Stages are the only part in CvS2 that is inferior to its predecessor. Holland and a couple of others are ok, none are great.
CVS2 has the following Stages. And wow, 4 Japanese stages!!!:
To be fair, 3 of those stages are basically all the same place, just under different conditions based on the final boss.
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None. They all suck 
CVS1’s stages were gold, though -.-
One can’t have everything.
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Joe Higashi > Stages
CvS1PRO had Joe Higashi though
Now that we talk about CvS
CvS had COLOR EDIT
@bakfromon @Lord_Vega @Shockdingo @Darc_Requiem @Phantom_Miria @TazyryLipo @Daemos @DarthEnder @Pertho @LOVECYCLONE and everyone else…
Let’s get started.
First of all, a thing that everyone in the FGC could already know… Although I suspect no one bothered to actually check it.
According to this interview to the developers of Final Fight, Haggar was inspired by Kazuo Koike and Noriyoshi Inoue’s manga Mad Bull 34 and… By Les Misérables. Basically, Akiman took Mad Bull 34’s protagonist “Sleepy” John Estes, who is a cop, and made him a mayor because he liked Jean Valjean when Jean became the wealthy mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer under the alias of “Monsieur Madeleine”.
Now, many know only Mad Bull 34 as an anime, because it was released in English… But not the original manga. The anime only adapts the first four volumes (out of 27), omitting various things in between and especially AFTER. By reading the manga, it becomes clear that the great part of Final Fight’s world (and even something of Street Fighter) comes straight from Mad Bull 34. Haggar in particular IS Sleepy, only without Sleepy’s habit to… well, sleep with all the women he meets.
From Mad Bull 34 comes even Capcom’s habit of using the names of famous singers and actors for their characters: “Sleepy” John Estes was a blues guitarist, and his partner Daizaburō “Eddie” Ban is a Japanese guitarist. Daizaburō’s lover Perrine owes her name to the actress Valerie Perrine, and so on.
Eddie Ban gave EDI. E his name. Eddie Ban is written エディ伴 Edi Ban in Japanese ( エディ藩 Edi Ban is the real-life guitarist; different kanji, same pronunciation), but the guitarist writes his name “Eddie Ban” in English. Basically Akiman separated the last E as if it were an additional letter…
Edi. E’s appearance comes from Kenneth (original Japanese ケンノート Kennōto, honestly very mangled…), a burly colleague of Sleepy and Daizaburō often at odds with Sleepy:
And Edi. E’s chewing gum comes from Sleepy’s own habit of calmly chewing a gum at the most inappropriate moments, such as while inspecting a murder victim’s body…
Back to Haggar: the anime gives a glimpse of Final Fight’s second stage during the brawl in the metro, when Sleepy and Daizaburō disguise themselves as nuns to pursue the accomplice of a killer to get through to him.
If you remember Final Fight, when Haggar grabs Andore, he lifts him up by grabbing his wrists. And then… headbutt. The killer’s sunglasses obviously became a part of Damnd’s attire.
Then there’s the fact that Sleepy uses wrestling as a fighting style when he’s not busy shooting or using grenades attached to his testicles (yes, you read it right).
During the Woodburn prison arc (volumes 7/8), Sleepy, Daizaburō and Perrine go undercover as convicts to investigate a prison, where they found that a convicted assassin had killed the warden and is posing as him, effectively ruling the prison and letting the inmates go free to commit other crimes whenever they want. He has four underlings named the “golden soldiers”: a karate champ, a wrestling champ (identical to Hulk Hogan, LOL), a boxer and a gigantic football linebacker, Bob, who’s incredibly similar to early Capcom depictions of ANDORE. Bob fights with Sleepy, and after having been defeated in a tackle contest, acknowledges Sleepy’s fair play and betrays his former boss, secretly informing the police of the prison’s situation. After having killed the other golden soldiers and the boss, Bob challenges Sleepy to a rematch as a sendoff for his previous comrades. Unfortunately, Sleepy accidentally throws Bob onto a PIPE that pierces his lung, and Bob tries to continue the fight with his remaining forces when Sleepy doesn’t fight back, fully aware that Bob is dying. When Bob finally collapses, all the inmates cheer him as the greatest linebacker ever, remembering him his glory days. I dare you to see the pictures of Sleepy sadly carrying Bob in his arms and NOT to be reminded of the face of Haggar when he hugs Jessica in FF’s ending.
Or to read the entire fight and not to think that’s a manga about Haggar fighting Andore, for that matter…
Oh, hello, Hugo’s Shootdown Backbreaker.
Haggar would then gain a Giant Swing in MvC3.
I think that even THE PIPE in FF is a tribute to this match Sleepy vs Bob / Haggar vs Andore. Exactly as the katana was specific to Guy and his inspiration SPOILER .
Then, in the 25th volume, Sleepy agrees to a barbed-wire and broken-glasses deathmatch on a ship for the rich guests of the promoter, Dark Bolton, a carbon-copy of Hulk Hogan but ARMED WITH A KATANA. It’s the first step towards the creation of Sodom and the whole “underground wrestling” thing - Sodom’s bio in FF said he was an underground wrestling promoter who fought in his events, after all. And really, this is where you literally can rename the manga “Haggar’s adventures except he has lots of sex”. Sleepy agrees to do the match in order to meet the expensive demands of Marie Valente, a girl he met in New York whose family was murdered by the mafia, and who will become his wife.
