This New Final Fight 2 Strength Hack Rebalances The SNES Beat 'Em Up

I'm a simple guy, I see Final Fight, I click the link.

If you think the enemies are bad in the SNES version, try playing the arcade bootleg! I think that game has the opposite of this patch applied, where your character does even less damage than usual (and the enemies do 2x the damage!). 😆

It's great this patch works with the JP version of the game as that's the one I had growing up. There's another FF2 romhack that allows 5 enemies on screen at once, I wish that was compatible with the JP release!

I did a play through of Final Fight 2 not long ago, and never really got the impression that it needed something like this. Nice for those who want to try it though.

@MARl0 It's not too bad on Normal difficulty (though I feel like it still goes on just a bit longer than it needs to), but it really is a slog on higher difficulties.
Still not as bad as the NA version of Streets of Rage 3, though!
I came decently close to finishing Expert mode in FF2 (I think I did okay in Sor3 on Hard as well), but it was just too monotonous and time-consuming for me to give it another try.

Give me a hack for a Haggard ponytail, then I'll be interested.

A hack where Guy is playable would be awesome.

@BulkSlash I got a fix for that. It is a literal byte change to have 5 players on screen.

Haven't found the fix for Final Fight 3 though.

Emulator
029948:05
Hex Edit:
011948:05
Game Genie
D9B0-04DC

It's a small thing but welcome for those who wanted this. I can't recall ever noticing an issue there to be honest.

@BillyTime Oh wow, thanks! I’ll try patching that tomorrow, I can’t believe it’s that simple. 😂 I wonder why Capcom left it out of the game? Do you think it could be done with Final Fight Guy too?

@BulkSlash Maybe, I never had to much interest with SNES Final Fight due to all the limitations.

@BulkSlash From the looks of it, they reduced the number of characters on screen due to sprite flicker. With a beat-em-up game like that with such large characters, you'll be up against the horizontal sprite and pixel limits pretty quickly. Plus they had to leave a bit of room available to accommodate the second player. It's almost like that option was there for testing during development.

@sdelfin Yeah I think the limit in part must be down to the second player. Playing single player with the number of enemies at 4 is OK, but when going to 5 you do get flicker. So a two-player game with 4 enemies would have had flicker too, but by sticking to 3 it would have been OK.

I decided to experiment a bit, I upped the number of sprites to 6 and aside from the occasional brief priority issue (one enemy would be in front of another when he should be behind) it's actually able to run OK with 6 enemies. Pushing it to 7 works too, but there's some slowdown and there must only be enough palettes for 6 characters as the 7th has wrong colours. I'm actually going to leave it on 6 I think, it's unlikely I'll be playing it two-player any time soon.

Thanks @BillyTime for including both the emulator and file offset, even when I've found something using the memory editor, finding it again in the ROM file is often a pain! 😅