Firstly, you need to play through the first Art of Fighting and complete the bonus games. You don't have to do them all, you can just do one if you want. But in this case, I'm going to do the gain spirit bonus game twice, and the death blow bonus game. You get three chances to do the bonus games, and they appear after beating the second, fourth and sixth opponents.

So how do you save your game? If you beat Art of Fighting, there's no option to save. So we have to do something that'll make one credit clearers shudder: we have to lose on purpose. Once you've completed the third bonus game, simply let Mr. Big beat Ryo or Robert up until they lose. Then at the continue screen, don't press start, just let the time run down to zero. Once this has happened, you'll be presented with the memory card save screen, so highlight yes and press the A button. This will save the game to the memory card.

Now go and get your Art of Fighting 2 cartridge and start the game up. At the main menu, select the one player mode and choose a character. If everything has gone to plan, you should notice that you'll start off with increased spirit or strength. So as a reminder, in the first game, I completed the spirit bonus game twice, and did the super death blow game, so when I started Art of Fighting 2, the spirit gauge is longer than usual and I could use the haoh shoukou ken straight away. Incidentally it doesn't matter which character you pick in AoF 2 -if you pick John, for example, he'll be able to use his super move straight away without having to do the bonus game.

This process should work in the arcade (MVS) version. Neo Geo arcade cabinets had memory card slots, so in theory the above should be doable there. But I've never tried it, and good luck finding an arcade with these two Art of Fighting games in it now.

For the CD version, the process with the first game is exactly the same as in the AES version. But when you start the second game, don't load your game. This will take you to another data select screen, select "ART OF FIGHTING" and you'll be taken to the character select screen. Choose your character and then you'll start a new game, and you'll have the extra bonuses.

But what do I do if I only own the PS2/PS4/PC/Switch/Xbox One versions?

What you do is you go to hell for being a disgusting, non-Neo Geo owning PEASANT.

...

In reality, I don't think it's possible to get these memory card bonuses in non-Neo Geo versions of Art of Fighting 2 simply because none of them have got Neo Geo memory card emulation. You'd hope the PS2 Art of Fighting Anthology Collection could have had it, but alas it doesn't. And Hamster's Arcade Archives versions also lack it.

The Neo Geo Mini has memory card support! Surely it works in that!

It sure should! Well go ahead and do everything you need to do in the first game, then load up Art of Fighting 2... wait...

Oh.

Yeah, so the problem with the Neo Geo Mini is that every single variant of it only contains one Art of Fighting game: the first one. Which means that despite having memory card support, it's no good because the second game simply isn't available to try this on. Hey, hackers! Try getting AoF 2 onto your Neo Geo Mini and see if the memory card bonuses work!