Yeah, I bought Fatal Fury: City Of The Wolves, and what's worse, I LIKE IT

The full-force revival of SNK and the return of the Neo-Geo fighting greats— King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury— has always been a monkey’s paw situation. The games themselves have answered fans’ wildest dreams, with superb art, music and gameplay along with strong post-release support. But meanwhile in the real world, the revival has been funded by SNK’s current owner, Saudi crown prince Muhammad Bin Salman: for one of many reasons why people might not like him, google “Jamal Khashoggi”. So it’s always been a moral judgment to support their ongoing second golden age. A lot of people online— a few of whom had even been interested in the game— decided to boycott Fatal Fury: City Of the Wolves over this and a few other reasons we’ll get into.

I’m not one of those folks. I made my decision back at King of Fighters XIV— the larval stage of SNK’s revival, the one where the graphics weren’t there yet— that I was going to follow the process no matter who paid for it. And I’m not going to excuse myself from that, even though the marketing for City of the Wolves gave me a great chance to do so.

Poor City of the Wolves. It was probably the hardest of SNK’s revivals to push: the 25-years-late sequel to a beloved reboot of the Fatal Fury series known to very few outside of extreme genre fans. KOF is still a cult household name (particularly in Latin America, where it is Call of Duty level mainstream), Samurai Shodown has nostalgia and blood, but Fatal Fury's (Garou Densetsu/Legend of the Wolves) situation is a little more complicated.

Terry Bogard and his many friends have been perpetual guests in other fighting games (King of Fighters, Smash Brothers, even Street Fighter 6) for so long that it doesn’t really feel like he’s ever been gone. But his game, Fatal Fury, hasn’t had a new entry in 25 years. It hasn’t been in the mainstream gamer consciousness for even longer than that.

City of the Wolves is also the game that SNK’s owners finally decided to go all-out in promoting, a massive blitz that included putting the name of the game on major pro wrestling and boxing events, as well as getting the game in the hands of every streamer and Vtuber on earth. This heavy-handed astro-turfing of a niche title probably got a lot of new eyes on the game, but it also made people skeptical, and a poor choice of guest character even convinced a lot of fans not to buy it. I sympathize with City of the Wolves’ developers, if anything; I doubt anyone on board had any kind of say about making an accused rapist a playable character, but that's what they had to do.

Yeah, that’s definitely the worst thing. We’ll get back around to Cristiano Ronaldo— who may indeed go down in fighting game history as the worst-ever guest character in a major game— but I recommend simply Googling “Cristiano Ronaldo Vegas” to learn more. That's how I found out what his deal was, after all.

If I could make my electronic money beams fly around MBS and go directly to the SNK guys, that would be nice and maybe I’d be able to buy three of them dinner and a drink, but I can’t. And there was no way that some loaded murderous prince was going to keep me away from Garou 2. Not after all these years.

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Garou

So let’s talk about the first Garou, to which City of the Wolves is a sequel. Remember Street Fighter III? (Don’t worry, most folks don’t.) In that game, Capcom took the bold and risky step of skipping forward in time, aging up heroes Ryu and Ken, and surrounding them with a cast of completely new characters, including a young protege for Ken and a new protagonist who has nothing to do with any of them.

Street Fighter III (specifically the final revision, Third Strike) would go down in history as a genre masterpiece. But as is often the case in video games, this was a hindsight judgment. In the late 1990s, it was the direct opposite of what the audience wanted: a 2D game, for arcades, without any of your favorite characters. The game was so irrelevant at the time that after years of begging for a Street Fighter III, gamers busy with Tekken and Soul Edge largely never noticed it ever happened. Even Capcom die-hards treated it as "the one we don't talk about" until the early fighting game community and a certain famous Justin Wong/Daigo match made Third Strike's value clear.

Fatal Fury has been in conversation with Street Fighter from day one— they share a co-creator, and SFII released at nearly the same time as the first Fatal Fury. (Don’t confuse it or Art of Fighting for a simple rip-off! It’s much more complicated.) So SNK looked at SFIII, that bomb, and said, “we could do this!” You know why? Because they’re artists.

