Honestly, this game is insanely good for the time.

It's got good mechanics. It's 3D in a time where 3D was in its infancy and the characters look great for the time.

Playing as Daigo and Akira, I went through the single player. Now usually the lack of story or further content would be a hindrance to the review, but each character has a good ending, achieved by doing a tag attack on the final boss, which you should be able to view from the extras menu. This adds a layer of replayability. Now thankfully for me, I googled how long the game was and was greeted with this information.

The game feels good. combo system works pretty well, the roster is something else when it comes to uniqueness, and playing it feels good. there is a layer of crust that you have to peel away at, but honestly, if you spent enough time adjusting to it, you'll be surprised at how fun and tense it can be with the AI being perfectly level for someone playing it for the first time and does have a setting to amend that.

The tag system is fun to see the different character interactions, but you're only allowed to switch between rounds. That's perfectly fine to be honest.

The only reason this isn't higher is sound design is lacking, the stages aren't memorable in the slightest and it feels as though some mechanics such as the dodging were off? Not to mention the damage not quite being right. Slightly off.

Overall a great experience. With some lab time, you could seriously get a lot of enjoyment out of this

There are two discs, the arcade version and the PS1 version. The arcade version is good, but to be honest, the evolution disk is much better.

Take any of my ratings of non-Smash fighting games with a grain of salt, as they're usually based off a single run or two through the arcade ladder and general surface impressions.

Cute! I see this and Street Fighter EX as being cut from the same cloth, but Rival School succeeds where SF EX does not because it's more distinctly its own thing rather than trying to compromise SF's 2D systems in early 3D. Rival Schools meanwhile gets to have out-there stuff like tag-team fights, and assists, and all these weirdo high-schoolers and teachers duking it out. There's a nice rhythm as a novice to figuring out the best point in a match-up to pull out the assist, and who to do it as.

What on earth is going on with the Americans in this game.

One of the greatest fighting games ever made. Period. Lot of people don't know about it, but you can't really blame them can you? Capcom used to pump and dump their IPs and unfortunately, Rival Schools is a victim of that. From the highly energetic music to the vibrant cast of playable characters. From Story mode to a dating sim, the game comes with tons of content in it. Rival Schools: United by Fate came in 2 discs and that should tell you enough about how much playable content there is to this game. And its fun, fluid gameplay. Really easy to get into. You choose 2 characters and you can switch between either of them at the change of a round. The characters also have special abilities (that are really easy to execute) which are visually really well made. And the music! Oh the music. Just check the OST out on Youtube. I personally own the CD. It's that good! Only thing I'd say as a negative, is that the game doesn't really give you a memorable villain. No Rugal, no Shao Kahn, no Akuma, no Heihachi. There's just a dude with a sword and an old man who is a mole...man... Iconic fighting game villains weren't iconic because of their motivations or personalities.. It's the overall visual design and the movesets. In that aspect, it's safe to say that this game was lacking.

On the first few fights this game felt kinda strange to me, but after some of them i got used to it and liked a lot. Some characters i just don't know how to use well, like Roberto(south americanbro), Batsu, and Boman, but most of them just feel so good playing, like Akira, Kyosuke(also nice seeing him here after playing Capcom vs SNK 2), Edge, Hinata, and Sakura, who ironically feels much better here than on Street Fighter EX. The mechanics are pretty fun, if you have momentum you can pull off normal and double specials or other moves in the right time, and it's very satisfying. Personally i just thought that the double specials for restoring HP when a male is paired with a female are very boring, because they are harder to hit, the HP restored is way too low, and it's repetitive, but besides that the specials work very well. The blocking mechanic that is similar to the alpha counter is easier to use here, that's nice because i'm really bad at this. Also Capcom put moves list here, which surprised since most of their fighting games from these days don't have this, and that's good, i really don't like googling this.

The designs and models have a lot of personality, the specials look awesome, the game has a lot of arts in loading screens, even though they didn't translated the japanese texts in them. I didn't find the OST to be memorable, but is kinda banger. The story is very silly but at least kinda entertaining while playing, and i didn't cared too much about the extra modes on disc 2, but this was probably very cool back in the PS1 days