France, and Holland (just to name a few) in search for the Genryusai family, and for the sake of Guy's love interest because he's such a player like that. There's a lot of enemies in this game - and while neither Roxy and Poison nor Billy and Sid make appearances, there's still the Andore family to beat up and there are new bosses to yell swear words at in rage. Some brawlers are harder than others, many utilize different strategies such as jumping in off-screen, blocking, and grabbing to shake up the action a little. It's always fun to analyze each enemy's tactics and utilize their weaknesses against them with success, and the game plays a lot similar to the previous one since the controls are pretty much identical. Chances are you'll be at least a little frustrated with the enemies, which can lead to some lame, cheap deaths.
Bonus stages do make a return in different forms - the car destruction is back (unfortunately the "Oh my God" guy doesn't make a cameo) and there's one where you have to destroy all of the flaming oil drums with accurate timing so that you don't burn yourself. They're a nice addition, though I found the latter overly challenging - but it's nice to see the bonus levels make a return. I'm still missing the car guy though. There's other cool stuff in the game such as characters that would later make it into the Street Fighter series, such as one of the in-game bosses Rolent (later Rolento) and Hugo (Andore). Even someone as obscure as Maki whose only major appearance in the Final Fight franchise was in this game would later be included in Capcom vs SNK 2 and Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper.
With the increase of Capcom's knowledge in the SNES hardware it isn't hard to notice the improvements in graphics, sound, and music. Some may consider the newer environments bland and dull-looking, and I do agree partially - but the game isn't totally ugly either. The sounds in this game are pretty good, with everything sounding as they should - although I did find a few sound errors here and there leading to some temporary audio problems. The compositions in Final Fight 2 are surprisingly well-done - compared to the awesome score of the original this sequel holds up pretty well in terms of music - the boss fights are always complimented by the game's ridiculously catchy tunes. Action-wise, it gets pretty amped when there's great music to break a few skulls to - though only a few tracks stand out while the rest sound adequate at best.
At a glance, Final Fight 2 isn't only a sequel but a rather worthy successor to its predecessor. But as you look deeper it's easy to see where missteps were taken, such as the overly-similar gameplay elements to the first game, the music and sound, the environments, and others. Not every game is perfect, and not every sequel manages to pull off the "better than the first" like Street Fighter II or Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and this game is an example of that. However, what manages to make Final Fight 2 a great beat-em-up is what they didn't change from the previous game. It still retains the classic brawling frenzy from the first game and it does have Haggar in it. I just wish that there was a little more to the gameplay than the "beat up the bad guys, walk right" formula, and a little more changes could have been made to make the action a little less bland and similar to the first game. But the story isn't half-bad and neither are the new characters - and Final Fight 2 should be given more credit because it does provide an fun, intense beat-em-up experience.