Rival Schools: United by Fate
The main fighting game is best described as a polygonal Marvel vs. Capcom game, with some notable differences. The controls differ from other Capcom fighting games in that there are only four buttons (two punches and two kicks, which is more in line with the SNK game format) rather than the usual six. The player chooses a team of two characters and fights another team of two characters. The actual fights, however, are one-on-one battles in which the partner only participates when one player has enough "power" for a Team Up attack, which is performed by pressing a punch and a kick button with the same pressure. Team Ups are a type of double team attack by the character and the partner, or (in the case of Team Ups for most female characters) healing the main character or giving them more power. At the end of a round, a player (win or lose) has the choice of fighting the next round with their partner from the previous round or keeping their main character in the game. The power meter (basically a super meter) can reach up to 9 levels, with team-ups costing two levels and single person super moves costing one power level each. Similar to the Marvel vs. Capcom games, launchers can be performed to enable aerial combos, with all characters having universal low and high launchers. The game also had a few defensive techniques. Tardy counters functioned similarly to Alpha counters from Street Fighter Alpha, allowing a player to immediately counterattack from a blocking position. However, the restrictions on Tardy Counters are very lax: any hard normal, special or super attack can be used for Tardy Counters (Alpha Counters are only limited to certain special moves for each character), and Tardy Counters don't cost any extra power to perform (Alpha Counters required at least one level of Super Combo meter). Attack Cancels allow a player to cancel an incoming hit by matching their own hit with the attack. This cancels both attacks (though it does not cancel the remaining hits from a multihit move). It also grants an additional power level.
Story
The story of Rival Schools takes the player to a Japanese city called Aoharu City, in which several schools are victims of unknown attacks and kidnappings of students and teachers. The different characters in the game set out to find out who is responsible for the attacks on their school, with cutscenes and fights that represent their interactions with the other schools and with each other. In the end, it turns out that an elite school in the city, Justice High, is responsible for the attacks. The player's team eventually goes up against Raizo Imawano, the school's principal and the game's first boss. If certain conditions are met during the fight against Raizo, the story continues and the player faces Hyo Imawano, Raizo's nephew and the real mastermind behind the game's events, in a real boss fight. The structure of the single-player game of Rival Schools varied depending on how the characters were selected. When two characters were chosen from the same school (with some exceptions), the single-player game played out in a continuous story with predetermined battles and short 2D cutscenes explaining the story before and after each battle. Instead, when two characters from different schools were chosen, the single-player mode played out similarly to other fighting games, with the player's chosen team fighting random teams of opponents before reaching the final boss. In the arcade, character selection was initially limited to two characters from the same school, and free selection of any character was possible over time; there were no such restrictions in the PlayStation versions, where all characters were unlocked by default.