Fighters Megamix

About Fighters Megamix

Fighters Megamix (1996) is Sega AM2's Saturn-exclusive crossover of Virtua Fighter 2 and Fighting Vipers, with hidden fighters from other AM2 games including a Daytona USA racing car, and one of the Saturn's best sellers.

Fighters Megamix in Depth

The full casts of Virtua Fighter 2 and Fighting Vipers meet, along with Kumachan, a bear mascot with no points of articulation. Players can switch between the two games' fighting systems, which differ in knockback and recovery, and fight in Virtua Fighter's open rings, without ring-outs, or Fighting Vipers' walled cages. The Vipers keep their breakable armour, so the Virtua Fighter characters gain moves to break it, along with some moves from Virtua Fighter 3, including a sidestep dodge. Both games' bosses are playable without cheats.

The one-player mode is split into nine courses, such as Girls, Muscle, Smart Guys and Dirty Fighters, each six fights followed by a hidden opponent, and completing them unlocks twelve secret characters. They include Bark and Bean from Sonic the Fighters, Janet from Virtua Cop 2, Kids Akira and Kids Sarah from Virtua Fighter Kids, Rent-A-Hero from a Mega Drive game, Siba, cut from Virtua Fighter's prototype, the new character Deku, a Mexican bean with a bird under his hat, and Hornet, the number 41 car from Daytona USA, which stands on its back wheels and boxes. There are also versus, team battle, survival and training modes.

Making Fighters Megamix

Director Hiroshi Kataoka described it as a new fighting game with characters from both series rather than a simple combination, the hardest part being to reconcile their armour and defence systems while keeping each fighter's character. AM2 called it fairly easy to make, because compression techniques developed for squeezing Virtua Fighter 2 onto one disc made fitting its larger move list simple. It was intended as an introduction to Virtua Fighter 3, which never came to the Saturn, and borrowed The King of Fighters' idea of mixing characters from different games.

Critics hailed it as one of the Saturn's best games. Game Informer gave it 9.25, its highest score for any Saturn game, Next Generation called it "the best fighting game ever on a system that's already chock full of great fighting games", and Famitsu gave it 35 out of 40, though reviewers noted fewer polygons than Virtua Fighter 2 and easy AI. It sold over 600,000 copies in Japan and was the top Saturn rental in the US for three months of 1997. It has since been called a precursor of Super Smash Bros.