It seems you can’t spend a couple of months without tripping over a Capcom collection. Capcom has honoured its incredibly storied fighting game history with three collections – one celebrating Street Fighter, one with everything in between. But with all those collections, the consensus on the strength of those titles was already resounding. With Capcom Fighting Collection 2, the collection of games feels highly curated to be, once again, a celebration of everything between Capcom’s tentpole franchises. However, this collection is different in that many of the games, some emerging in the infancy of 3D visuals, don’t stand up as well as they might have when released over two decades ago.
Each of these collections has a flagship title, and that’s harder to discern than Fighting Collection 2. Having spent quite a bit of time with all of the games in this collection, each of these games has varying strengths and weaknesses, but easily, within Fighting Collection 2, the highlights are the Capcom vs. SNK games. These games have never previously been available on subsequent platforms following their original release, probably owing to licensing issues, so it’s nice to see them brought back.
And you have to wonder why it took so long, given how good these games are. While a completely different beast to the Marvel vs. Capcom games, these games have their own sense of style and flow that remain unchallenged. Both of them play very well, have extensive rosters, and, while ostensibly more complicated than Marvel vs. Capcom, are still enjoyable to play casually with your mates. It’s a tad disappointing that other versions of the games aren’t included here – like the enhanced EO edition released for Xbox and Gamecube back in the day -but that doesn’t take away from the fact that the games still look and feel great to play.
Much like the previous collections, there are some attempts to simplify the controls for lesser experienced players. Pressing one of the triggers or shoulder buttons plus a specific direction will auto-input moves for you. These minor improvements are appreciated, especially if you want to casually pop in and out of these games, though the input system does feel less elegant than the Modern control scheme in Street Fighter 6. Every game has been tweaked to this new system – allowing all players to perform special moves and ultimates with the tap of two buttons, no matter their experience with the genre.
The other major highlight, at least for me personally, is the inclusion of both Power Stone games, which have previously been doomed to be forgotten on both the Dreamcast and PSP. These games are chaotic fun – pitting multiple players against each other in 3D arenas, dropping items into the fray to keep things hectic. It felt like Super Smash Bros., in a way, though without the brand recognition that would make those games go on to become so successful. Having a modern playable version of Power Stone and its sequel is easily one of the boons of this collection that I hadn’t appreciated that I needed until now.
But some of the other games in this collection aren’t as strong as these four. It’s odd because these games weren’t lighting the world on fire when they first released and haven’t enjoyed the critical reappraisal that many older games usually enjoy. One such game is Capcom Fighting Evolution, which mashes together the style of previous Capcom fighters to mixed results. Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein is a Star Wars-esque 3D fighter reminiscent of Soulcalibur, but without any of the pizzazz that Namco’s historical fighter had. It’s especially more perplexing when the game that came before it, Star Gladiator, is much better to play (though not by a wide margin, ittedly).
Other games are just there, doing nothing offensive – neither bad nor great, just existing. Project Justice, the sequel to Rival Schools, falls squarely in this category, and while I enjoyed it for what it was, it’s not an endearing fighter. It’s another example of a sequel being included when the original game is seemingly absent from the collection. The other inclusion isn’t so much middling; it’s just random. Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper is the “final” version of Street Fighter 3 Alpha, though it was never included in 2018’s Anniversary Collection. This version has a lot of balance changes that were contentious throughout the community to the point where it’s rarely used in tournaments today. It’s a nice inclusion for preservation purposes, but it sticks out here as a thrown-in afterthought more than anything else.
Regardless of how you feel about these games, it’s resoundingly clear that the treatment they’ve been given as part of this collection is strong. Each game comes with rollback-enabled online play, including ranked and casual matches. The netcode on these games is fairly solid, but I still can’t believe we’re four collections in, and Capcom has yet to implement any form of crossplay for these collections. It feels like a massive misstep for a game made in 2025, much more for a fighting game, and especially egregious when Capcom has successfully even Exoprimal. I assume the budget isn’t there, but it’s something I’ve loathed about the collections so far and is still an issue today, with four games in.
From a visual perspective, these games still look and run great. Most of them, especially the Capcom vs. SNK games, still sport that strong animated sprite work that set these games apart back then and even today. The 3D games, while not aging as gracefully, have options to improve the rendering resolution, though the original presentation is also available if that’s what you’re into. All in all, these games are still visually impressive to some extent, and while I don’t have the technical know-how to get into the refresh rates or input lag of each, they feel and play fluidly, too, for a semi-serious fighter like me.
And that’s all you can ask from a collection of this ilk. Each of the games is more than playable, arguably in a better form than when they were originally presented, and each of them has additions that super fans will adore immersing themselves in. It’s that, unlike previous collections, the quality of the games in Capcom Fighting Collection 2 is less consistent, so whether it’s for you is not so cut and dry.