Garou: Mark of the Wolves (1999) is a rough draft for a second-generation Fatal Fury. Ten years after bopping his father’s killer, Geese Howard, off a skyscraper, Terry takes in his son Rock as his own. Terry is the only returning Fatal Fury character, looking older and rugged with his ponytail cut and his bright red jacket traded for a leather army jacket. (Fans agreed this was the coolest that Terry had ever looked.)

Rock is a breakout character design for SNK. Too cool to be confined to one game, he’s a fusion of a hero and villain character into one slick, haunted pretty boy. He faced off against new, completely original characters (B. Jenet, a sexy pirate, Gato, a merciless kung-fu master), other second-generation fighters (Kim Kaphwan’s sons, Ryo Sakazaki’s enthusiastic student Marco), and ultimately the remnants of South Town’s criminal world in the form of his uncle Kain Heinlein.

Even for the prolific, unsung artists at SNK, Mark of the Wolves contained some of the finest work of their careers. Stepping their game up several notches to compete with Street Fighter III, the game features minutely detailed character sprites and stunningly smooth animation. They didn’t match Street Fighter III, but they sure came closer than anyone else ever would. Even fewer people knew that Garou existed than SFIII: it, too, would only be appreciated as a brilliant work after a few years of reconsideration (as well as widespread Neo-Geo piracy throughout the 2000s).

I first saw Garou at the time of release at an anime store, and it was utterly shocking; not least because I had no idea the game even existed. It felt like something that had come in from an alternate universe.

Anyway, the thing about Mark of the Wolves is it was never heard from again. Clearly a “Part I” game, it ends in a cliffhanger where— gasp!— Rock parts with Terry and joins up with the final boss Kain, after he hits him with a real bombshell: “Your mother is still alive.”

We haven’t known what happened after that for 25 years.

You see, SNK shut down international operations the same year Garou released, and whole company filed for bankruptcy the next year. It was the Neo-Geo way to put out a new game as soon as it was ready and crank out sequels and updates, and we’ve since learned that Mark of the Wolves 2 was even very early in the works at this time. But it wasn’t to be.

Rock still shows up in KOF, continuity be damned, and wherever Terry guests, he takes his army jacket look with him as DLC. But a continuation to Rock Howard’s game, and his story… that was, at a point, a wish beyond hope.

The reason I’m telling you this is so that you get how significant this game actually is to fighting game hardcores and SNK fanatics. It’s seriously a holy-grail level happening. We were not going to get this one. And if we did… who would care but us?

When SNK announced a new Fatal Fury game with an image of Rock Howard at Evo a few years ago, I and probably a thousand other maniacs absolutely lost our shit.

City of the Wolves

Again, I said all this so that you understand what a big deal a sequel to Mark of the Wolves is, how important it is to fighting game aficionados, and how much you’d have to mess up your PR to convince a fan not to buy it.

But I want to concentrate on one thing first: City of the Wolves is actually pretty damn good! The art and animation are beautiful, the fighting is smooth, the systems are thoughtfully designed, and the spirit of the original game shines through. It is a true inheritor, and I am totally satisfied with it.

The art direction this time places a pronounced American comic-book influence over anime-style character models, with heavy, inky black shadow and a lot of dot and cross-hatch shading effects you’d expect in a comic book. The cutscenes even feature classical “BANG” and “WHAM”-type sound effects. Fatal Fury has always taken place in the fictional American South Town (which my friends tell me is probably modeled after Miami, Florida), so it's location-appropriate.

Games like these need strong animation detail, and SNK's animators have caught up to their 2D work in 3D. Frame-by-frame, you can see the same kinds of details– rippling clothing blown back, blazing energy flames– are as painstakingly wrought here as they were a quarter century ago. Modern 3D gives us stylized effects, motion blur, character close-ups, but the character animation is pure 2D fundamentals.

