ACA NEOGEO WORLD HEROES 2 - (Brocken, Level 1 Difficulty, English Version)
0World Heroes 2 was developed by ADK and released in 1993. Once again, Doc Brown (no, not the one from Back to the Future, the one from THIS series) has realized that after the first World Heroes tournament, there was no determined clear cut winner. Either everyone was blind and wasn't paying attention to the events of what happened after Geegus' supposed defeat, or it was entirely possible Geegus ended up beating everyone's ass effortlessly. Personally, I'm just going to chalk it up to the first theory....
So what does our buddy Doc Brown do? What else? He uses the time machine to regather our original eight historic figures and ends up adding six new fighters to join the fray to see who's the strongest and mightest of them all! Judging from the memorable intro, it looks like these newcomers has Hanzo prepped and sweating! He has a right to be - considering the cheapness of the CPU is even more ridiculous in this sequel.
So, who are the new characters we're dealing with? We have Captain Kidd, a pirate who is based on... Captain Kidd. Redundancy returns. Then there's Erick, a viking who's based on Erik the Red, Ryoko Izumo a judo pracitioner who's based off real life judo champion Ryoko Tani (and also shares similarities with Ryoko from Data East's Fighters' History), Shura, a Muay Thai champion whose based on Nai Khanom Tom, a Muay Thai fighter, Mudman, a Papua New Guinean shaman who resembles the protagonist fromDaijiro Morohoshi's "MudMen" manga series, and lastly Johnny Maximum, a bloodthirsty football player who is based off real life football player Joe Montana (another redundant redundancy).
Geegus also returns, but is now new and improved and therefore named Neo Geegus, and returns as the second to last boss of the game. Yes, you read right - there's a true final boss, and his name is Dio, a dangerous artificial lifeform created by Damned (who also created Geegus) who's hellbent on causing death and destruction everywhere he goes. Dio shares striking similarities with a combination of Kars (personality-wise) and Dio (in namesake only) from Hirohiko Araki's Jojo Bizarre Adventures and being an outright visual homage of Baoh the Visitor, another manga by the same author.
World Heroes 2 virtually plays the same as it's predecessor, although slightly faster but still retains that slow traction movement in comparison to other fighters during the heydays. The option to choose Normal Match and Death Match makes its return, where the latter's stakes still remain the same, spiked arenas, oil slicked floors, battlefields strewn with landmines, and wrestling rings where the ropes are alight with raging fire.
However, in Death Match, a new lifebar mechanic is introduced that works like a seesaw. Whenever a character gets K.O.'ed, the referee will give you to the count of ten where the defeated player can mash the buttons in order to get back and replenish some of their life and continue the match. If a player gets K.O.'ed for a third time, then it's impossible to recover.
When I used to play WH2 in the arcades, I used to piss off challengers because I always picked Death Match, not only because I found it easier to beat my opponents, it made the matches go on longer than they'd normally would. I'd almost always win by attrition, and guess who I picked? Yep, Brocken. Although Mudman is my favorite character in this game, design wise. Brocken is still top tier in this, but I had no choice but to use him because even on Level 1 difficulty, the CPU is STILL input reading and countering accordingly, so I had to outcheese the opponent with Brocken's jumping kick. I have to apologize to any viewers for the repetitive and boring gameplay, but believe me, after test running with different characters before recording, I was getting destroyed no matter what I did. I originally intended to do a run with Mudman, but the CPU was NOT having it.
World Heroes 2 of course has new stages, much more colorful than the first game, and improved visuals overall, and the gameplay is essentially almost the same. Except making your character taunt if you're a certain distance with the throw button (which is C) was kind of a bad implementation, although if I remember right, Fatal Fury 2 had a similar taunt mechanic.
The CPU still plays the "walk back and forth and look for a frame perfect counterattack" thing from the first game - and some hit and hurtboxes have some questionable behavior - a good example is when I faced Janne, she managed to throw me in the corner despite the fact she technically shouldn't have been able to due to her sprite positioning - and she did it at least two or three times. I had to use save states, I just didn't feel like replaying full matches or else the runtime for the video would've went on for too long. Again, apologies for the repetition of this playthrough - some old school fighting games are ridiculously difficult!
This entry now comes to a close - see you next game!