This is the most anime fighter that you'll ever play.
I've been meaning to pick up this game for a while not and now that I've actually played it, I don't regret it.

Most 3D fighters on the PS1 that aren't Tekken haven't aged well but Rival Schools aged like a fine wine, I thought its mechanics and controls were pretty easy to pick up (Its just your average Capcom fighter LOL) and I like how tag teams were incorporated into this game, after your first character gets KO'd you can choose if you want to use your second character or use the first one again which I think is neat, it might be strange to some people since fighters that have a tag team mechanic never do that but Rival Schools isn't primarily a tag fighter so it fits here.

The roster size is BIG, not as large as MVC2s roster size but there's a lot of characters and the only one you know is Sakura. I did eventually find a few characters I like, Tiffany, Hayato, and the two versions of Akira, she's just that good they needed to put her in TWICE. Some of the teams you can create with these characters are broken but I'm a fan of creating broken teams in fighting games, it just means I can use them to my advantage, did I mention a lot of the characters have healing abilities? If you charge up that super meter enough you can spam those moves all you want as long as you're close to your opponent. (Yep, that's the one thing that stops you from spamming the healing moves all the time.)

This game is based as hell and I think everyone should try it at least once in their life.

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

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.