There are a few years between Mark of the Wolves and City of the Wolves, but the world picks up from pretty much the same point. Rock is involved with Kain and Billy Kane, who are using him to get after Geese Howard’s mysterious “legacy”. All the characters from the old game join the fight, along with a few second-generation newcomers and the sorely missing characters from the original Fatal Fury series that Garou left out. (SNK discovered years ago that they are not allowed to have neither KOF nor Fatal Fury without Mai Shiranui present.)

In fact, the focus has shifted to directly pleasing fans by bringing back existing Fatal Fury characters rather than having very many second-generation new characters. Along with the full returning cast is Joe’s student Preecha, a quirky scientist/Muay Thai boxer voiced by Chika Anzai (I mention this because it is a shorthand for her personality), and Garou midboss Grant’s student Vox Reaper, who’s the kind of generic tough bald dude you put in to sell video games to average bros. Both of these characters are cool, and as much as Duck King needs to come back too, I wish the roster had taken more shots like these. A few strong reinventions of existing characters– Billy Kane as a 2000s pop punk dude and Hokutomaru as an awkward lowteen– are appreciated.

You see, the DLC plan (going by leaks) consists entirely of legacy characters, which disappoints me quite a bit, considering the whole idea of the 25-year-old original game was to freshen things up with new characters. Can we not take any chances in fighting games anymore, or are we just going to re-animate the same 200 characters from the 1990s forever as the audience reaches retirement age and takes up mahjong? But I also get my long-dreamed-of future Blue Mary this way, so it’s impossible to say which is right.

Now speaking of characters…

Let’s talk about the guests

I have a theory about this whole thing, but first let me go through it in the order it actually happened.

Early in COTW’s development, SNK announced they were going to have some kind of collaboration with legendary Portuguese soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo, who now plays in Saudi Arabia. This appeared to be a branding collab, and didn’t really come off like a guest character announcement. People knew the things they knew about Ronaldo that would later cause them to boycott the game, but if it was just advertising, we could all ignore it.

Of course, it wasn’t. The announcement of Ronaldo as an actual playable character, and a trailer showcasing his bizarre, hideous fighting animations baffled and amused players everywhere. Then they started googling “Cristiano Ronaldo Vegas”, and the reactions got a lot more negative in the light of various allegations of rape against him. People started to boycott the game within the day. People had known about SNK’s ownership, but these guest appearances felt like the ownership forcing itself into the game in a way that was unacceptable. Note that Najd, a new Saudi character designed by MBS’ Manga Productions for the King of Fighters, was acceptable. Hell, creating a new character to represent your nation is pretty cool. But putting one’s totally unrelated personal friends into the game— even if they were famous friends— felt a bit over the line.

After this, SNK’s marketing added insult to injury by grandly introducing another real-life guest character, DJ Salvatore Ganacci. Nobody in the target audience knew who this dude was, but he was a fully-fledged character in the game, complete with appearances in the story. When the game released, players came around on Sal. Unlike Ronaldo, he turned out to be a funny comic-relief character with weird and surreal moves drawn from his music videos. But at the time it came off as adding insult to injury, and the bad press only intensified.

As for the Ronaldo character in the final game… he’s one of the jankiest things I’ve ever seen in a major fighting game. The character is unnaturally animated, as though Ronaldo’s people insisted he only ever be visible from his “good sides”. He almost always faces the camera at the exact same three-quarters view and only twists his body at all for soccer kicks. Owing perhaps to the nature of the allegations against him— or perhaps his people didn’t want him to be shown hitting a woman at all— Ronaldo does not use any punches, slaps or other hand strikes. His standing “light punch” is a soccer chest bump that both looks extremely weird and is bizarrely powerful, his traditional low jab is a thumbs-up.

The character’s art design is a mess: put him next to any proper character to see how bad he looks by comparison. You also can't just ignore Ronaldo because he’s also competitively strong; maybe Ronaldo’s people also asked that he do more damage than anyone else, because he hits like a damn truck. Particularly because you can't just ignore him, I am hard pressed to think of a worse guest character in a fighting game. He might really be the worst ever.

Here’s my theory

I can imagine how something like this might have happened.

