Capcom has once again pleased old arcade and fighting game fans with a new classic fighting game collection.
Capcom Fighting Collection 2 is coming this 2025, to PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Steam. We’ll run down the games below, but well actually start off with some observations.
This is now the fourth current generation collection of Capcom fighting games, and it comes with all the features that were only covered in part in earlier collections. So all the games have online casual and ranked modes with rollback netcode. They also have training modes, spectator modes, leaderboards, and art and soundtrack galleries. There are new quick save and one button super options, to make these games far more accessible. Hidden and additional characters are now also available to play, with some exceptions we’ll explain below.
The games now cover the late 1990s and early 2000s era of fighting games. As such, many of these games were originally made on the Naomi board, a Sega arcade board that shares architecture with the Dreamcast. There are PlayStation versions of some of these games that are not in this collection, and also haven’t seen any recent rerelease. We’ll elaborate below.
Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 is the first fighting game in the Capcom vs. SNK series, and has not been rereleased since the inferior PlayStation port in 2002. We are getting the 2000 arcade revision, called Capcom vs. SNK Pro. This is the first time this version of the game will be available outside Japan, so it has a new localization based on that PlayStation version.
Capcom vs. SNK 2: Mark of the Millennium 2001 is a significantly bigger release, and the most famous in the franchise. The original game came to the Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2, and a revised version called Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO came later to the Gamecube and Xbox. Players can switch between the original and EO version in the settings, though the gameplay’s nuances have been changed to both versions.
Obviously, one wonders if Capcom and SNK could have worked something out to make a package of Capcom vs. SNK games instead. Aside from SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos, they could have added the SVC games for the Neo Geo Pocket, and the Nintendo DS title SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters DS. Whatever the reason is that this didn’t come to pass, all of the games in this franchise, save the DS title, have been rereleased to modern platforms.
Project Justice and Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein are sequels to the arcade/PlayStation games Rival Schools and Star Gladiator, respectively. These are the first 3D games in these collections, but the omission of the games that came before them is quite glaring. We don’t know if there was a licensing issue with Sony, but it’s clear Capcom decided to work on a Dreamcast/Naomi emulator to get multiple games on that hardware rereleased today.
Power Stone and Power Stone 2 originally released on Naomi and Dreamcast. The two games were brought to the PlayStation Portable as the Power Stone Collection, but because of the PSP’s limitations, multiplayer required that each player have their own PSP and copy of the game. Of course, this new rerelease fixes all those issues definitively.
Capcom Fighting Evolution, also known as Capcom Fighting Jam, is more interesting as a trivia question than as an actual game to play. Nonetheless, it is great to see Capcom bring this game back as part of this package, a crossover title between Capcom’s characters from Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, and Red Earth, that happened to use the original 1990s sprites from those games, in 2004.
Lastly, we get Street Fighter 3 Alpha Upper. This is the final arcade version of Street Fighter 3 Alpha, and it is being rereleased for the first time on consoles and PC. This version added six characters, namely, Dee Jay, Fei Long, T. Hawk, Guile, Shin Akuma, and Evil Ryu. It does not include newer characters added in the Game Boy Advance and PlayStation Portable ports, namely Yun, Maki, Eagle, and Ingrid. That may have been too much to ask from Capcom as they would essentially be making a new version of Street Fighter 3 Alpha, but maybe that’s an idea for a future release.
It’s all exciting stuff for gamers of a certain age to relive a bygone era of arcade video games, and maybe even pass the fandom on to newer gamers. As we’ve seen Capcom go about these rereleases of their older games in earnest, we hope they can go back and bring back even more deeper cuts in the future. If they can do PlayStation games next, they can get us Rival Schools, Star Gladiator, and the Street Fighter EX games!
In the meantime, you can check out the official Capcom Fighting Collection 2 announcement trailer below.
