- General Info
- Trivia
- Box Art

[ Streets of Rage 2 Menu ]

Anyone who played the game quickly saw where that extra memory went. Gone were the tiny sprites and grainy backdrops of the original. Now the graphics were huge, highly detailed, well-animated and easily of arcade quality. This showcased what the Genesis/Megadrive was capable of and showed that it was still a serious rival to the technologically superior SNES.

The character roster expanded to 4, with 2 new characters; Max and Skate. All the characters had a large selection of individual moves and were now quite different to play. New special moves replaced the old rocket special attack and led to much smoother gameplay as players could now fight their way out of a situation without wasting a special attack. Wisely, the new special attacks cost energy, so players could not just walk through the game using them.

As well as more characters to choose from the number of enemies pitted against the heroes increased also. New, more interesting enemies with special attacks of their own were added alongside the old ones to create some formidable opposition. New weaponry was introduced to liven things up further. The 8 levels were much longer, more ambitious and with multiple scenes.

A 2-player Duel feature was also introduced, which allowed players to just fight each other one-on-one in a Streetfighter-style best of 3 battle. This was a feature that Sega had included with similar Genesis/Megadrive side-scrolling games such as Golden Axe and Alien Storm. Although it wasn't particularly fun to play, it was an interesting addition none the less.

Streets of Rage 2 is a perfect sequel. Usually videogame sequels, like with movie sequels, are rehashes of the original. Not so with Streets of Rage 2. Everything from the original is improved and expanded to create one of the best games of the 16-bit era.

• The game was known as Bare Knuckle 2 in Japan. Check out the arcade in Round 3 - there are Bare Knuckle arcade machines and posters on the wall for "BK2". Also notice the adverts in the Round 4 stadium for "Bare 2".

• The tattered photo in the intro is of course from the ending of Streets of Rage 1.

• Have a listen to the sound test in Options for some interesting background musics. BGM 01 is a more techno-like remix of the Round 1 music and is not used in the game. The same goes for BGM 03 which is a slower remix of the Barbon's bar music. BGM 09 is a cool tune not used at all in the game.

• The waves on the beach in Round 6 crash backwards - thanks to Anton Berglin for spotting that.

• Ever noticed the two Big Ben-type punks named Talk and Wanter? Take a look at the ending credits to see that Talk (Uchimura) and Wanter are both persons who made the game, although the latter is nicknamed Wanta in the ending credits (in SOR3's credits he's called Wanter). Thanks to Anton Berglin for this.

• There's a sign before the Round 4 Stadium that says "It's like Boo!". TurboKiller's theory on this is that it has something to with Dragonball Z - check out the pic of Fat Boo and Big Ben from the stadium for a weird similarity.
  

• Timo Takalo's theory is that the Big Ben type enemies in SOR 2 & 3 named Heart are probably a reference to the popular manga Fist of the North Star (Hokuto No Ken in Japan), which featured an extremely overweight martial artist also called Heart. Check out a pic of FotNS Heart from the SNES game Hokuto No Ken 6.
  

• The GG version of Streets of Rage 1 features a programmer called Abadede in the credits - obviously Abedede, the wrestler boss in SOR2, was named after this person.

• Check out the similarity between Skate and DJ Boy (from the game DJ Boy, strangely enough). They obviously look pretty similar, and both come from side-scrolling beat-em-up games. DJ Boy was originally an arcade game by Kaneko and was later published by Sega for Kaneko on the Megadrive in some markets. The link continues with the fact that Sega changed the character of Sammy in Bare Knuckle 2 into Skate for SOR2 and that the US publisher for the Megadrive conversion of DJ Boy was a company called SAMMY... Cheers to Joe Talledo for this.
  

• Take a close look at the high score table. Are Y.K & A.K (playing Max & Blaze) Yuzo and Ayano Koshiro? Cheers to Anton Berglin for this.

• In the European (PAL) version of Streets of Rage 2, the "2" on the title screen Streets of Rage logo is spelt as "II", but in the US version it's just a "2". This also applies to the logo on the box art for the different versions. Thanks to R. B. for this.