Salvatore Ganacci is a much more integrated element in City of the Wolves. He has his own stage; Ronaldo does not. He appears in the story, including in pre-rendered cutscenes. Ronaldo does not. His animations, though weird, are deliberate and on-theme: Ronaldo’s are not.

My guess is that Salvatore was in the works for the game to begin with, and that when Ronaldo’s people saw that some other real-life person was in the game and not theirs, they proposed or demanded that Ronaldo be a guest character too. And we got what we got, because I bet the owners of SNK loved the idea. The low quality of the Ronaldo character certainly points towards the idea that he was actually an unscheduled rush job.

Last time I saw an interview where SNK devs were asked about their ownership, the games’ producer simply said “that’s above my pay grade.” That’s pretty much how I feel about Ronaldo in this game.

Anyway, I finally get to talk about the gameplay now

I’m only two thousand words in and I finally get to talk about how the game plays! The original Garou is a bit like a Street Fighter, but with some unique experimental concept and twists on SFIII in particular. The answer to Street Fighter III’s defining and divisive parry system was something called Just Defense, where you block right before a move hits and can potentially counter with a special move of your own… if you are very fast about it. This is a way to break through predictable attack patterns by calling them out very directly and with precise judgment. Garou looks like a completely different game when high-skill players are playing it, people who know every move well enough to to JD block over and over again.

City of The Wolves adds a lot of similarly high-skill elements— some brought along from Garou, some new— to mix up a classic Street Fighter-style formula. It’s easy to approach as a basic fighting game, and has added modern beginner-friendly amenities like the now-standard “mash jab to combo” and an easy, abusable armored attack to use as a panic button. But like the best older fighting games, it’s got a lot of hidden depth and pays off hard work.

It also leads with a new way of looking at the traditional “super meter” concept, inspired by Street Fighter 6’s Drive system. Drive sees the glass as full and ready to be depleted by your moves: the “Rev” system uses an empty speedometer to encourage players to start burning their resources right away. It’s your choice whether to burn all your Rev on a big extended combo with EX special moves, or to conserve it for defensive moves like push-blocking or a table-turning counter from a Just Defend block. Once Rev hits 100%, though, it’s gone and you have to fight from a vulnerable position, without your tricks. Unlike Street Fighter 6’s burnout, the overheat state lasts for most of the rest of the round, longer than most players will be able to wait it out.

The nice thing about the Rev system is that it works on high and low levels: on a low level, you can easily string together Rev special moves to make for easy, highly damaging combos at the cost of a bit of meter. But on the high end, a lot of high skill maneuvers like Just Defense, or the careful decision of when to use a super move or extend a combo, actually cause the meter to go back down, directly paying off the advanced player with more resources to use.

Offense is also very tricky with feint and “break” fake-outs that allow you to cancel a move early and make a defender flinch. When a clever attacker gets on you in this game, it’s tough to determine when to try and backstep or jump out, when to risk a counter-punch to maybe beat that feint, or when to burn Rev meter to push them back.

I like the little element of uncertainty that moves like Just Defense and feints bring to the regular guessing game. Normally you can’t block in the air in City of the Wolves, so your anti-air attacks will certainly land against a new player— but what about the savvy veteran who’s leading you into that move so they can read your mind, skillfully Just Defend and counter you? The powerful defensive option is of course reminiscent of SFIII’s parry, but it gives players that same feeling of caution— don’t be too predictable or you’ll eat it!— without actually dominating the game like the SFIII parry. This game rewards making hard reads and getting them right: I particularly like the way it slows down to emphasize the moment when certain attacks jump over a low attack or slide under a high attack to counter.

Unfortunately, for all of this mechanical depth, SNK’s tutorials remain poor, like an interactive run through an 8-page instruction manual. This hasn’t really changed, and I think it’s a big reason their games aren’t as popular in the fighting game community as they could be. SNK’s new wave of games have been kind of 2000s-style, and something that never really worked about that school of arcade design was dropping a really complex game and expecting audiences to work it out themselves. Some people will. Most people won’t.

Characters I like

The characters who run this game right now are Hotaru, Hokutomaru, and Kain. Hotaru is an S-tier fast-moving all-rounder with some of the strongest versions of every possible tool in the game, and she gets to combo off a throw for good measure. A little killer who does it all.