The first match is against O’Keefe, a sambo champion… Who ends up eating HaggarSLEEPY’s Backdrop onto the broken glasses:
Then Marie is relieved and kisses Sleepy…
(Oh, even Haggar’s wife Nancy was a short-haired blondie, WHAT A COINCIDENCE…
And Sleepy had his no-moustache phase with short hair that seemed red too, WHAT-A-COINCIDENCE!)
…Bolton however orders Kerberos, a guy with a sadomaso spiked armor, to rape Marie in front of all the guests… He’s immune to projectiles and immediately charges, exactly like Sodom did in FF:
Haggar would gain the Gorilla Press Slam in FF3 and Slammasters.
Sleepy then challenges Bolton directly…
Hello, Sodom’s katana!
After having beaten Bolton, Sleepy and Marie threaten all the guests to blow up the ship if they don’t strip themselves and reach the nearest city by swimming, but a waiter shoots Marie. Enraged, Sleepy LIFTS THE SHIP’S ANCHOR AND THROWS IT AT HIM:
Just so you know, even in Zangief’s SFZ3 Stage backstory Zangief throws an anchor in the blast furnace of the factory, just to galvanise the workers. WHO KNOWS WHERE CAPCOM COULD HAVE TAKEN THAT FROM.
Sleepy goes to prison another time, where an inmate tries to kill him with a razor:
And that’s Haggar’s trademark choke grab with the headbutt.
Capcom did even use SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY…
…and guess what, it wasn’t only Capcom to take inspiration from Mad Bull 34…
Oh, and a minor character is named Jessica, obviously.
Next: where Mika and Makoto come from. Then… THAT artist.
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Holy shit.
I don’t know why these posts aren’t front page content.
Actually I know exactly why but fuck all that. Awesome post.
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Great post, never cease to amaze me how deep you dig finding the most obscure sources
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Midgardsorm is the Hidden secret boss of the thread.
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@Midgardsorm Great Post, but that last picture has a man named Ralf Jones. Is there any similarity between that Ralf and the KOF Ralf?
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None whatsoever. Mad Bull 34’s Ralf Jones is a fugitive convict. SNK only took his name for the KOF character. It’s abundantly evident that their shared creative process involves taking the names from other sources, very rarely related to the sources used for the character’s appearance and physical attributes. Even Sodom and Guy’s names come from another manga.
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That’s some BigMex level reporting right there!
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This scene reminds also when Jessica run on the ring to celebrate her dad win in Slam Masters 
Half OT, but i think this dude served also as influence for final Boss in Dynamite Deka
at 1:35 of the vid start second phase where he goes bare-chest and use a katana
The protagonist is a cop too while at it
cool never known that, do you have full story somewhere?
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@Midgardsorm Bizarre question but have you ever thought of creating a blog or a social media page for all your personal translations? There’s golden nuggets of info on everything you do and honestly it’s a shame your hard work is only seen on here. It’s high quality work and it deserves more exposure.
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Yes. I had planned to translate it LAST. Zangief is my favourite, and he needs special attention.
Believe me, when you read that story you’ll instantly become a fervent communist ready to piledrive all the dirty Shadaloo capitalists to gulag.
I did think about that, but I have no time to work on a personal web space at the moment… Even though it would be perfect for a lot of things I consider essential. The old forum was a bit better at it: I reread some of my older articles and, old dead links aside, they’re often unrecognisable. My article about Menat and her moves has become almost unreadable.
Oh, a couple of things I forgot… Eddie Ban is completely unrelated to Eddie Van Halen. He even started his career before Van Halen. The similarity between their names, however, is played upon quite a bit in Japan… And Capcom was no exception. So we have Eddie Ban giving his name to Edi. E… and Van Halen’s members Michael Anthony and Sammy Hagar giving theirs to Mike Haggar.
Sleepy also had a ponytail phase, exactly as Haggar did in Final Fight 3… When he posed as a priest, LOL.
Once Edi. E spits his chewing gum, if you pick it up with full HP it gives 42910 points. That’s an oddly specific number… because it’s Akira Nishitani’s birth date. Shōwa 42 (=1967) / 9 / 10. September 10, 1967. We already saw Nishitani’s nickname NIN-NIN on top of the Golden Nugget Casino in Balrog’s stage, after all… And it comes from the same source.
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Bison: “You fools had better wash your hands or I will administrate your destruction for contaminating my grand scheme.”
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Alternatively, his grand scheme involves us not washing our hands. Either way, he’s brilliant!
Will be cool af build some sort of SF Bible for all this kind of stuff
Like divided on character (or stage) pages where you can find all inspirations/tributes/curiosity for chacters story, design, moves, costumes etc
But yeah, sounds like something that will require tons of hours
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Come on, if Bison wanted to kill us all, don’t you think he’d do it in a more stylish manner. It’s obviously Ingrid who did this:
Summary
Fig1: A leaked photo of Ingrid overseeing development of COVID-19. In fact, the word Corona is actually Demonese (Ingrid’ native language) for canon. It’s speculated that Ingrid made this virus in order to make herself canon again.
However, there is still hope. Celebrity reggae singer Deejay has been proven immune to the CoronaVirus and is negotiating with Interpol’s Chun-Li to effectively defeat Ingrid once and for all
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