3D Streets of Rage 2’s ‘Quartet’ mode explained

One of the notable additions announced for 3D Streets of Rage 2 is the “Quartet” mode, which we heard would somehow include all the game’s four playable characters.

Up until now, we didn’t really know how it was going to work, but thanks to a transcribed Famitsu interview (by way of Automaton) with SEGA Games Producer Yosuke Okunari and M2 CEO Naoki Horii, we now have all the details.

• When you first start the game in “Quartet” mode, you have four lives and must choose your preferred order of characters (Let’s say your chosen order is Skate, Blaze, Max and Axel).
• Once Skate dies in battle, Blaze will come in to replace him, followed by Max and Axel.
• Once all the characters have fallen, you’ll lose a life, and you’ll begin again with Skate, followed by the others in the same order.
• You can gain life-ups if you have three or less lives, but four lives are the maximum you can have.

“[Even in the original game] you can change your character at the continue screen, but people fall into a habit of choosing the same character as they mash the buttons to progress,” Okunari said. “Our thought process behind this mode was that we wanted people to not only use various characters, but also play the game getting a sense that these four characters are progressing via cooperation with one another. Oh, and you have one extra life [per continue in ‘Quartet’ mode, when compared to ‘Standard’].”

Also included in the game is a ‘Knockdown’ mode, where an enemy can be defeated simply by knocking him to the ground.

“If you get stuck into test playing this game, it becomes clear that the people who created it did so after playing the snot out of fighters such as Final Fight and Street Fighter II,” Horii said. “They took everything those games had, and I mean everything [and put it into Streets of Rage 2]! That gives the game a particular flavor that a one-hit kill [mode] would undo, so we followed the directors’ discretion, and that’s how we ended up with this [‘Knockdown’ mode]. Although we had a tough time of it, having to make a lot of rebalancing changes to accommodate the mode. But I’m happy we did it nonetheless.”

The interview is really fascinating and gives some great insight into M2’s thought process in porting Streets of Rage 2. They also mention the recently announced line of Genesis games into the 3D Classics series is the last in the second wave and there are no current plans for a third wave, although they’re very much open to continue the series if sales are good.