Hokutomaru is a pressure and neutral beast with a ninja teleport that’s plus on block. Yeah, he needs to get in, and also… he gets in for pretty much free. Kain is an untouchable wall of projectile fire who tests his opponent’s patience by existing, and has to screw up really bad to lose. Good luck ever getting in on him.

(I think Hokutomaru is also the best redesign, in that he was a elementary-age kid in the original Garou and now he’s a decidedly awkward early-teen doing his best to look cool. It’s a very specific age to place a character at, and not something you see a lot of in video games.)

As for myself, I’ve mostly been playing Dong Hwan, the goofier of Kim Kaphwan’s two sons. (Note his name sounds like Don Juan; he’s a bit of a failure playboy.) In addition to just being a fun dork, Dong Hwan has tricky movement in the air— including a powerful dive kick ala Cammy– and nasty offense up close using various feints and fake-outs that keep him attacking over and over again. He needs to get in, but starting at medium range he starts to get really scary. He’s a great “style points” character; in fact his whole personality is “style points”.

Single player and other

One of the very 2000s things that SNK does is offer the full arcade mode that single-player FG enthusiasts demand, complete with lore drops via story cutscenes and individual character endings. (For all the wait, not a hell of a lot happens in the COTW story, but Terry’s ending was a good one.)

In addition to that, another way SNK plays catch-up with Street Fighter here is the full single-player RPG mode. But City of the Wolves doesn’t have the budget (guess that all went to marketing) or the scope to do a completely separate free-roaming RPG mode like SF6. Instead, you have a much simpler RPG similar to the World Tour mode in the old Street Fighter Alpha 3 home versions (if you're old enough to remember those). Pick a location on the map, have a fight there, get a prize. As far as the story component, I was able to get through it with Mai in a couple of hours by just rushing through the important fights (for which I was deliberately under-leveled). But the grind and unlockables— including new looks for the game’s color edit mode— go on for significantly longer.

To SNK’s credit, this is precisely the sort of XP-grinding, skill equipping, stat-increasing content that single-player FG fans have specifically asked for for the last twenty years, and which only a few games bother to include. It’s important for players to have something to do that isn’t direct 1-to-1 competition. And speaking of, the players on here are pretty tough!

Multiplayer

The multiplayer in this game is exactly the same as in KOFXV, rollback and all, so matches play out just fine. But this does bring up a problem. Like KOFXV, this game has cavernous, labyrinthine menus. They’re not as bad as SF6, where you’re flipping between three video games with completely different UIs, but they’re close. Common features, like which character to use and what stage/music to use in game, feel like they are practically hidden. This is not really “what worked last time is good enough for this time”; the whole UI for multiplayer needs a redo. And probably the main menu too.

I told the game I was experienced at fighting games when it asked; This put me in the B rank, where I seem to belong, because I have moved little. Players in C rank know how to do combos to deal damage, but don’t have much other feel for the game; they still fight you like they would fight a computer opponent, never expecting you to block or counter. Players in B rank can deal damage and play the neutral game, but they haven’t optimized a character to win yet. Players in A rank have a basic mastery of the game and their character’s game plan. This is not SF6, where you will eventually move on as you play, whether or not you improve. No, it’s harsh and you’re in for the long haul.

Like any competitive fighting game, the versus mode is where City of the Wolves diehards will be spending most of their time. I am only beginning to get my head around the mechanics, but it’s all worth it when you’re matching wits with a real person and make that one perfect read that makes you feel like a genius. It's a system that really makes you want to get better.

In closing, how long was this review? Oh my god.

So to sum up, we finally got the sequel to Garou and it's good! But there's somehow a ton of political and marketing baggage to the sequel to Garou! (How would you even break this to someone in 2000, how could you even explain that) I don't blame anyone at all who boycotted it. There are also a ton of other cool fighting games you could buy right now, like Iron Saga VS, or the new Capcom classic collection. But I've been waiting 25 years for this one, and damn it all, I am loving it.