Fatal Fury - Battle Archives Volume 1

The two-line plane is the reason this collection is worth sitting with. Introduced in 1991 so that Terry Bogard could sidestep a fireball by hopping to the back of the stage, it was SNK's answer to the flat plane of its competition, and across the four games gathered here you can watch the idea get argued with, refined, complicated into a three-line version, and quietly set aside. Few compilations document a design experiment this cleanly.

The lineup runs Fatal Fury, Fatal Fury 2, Fatal Fury Special and Fatal Fury 3: Road to the Final Victory. The first is the hardest sell now: a three-character roster in single player, boss fights against opponents who barely observe the same rules you do, and a stiffness that the arcade original shared. Fatal Fury 2 opens the roster properly. Special is the one people still play, a rebalanced expansion with chained combos, faster recovery and Geese Howard restored to the cast. Fatal Fury 3 rebuilds nearly everything, swaps in the oversway three-plane setup and introduces the Jin scrolls plot that would carry into Real Bout.

SNK Playmore's emulation work is straightforward and mostly unfussy. You get the arcade and console variants where they differ, adjustable difficulty, a gallery, and the Japanese Garou Densetsu naming alongside the western titles. Nothing here is restored or remastered in any meaningful sense, and the PS2's handling of the Neo Geo's pixel output is serviceable rather than careful. What matters more is the pad, and the default controller makes the diagonal-heavy motions of the later entries more of a fight than they should be.

Played back to back, the four games make an unusual argument about iteration. Terry, Andy and Joe barely change. The system underneath them changes constantly, sometimes for the worse, and Special stands out precisely because it stopped adding and started tuning. That is the lesson the Real Bout games took forward, and it is visible here in a way it never is when you play these titles in isolation.

As a museum piece it is honest, and as a fighting game purchase it lives or dies on how much time you plan to give the 1993 entry. Most of it will go there.