Actually, it shares no tie to Final Fight or anything Capcom, this being an SNK game.
As for the RTS, first it’s got a gimmicky “power bar” that fuels your specials. A ressource to manage! which limits also the spamming of special hits.
Second, there are no combos: the game is all about moving and countering, one hit at a time. But here is the real trick: the special moves require the popular special inputs, but those can be done on a quite slow pace, and even prepared during other hits before unleashing them at the perfect time. It’s quite hard to describe as I don’t know of any other game that uses such mechanic (it is very frustrating to new players, as doing the standard fighting motion really quick and smashing buttons won’t produce the desired output).
Like any RTS, once you got two players who know how to play the game, it is a thing of beauty, and one of my absolute favourite competitive games.
The game is also quite unique in having characters totally unbalanced for versus mode: some are clearly unbeatable. But for enjoyment purposes, playing with the local Ryu and Ken (Ryo and Robert) is commonly agreed on.
When I first played it in the arcade, around 17 at the time I guess, I was one to claim this was the lamest and ugliest Street Fighter 2 clone. How clueless was I!
The two sequels, sadly, threw all this unicity away, to become another standard fighting game series.
It’s not a Simpson game, but it’s true those esthetics are quite close.
