Fatal Fury Special is a solid 2D fighter for Xbox Live Arcade despite its hard difficulty and missing features.
Fatal Fury Special has a good amount of characters to choose from ranging from favorites Terry and Andy Bogard, Joe, Kim, and Mai to weird characters such as Cheng. Then you have your boss characters as well rounding out the roster. The fact about this Fatal Fury is an unlockable character which is Ryo from the Art of Fighting games. The gameplay is your standard 2D fighting game with some twists where there is two planes that the fighting can take place, which is your normal and far plane. It is a there for a reason and can be used to your advantage avoiding attacks. In the end, it feels like a gimmick and you will usually stick to fighting the normal way unless the computer A.I. is willing to use it. Speaking of the computer A.I., this game is hard as with most SNK games so be prepared to lose a lot in the single player mode and there is limited continues compared to other 2D fighting games on Xbox Live Arcade, which makes the game harder even at the easier difficulties.
The controls for this game are basically light and strong attacks for punches and kicks along with the bumpers to change plane. As with the other 2D fighters, the 360 d-pad is not that great for Fatal Fury Special especially trying to do the desperation super moves with your health bar is flashing requiring multi-directional button combinations to use. An arcade stick like the Hori EX2 is highly recommended to play this game especially nailing the special moves accurately. The only thing that is not good playing the game with the arcade stick is that the default button configuration is not designed for sticks in general and you can only change the face button commands in this game as trigger and bumper commands can not be changed. The single-player mode is actually longer than your average 2D fighter facing every character in the game, in which there are more than ten and there is no other single player modes like a training mode other than arcade mode. The online experience for this game is actually better than Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 with little to no lag at all with most matches. You will obviously run into some laggy matches at times, but those do not happen that much. The online multiplayer is set to player matches, which are similar to the quarter match from Hyper Fighting, and ranked matches. The major flaw with the multiplayer for Fatal Fury Special is the lack of local multiplayer, which is disappointing considering other 2D fighters have both local and online multiplayer.
The presentation of this XBLA port of Fatal Fury Special is pretty bare-bones with your standard menu screen you expect from a Live Arcade game. The graphics are arcade perfect for this port with no major inaccuracies. The characters have huge sprites compared to other 2D fighters and the stages actually look better and more diverse than something like Street Fighter II. The backgrounds range from fighting on a train, a raft, to a boxing ring surrounded by electricity. The sound is also arcade perfect as each character has their own grunts and the music is decent for a fighting game.
Fatal Fury Special is a solid 2D fighter for Xbox Live Arcade even though it has missing features like local multiplayer. Its punishing difficulty for the single player mode may scare off newcomers to the series, but the online play actually performs well for a fighting game. This game is more suited for SNK fans and fans of the genre in general as it provides enough to enjoy the game even if they played this back in the early 1990s. For 400 Microsoft Points, it is the cheapest 2D fighter available on Xbox Live Arcade, but it could have been better if more features were added to make it a more complete package.