In an article series dedicated to obscurities, Fighting Vipers 2 might exist in its own class. It never got an official release in North American arcades, its Dreamcast port was Japan- and Europe-only, and it being a 3D game running on Sega’s (for the time) extremely powerful Model 3 Step 2 hardware means you’re not going to be able to run it on that 8-year old laptop you play GGPO with.

But that just makes it even more important to unearth and talk about. Fighting Vipers 2 was Sega’s 3D fighting game design gods at their most crazy and inventive, with over-the-top moves and characters concealing a deeply technical game that rewards good reads, a varied offense, and fast decision-making. And if you really want to show off, you can punch someone through a wall and into a T-Rex’s mouth. Because.

You’d be forgiven for not realizing how groundbreaking ADK’s World Heroes Perfect was. Released in May 1995 alongside a glut of similar-looking Neo Geo fighting games and against better marketed Capcom titles like Street Fighter Alpha, it was inevitable that WHP would get lost in the shuffle. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s, when Capcom had all but stopped developing new fighting games, that WHP was unearthed by players desperate for something new. What they discovered was a game shockingly ahead of its time: fast, with varied character designs, one-off mechanics, and an anything-goes attitude that somehow just worked.

The Neo Geo arcade system saw plenty of fighters that have either become celebrated or ignored. While some experimented with different play mechanics, Visco’s Breakers and Breakers Revenge games went for a more simple approach that made it easy to pick up and immediately have fun in the fight. I reached out to Matt “Lord BBH” Hall and Dustin “ZandKun” Cobb for information about this often-overlooked gem.

Why is V Special so highly regarded? Which characters and tactics define high level play, and how do they fit into the game’s ecosystem as a whole? What makes SSV Special so… special? I spoke to SamSho specialists Patrick “Mauve” McCarthy and Uesugi Kengou to find out.