The highly anticipated Capcom Fighting Collection 2 is finally here, and it’s bringing many classic Capcom fighters with it. With iconic titles such as Capcom vs. SNK 2, Plasma Sword, Power Stone, and Project Justice, there’s way too much fun to be had. Thankfully, we at Final Weapon had the opportunity to review Capcom Fighting Collection 2 before its release! So, if you’re looking to see how this collection fares, you’ve come to the right place!
Old School Fighters, New School Tools
Capcom Fighting Collection 2 is one of the few recent Capcom collections that have treated many fighting game fans to a wave of re-releases of classic titles. This time around, the collection continues Capcom’s recent trend of including thoughtfully crafted training modes aimed at making these older titles more approachable for newcomers. These aren’t your average training modes either, as each one is packed with highly customizable features. Players can program the dummy to crouch, block, jump, or even execute recorded inputs. Regarding move lists, they provide extra guidance for mechanics, such as delayed wake-ups in CvS2.
Additionally, several games’ training modes have specialized settings unique to their system mechanics. Project Justice allows you to display invincibility frames during moves, and CvS2 includes guard crush training options. Moreover, for any of you Plasma Sword fans out there, its training mode lets you toggle the dummy’s safe fall behavior.
Also, first introduced in earlier Capcom collections, the Hitbox Viewer makes a comeback for select titles—CvS1, CvS2, and Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper. It visually displays where your character can land hits, which are the red boxes, and where they can be hit, which are the blue boxes. This helps players better grasp spacing, priority, and why certain pokes work the way they do.
Making Classics More Comfortable to Play
Fans of the previous Capcom collections will be happy to know that Marquee Cards are back in Capcom Fighting Collection 2. Accessible from each game’s pause menu, these cards provide quick-reference guides for characters’ special moves, unique mechanics, and input commands. They also just look pretty cool too, so it doesn’t look like jumbled information on a sheet.
Capcom has also included accessibility options to help players execute special and super attacks with ease. Every game in the collection supports one-button inputs for special and super moves. By pressing L1 or LB with a direction, you can perform a character’s special move. Alternatively, pressing L2 or LT plus a direction activates a super move. It’s a great tool for those who struggle with execution, but note that this feature is disabled in online ranked matches when it comes to one-button special moves.
But if you’re just in it for the casual arcade run, the quick save system has your back. At any point during your arcade session, you can save your progress mid-run and reload it from the pause menu. It’s perfect for getting past tough fights without having to restart your entire run.
Display & Customization Options
Capcom Fighting Collection 2 also gives you a fair amount of visual control. In training mode, you can choose different screen filters, background wallpapers, or turn them off entirely. You can even adjust the display size to suit your preference. The display size changes the resolution to look full, wide, or the original look, with some 4:3 aspect ratio options on the side.
A Modern Online Experience for Classic Fighters
No discussion about modern fighting games is complete without mentioning online play. Seeing that it’s the main way people experience fighting games, online modes have to be handled with care. Thankfully, Capcom Fighting Collection 2 does a really good job with this. Players can jump into casual or ranked matches, join online lobbies with spectator support, or compete in global high-score challenges. Furthermore, players can tailor their experience before even entering an online match. You have the option to enable or disable cross-region matchmaking, allowing you to play players who are only in your region or not. You can also choose between the English and Japanese versions of each game, and adjust input delay settings to suit your preferences. Upon entering the match queue, you can play training mode, look at the museum, or play other games while waiting for a match.
However, when playing online ranked matches, each game has its own separate rules. Every game in the collection allows you to play secret characters in ranked matches, except for Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper. Additionally, Project Justice has both edit characters and Kyosuke’s aerial float disabled. And of course, Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper has crouch cancelling off. But the big change with this collection is that CvS2 ranked matches will be on the EO version standard. This means that Roll Cancels will not grant your special moves invincibility frames. The EO version of CvS2 is not the competitive tournament standard amongst the community, so this will be disappointing news for them. Hopefully, Capcom reconsiders this decision for the competitive players and updates the game later.
Hoping for Cross-Play
Other than that, the online experience pretty much has everything you need to enjoy yourself, but I do wish that cross-play was available. It’s very important for fighting games to give online players a wide pool of players they can fight against. Having players of all platforms be able to come together and fight it out would be awesome!
The game does utilize rollback netcode for its online connectivity, so that’s a relief! This type of netcode reduces the overall input lag and visual stuttering in online matches.
Capcom Fighting Collection 2 Review – We Were This Close to Perfection
For the most part, I think Capcom Fighting Collection 2 is pretty solid! I think the main thing that holds this collection back from being perfect is the CvS2 ranked being EO standard and no cross-play. Capcom vs SNK 2 is probably going to be the most popular game in the collection, and I know that many of its players like Roll Cancels. Sure, players can go to lobbies to experience the tournament standard version, but it would be nice if maybe there were separate leaderboards for the EO and non-EO versions.
Also, cross-play is an absolute must to have not just in this collection, but in any fighting game! People just want to be able to turn the game on, start up matchmaking, and find someone quickly. Sure, every platform can have enough people on it, but it would be great if all of them came together to create one matchmaking pool.
Nonetheless, Capcom Fighting Collection 2 is another really good collection that brings back some fantastic classics. If you want to experience these titles on modern platforms, then this is the one for you!
Disclaimer: Capcom provided Final Weapon with a PlayStation 5 copy of Capcom Fighting Collection 2 for review purposes.
