I play Fighting Vipers 2. The system in the begginning I recall was trying to be Sega’s answer to a VF with more colorful characters and more visually interesting to look at for the casual player. I recall the first FV did well on its port to the Saturn, but I’m not sure of its arcade outing; however I do remember a few tournies held for it in Japan (I think there’s a vid showing Bunbunmaru from VF playing in one).
As FV2, it ran on the model 3 system as noted above, but I believe it was overlooked even more than the first one in arcades, despite it looking better than VF3TB and having a deeper and more polished system than its prequel. The tiers were like Mauler being tops, people like bahn and emi a bit below, everyone else, and I know Sandman was near the bottom. Still, in typical AM2 fashion it was pretty balanced and everyone was solid.
About the air recovery system, its like Bloody Roar, you have to make your combos stable enough so that they are unable to tech and also make it so if you have high risk combos that are escapable, have tech traps ready to catch them should they do so; teching out of air combo resets the damage, so teching foolishly will allow a smart opponent to do more damage than if you just let him finish his juggle. Also, pounce attacks are a bit more common and relied upon after KD than in VF as recovery rolls are harder to time IMO.
The port itself has much the same problem as the VF3 port for DC did - Training mode. There is NO movelist, at least in NTSC-U version which I own, its as barebones as you can get. There’s only like a few unlockables, such as the boss characters (which are banned obviously) so not much incentive to play. Still, I’ll see if I can get my crew to get back into it when I go back to GA around December; the main problem is again, training mode, we had to look off the movelists online while reviewing stuff to learn everything since the game doesn’t tell you shit.