English Title: Suggoi! Arcana Heart 2
Japanese Title: すっごい！アルカナハート2
Publisher: AQ Interactive
Developer: EXAMU / Ecole Software
Genre: Fighting
Released: Apr. 9, 2009
Product Codes: SLPM-55147 / JAN 4582210540225
Follow-up to the modern heir to the girly fighter. The big addition here is a bunch of new characters -- the first title had a rather limited roster, but here it's nearly doubled with all sorts of bizarre otaku-bait stereotypes. There's probably some new systems here too, but I honestly couldn't tell you what they are, and the story this time is lol jk nobody cares about the story in fighting games.

That's what I'd say about the arcade version, anyway. This port certainly plays well enough -- the PS2 could handle the first game, and this one doesn't have anything fancier going on. Unfortunately it doesn't look so hot. Evidently, the PS2 simply wasn't capable of holding all the character sprites -- some of them quite large -- in memory, so rather than cutting animation like some old PS1 ports did, the developers decided instead to reduce the resolution of some frames.

What this means is that characters will spontaneously become indistinct masses of pixels for a few random frames here and there. In particular, most of the hit animations are affected, so it looks like punches and kicks phase the characters halfway out of existence. Some animations -- particularly Catherine with her gigantic robot -- use different resolutions for different parts of the same frame. To say it looks distracting is putting it lightly. It's a shame, because the game seems otherwise improved from the first game.