Trivia
Yuzo Koshiro claims to have been influenced by early 90's European club music while producing the soundtrack for SoR 2. This is mostly visible with the music in the first part of level 4, which bears an uncanny resemblance with the dance hit Move Any Mountain by The Shamen, released two years before.
Contributed by
Luis Silva (12625) on Aug 13, 2007.
It's no coincidence that the fat enemies in the game often go by the name of 'Heart'. It's a reference to the popular manga Fist of the North Star (Hokuto No Ken), which featured an extremely overweight martial artist also called Heart.
Contributed by
Sciere 
(119864) on Feb 29, 2004.
The character Skate resembles DJ Boy (from the game DJ Boy, another side-scrolling beat-em-up game). This arcade game developed by Kaneko was later published by Sega on the megadrive. In fact, Sega changed the name of the character from 'Sammy' in Bare Knuckle 2 (Japanese release) into Skate in Streets of Rage 2 (US release) and the US publisher for the Megadrive conversion of DJ Boy was the company "Sammy".
Contributed by
Sciere (119864) on Feb 29, 2004.
Before the Round 4 Stadium, you can see a sign that says "It's like Boo!". This may be a reference to "Fat Boo" from Dragonball Z, which looks an awful lot like the SoR2 character Big Ben.
Contributed by
Sciere (119864) on Feb 29, 2004.
Two fat thugs in the game are called Talk and Wanter. They're named after Talk Uchimura (Planning & System design) and Wanta (Project management).
Contributed by
Sciere (119864) on Feb 29, 2004.
Max Thunder, the hulking pro wrestler, doesn't appear in the 8-bit versions (Game Gear and SMS) of SoR2.
In early beta versions of Streets of Rage 2, Axel had two very different (and familiar) attacks: a move VERY similar to a Shotokan Dragon Punch, and...a Shotokan Hurricane Kick?
Looks like Sega axed them for good reason: legal action from Capcom for unauthorized teachings of Shotokan moves to their characters. (Shotokan, by the way, is the fighting technique Ryu, Ken, and Akuma use in Capcom's Street Fighter series).
Sammy "Skate" Hunter was renamed to Eddie "Skate" Hunter in the U.S. and European versions of the game.
