The Rumble Fish 2 Review: An Unexpected Treat

We live in a remarkable time for having access to classic games. Every few months, it feels like another lost classic or a title that never left Japan is releasing here in the US, available to a whole new audience who never got to experience it. The Rumble Fish 2 is both of those things. Originally released only in arcades back in 2005, it didn’t even get a home release in Japan like the first Rumble Fish did. While these games had a few hardcore fans, no one was yelling that they needed a modern revival. We got it, though, and I’m glad we did, because The Rumble Fish 2 is one of my bigger fighting game surprises of recent years.

Standing Out In Any Era

Right off the bat, it’s clear that The Rumble Fish 2 stands out from other fighting games of its era. Fast-paced and easy to pick up, players who have loved games like Marvel vs. Capcom will feel right at home, even if the mechanics are different. It also features a truly unique animation style where each limb of the characters is animated separately. While perhaps not as impressive today as it was in 2005, this still looks great and helps the game stand out from other fighting games on the market. I also loved how fighters will take visible damage as fights continue.

The roster of characters present in The Rumble Fish 2 is truly unique as well and feels far less filled with tropes than the average game in the genre. Sure, there are exceptions, such as Garnet, who feels like the standard anime nurse character, but characters like Boyd, Bazoo, Mito, and Hikari stand out, and the cast is extremely varied both in presentation and combat style. Jumping from a character like Bazoo, who uses the environment, to one like Typhon, who uses the environment in entirely different ways, feels very different. Yet no matter what character I chose, I always felt comfortable relatively quickly. Everyone has a lot of personality, which helps make up for the overall story not being overly engaging.

Building Power

In combat, you’ll have your standard combos, which will be familiar to any fighting game player, though controls are tight, and movement feels excellent. A block meter that leaves your blocks ineffective when it runs dry encourages aggressive play, which feels like a good fit with the fast-paced fighting. Players have two super meters to work with, one of which can be built up for explosive offensive actions while the other allows you to break combos and recover quickly while applying defensive skills. Build both all the way up, and you can unleash an incredibly powerful skill. There’s a lot of strategy in managing both of these and picking the right moment to spend your meters.

You have the standard variety of modes for a fighting game. Arcade mode lets you play through a series of fights with a small bit of story mixed in. Other options like survival, time attack, multiplayer, and training are what you’d expect of the genre, but they’re all represented, at least.

Taking It Online

The biggest change from the original 2005 arcade release is the addition of online play, a welcome change and one which really should be required of a fighting game in 2022. Its implementation in The Rumble Fish 2 is a really mixed bag of quality, though. Let’s start off with the good news. The developers of this port implemented rollback netcode, and in practice, the actual online fighting feels fantastic. In all of my testing, there was only one moment where lag felt like even the smallest factor in the outcome of a match. While developers will never completely defeat connections being a factor in online games, rollback helps make it an extremely small factor.

Despite the fantastic netcode, however, the implementation of online play here feels extremely weak. You can jump into random matches or challenge a friend, but there are no lobbies or any sort of way to really connect with players outside of fighting them. There’s not even a continue or rematch option. After a single fight, you’ll be kicked back to the main menu. If you want to fight your friend again, you’ll have to send a whole new request. It doesn’t take terribly long to do so, but this feels like a strange design choice, likely coming from building this online system on the back of local multiplayer, and it makes for a weaker experience.

Conclusion

Despite some strange choices around online play and a story that failed to grab my interest, however, I had a great time with The Rumble Fish 2. It’s easy to pick up and play with fast-paced fights that are exactly what I look for in a fighting game. With interesting mechanics and a varied cast of interesting fighters, fans of the genre should absolutely give this throwback a shot.

Final Verdict: 4/5

Available on: PS5 (Reviewed), PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Switch, PC; Publisher: 3goo; Developer: Dimps; Players: 2; Released: December 7th, 2022; ESRB: T for Teen; MSRP: $29.99

Full disclosure: This review is based on a copy of The Rumble Fish 2 provided by the publisher.