The Rumble Fish is a game series I’d always heard about for what felt like 20 years due to being an avid fighting game player, but I never actually had the opportunity to try the series. Apparently, the games never made their way outside of Japanese arcades until just a few years ago, allowing the rest of the world to experience the colorful cast and sheer depth of its fighting mechanics. Created by Dimps in 2005, The Rumble Fish 2 has a weighty style of combat with a lot of visual flair and tons of flexibility in how you approach combat. It just came out for the Nintendo Switch 2, but you can also find it for the PC on Steam, for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, and for the Xbox One and Xbox Series X.
The Rumble Fish 2 features a few modes: Arcade mode, which lets you select a character and battle through opponents, one after another. Survival has you fighting opponents back to back on a single health bar, getting a small heal in between rounds while you aim for the highest score. Time Attack mode tasks you with clearing the game as quickly as possible, and VS Mode lets you play against players locally or across the world in online play. There’s also a very useful Training mode for you to lab out combos with your chosen character, or to try out the game’s various mechanics.
This is a five-button fighting game, that is to say, you have four primary attack buttons, both a light and strong punch and kick, plus a dash that you can use for both offense and defense. In terms of accessibility for newcomers to fighting games, The Rumble Fish 2 uses motion inputs similar to Street Fighter, in that you have quarter, half, and full circle motions, etc., and you’ll also need to manage two separate gauges while you put pressure on your opponents. As far as I can remember, you won’t be expected to pull off any SNK-style pretzel motion inputs while you’re in the heat of combat.
What makes The Rumble Fish 2 unaccommodating to newbies is that its integral game mechanics don’t have a glossary or any way to actually see how to play in-game. This is very reminiscent of when Rumble Fish 2 released back in 2005 because most arcade-first fighting titles didn’t exactly have in-depth tutorials: The information would be placed on the game’s cabinet at the arcade. The Rumble Fish 2 does feature loading screens that can help players new to the series, but unless you catalog all of the loading screens or look at online resources like wikis, you’re likely not going to know how to perform an Impact Break or Impact Blow before you play.
The combo system in The Rumble Fish 2 is probably the most newcomer friendly system it has: Since you have four attacking buttons, any light button can chain into any other button, and any strong button can combo into your other strong button. This combo mechanic is universal to most of the cast, though there are a couple of odd characters who go by their own rules. You can perform throws by being close to an opponent, and they’re very fast and an easy way to beat guards without having to perform an unblockable attack or guard crush. And, of course, you can perform a character’s super moves by spending some segments of your meters, with some supers that can only be performed while knocked down or blocking, depending on character.
There is a plethora of really great mechanics in The Rumble Fish 2, however, so those with an affinity for fighting games or looking up information will definitely have a good time with this, especially for its price point. As previously mentioned, you have two separate meters to manage while you fight, an OFF and a DEF gauge, each with three segments for six total bars. OFF meter builds by attacking your opponent, while DEF increases when blocking hits. Dive Boost grants character specific buffs and consumes a bar from each of your gauges, so while the cool-looking Aran may get after-images that attack with him, Garnet’s dramatically boosts her damage output, and Mito’s produces floating hearts that makes approaching her difficult.
It was surprising to see how many cool mechanics The Rumble Fish 2 had, and how well they balanced offensive techniques while still giving players lots of defensive options. Assuming you have enough meter, you can spend your OFF bars to extend your combos or use an unblockable attack that will allow you to effortlessly juggle your opponents. Impact Breaks use your DEF bar and function like a parry, requiring you to block an opponent’s attack and press the dash button just as they hit you, reducing their frame advantage so you can get in a nice punish. Your DEF gauge primarily gets used for defensive options like your aerial recovery or turning a match around while blocking, while OFF gets used for combo extensions, frame traps, whiff canceling, and that sort of thing.
The Rumble Fish 2 has extremely smooth animations in part due to its utilization of marionette style animating; the same kind that was done around Flash videos in the mid-2000s. So, all of the parts that made up the fighters were animated separately, which may look a little dated at first, but it makes the action recognizable at a glance once things are in motion due to how fluid everything looks. The characters even show off battle damage as the fights progress! The Switch 2 Edition visual uplift is noticeable as The Rumble Fish 2’s colorful cast looks sharper and crisper when compared to the Nintendo Switch release, especially in handheld mode. However, whether or not that’s worth $5 to you is a different matter entirely.
The largest difference between the Switch 1 and 2 versions of The Rumble Fish 2, outside of improved visual clarity, is that the Switch 2 version includes a 3v3 Team Battle mode you can play online or offline against another player. Unfortunately, while online play of The Rumble Fish 2 features rollback netcode, it largely seems to be dead online, which is rather unfortunate considering how incredible all of the mechanics in this game are. When it comes to single player content, you might be able to get a number of hours out of playing Arcade, Survival, and Time Attack modes since those have a bit of substance to them, plus a very reasonable Training mode that gives a lot more information than I remember other mid-2000s fighters giving back in the day. At the end of the day, though, The Rumble Fish 2 is a $20 port of a 2005 game, so joining an online community to organize matches or having some friends also interested in this game is going to be a must it seems.
I did encounter a pretty funny bug during my time with The Rumble Fish 2 Switch 2 Edition: You can’t press the home button to “pause” the game because it will continue to run in the background while you’re on the home screen. I was playing Arcade mode but needed to answer the door while the game was loading in between rounds, so I just hit the home button to suspend it and went to the Switch home screen. When I returned about 2-3 minutes later, I was greeted by a Game Over screen. I’m uncertain why The Rumble Fish 2 doesn’t suspend if you jump out to the home menu, but if that’s a habit you have with your Switch 1 or 2 systems, you’ll need to break it to enjoy this, or else you’ll return to Game Over screens if you were playing Arcade or Survival mode.
That being said, The Rumble Fish 2 is a fighting game fan’s fighting game. If you’re new to fighting titles and want a fun anime-styled one to break into the genre, this is not the entry point for you. Reading and practicing are necessary to understand most of The Rumble Fish 2’s mechanics, and there aren’t combo trials or tutorials included in this release to help immerse you in the game mechanics. However, for those who are big fans of other fighting games will have a lot to love here, as many of the mechanics The Rumble Fish 2 uses look familiar to you (Impact Break is like an even more rewarding Instant Block from Guilty Gear, for example). If you’re big into the fighting games, the gameplay in this is meaty enough to make it seem like a 5 out of 5 GiN Gems title.
Developers: DIMPS
Platforms: Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Steam, Xbox Series X