A sequel with immediately noticeable improvements.
"The little things really do count" is what this review will come down to.
For example, the prequel, Advanced VG, was a perfectly fine game, but it was missing a bit more depth to make its gameplay more than just a derivative of Street Fighter Alpha. There was also no practice mode, but all the other bells and whistles were there.
Right off the bat, this game has a practice mode, which is already a nice game changer right there. For some reason, it lets you KO your opponent in the practice mode, but you can turn on the "life recover" setting to fix that. Through practicing, I quickly noticed that the gameplay actually took steps in the right direction.
You can get further away from your opponent than before, making the camera zoom away. It doesn't look so pretty when the characters get more pixelated, but hey, there's a way to help players distance themselves further from the opponent. Quick dashes actually feel good now, you can do normal jumps or dash jumps, high jumps straight up that will remind some of Capcom's vs games (X-men vs Street Fighter, Marvel vs SF/Capcom), and target chain combos that will probably also remind people of those games. There's also quick recoveries when you get knocked down, as well as attack counters.
So, yeah, a lot of goodies were added to the gameplay.
Fighting feels faster and I haven't mentioned the most important change - super moves no longer require you to be in low health to do them. You have a super meter like many other fighting games.
There's also a story mode, where you play as Tamao Mitsurugi, not Yuka Takeuchi. Tamao has a role that will remind some of Sakura from the Street Fighter Alpha games, but hey, when the gameplay is as good as it is here, there's not much to complain about. The premise is that Tamao admires Yuka and wants to prove that she can fight with the best of them.
The soundtrack is still just there, but I never really minded it, so there you go. If there's a Variable Geo game I'd definitely recommend, it's this one. It's like they actually wanted to make a video game here instead of the perverse awfulness that's on the wikipedia page for the Variable Geo series.