The fact that an obscure brand like Fatal Fury is getting a sequel after almost 30 years is strange enough in itself. But City of the Wolves is also heading in a very unusual direction.
Over 30,000 people are looking at me at the same time with big, questioning eyes. At least that’s how I imagine it when my colleague Maurice drags me in front of the camera at the Summer Game Fest 2024 in the middle of Los Angeles,to rave to Gronkh’s live audience about my highlights from the Geoff Keighley show And well, my highlight is called Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves.
Who even knows Fatal Fury these days? Or more generally, who ever knew Fatal Fury? In German homes in the early 90s, Street Fighter and Street Fighter alone reigned supreme as the premier fighting game. It wasn’t until the 3D era that Tekken, Soul Calibur, Virtua Fighter, and others spiced up the ryu- and ken-colored monotony.
Fatal Fury from 1991, on the other hand, was too obscure even for that one hipster kid who used to strut down the village street with his Sega Game Gear, telling everyone how lame the Game Boy was with its two colors. Well, you rarely saw that kid outside because he was constantly recharging his six Game Gear batteries, hehe.
But Fatal Fury was great – and a worthy competitor to Street Fighter in terms of quality. It catapulted developer SNK onto the map of major fighting game publishers and established big names that still endure today, most notably The King of Fighters (originally a spin-off of Fatal Fury). However, the Fatal Fury series itself has been extinct since 1999. Garou: Mark of the Wolves, a fantastic final installment, was released shortly before the turn of the millennium and still looks great today. But since then, nothing.
Until now!
What on earth is Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves?
At first glance, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves looks like any other fighting game. Seventeen characters beat each other up against picturesque backdrops with cool music playing in the background, punches, kicks, and fireballs fly until, ideally, the opponent chews up their gamepad in frustration. But there are two major differences:
- Not only are the characters familiar to veterans from 1999’s Garou: Mark of the Wolves, but they are still among the absolute best today. Every fighter in City of the Wolves has a distinct silhouette, a cool personality, and awesome moves – with the exception of Christiano Ronaldo. My goodness, what are publishers thinking with these collaborations? One of the biggest plagues of modern service games:
First, the characters: You’ve all played games where you just can’t seem to remember the characters, as if your mind is slipping away. Sometimes they’re too generic, sometimes they’re too much like the competition. The fighters in Fatal Fury are the opposite: you see them once and they stick in your memory.
Take B. Jenet, for example, a flamboyant diva in a flowing dress who crushes everyone under her heels. Or Terry Bogart, the aging hero of the very first Fatal Fury, who has traded his late-80s baseball cap for a mentor’s bomber jacket. Or Vox Reaper, a professional killer with a tattooed skull. Or Kevin, a SWAT captain. Or Kane, an aristocratic gangster boss in a white tailcoat who, as befits a good anime villain, announces all his attacks in German. Black flame and stuff.
And now to the whole thing with the counterpoint to Street Fighter.
The perfect introduction to challenging fighting games
This may sound paradoxical: Fatal Fury is the perfect introduction to the world of complex fighting games because it is so damn unfriendly to beginners
Let me explain.
Many modern fighting games make it as easy as possible for beginners. In Street Fighter 6, for example, you get a lavish open-world campaign at a shallow level, simplified controls, wild button mashing that gets you surprisingly far, and so on. Sure, if you dig deeper and venture into ranked multiplayer, you’ll still find a complex fighting game that you won’t be able to master even after hundreds of hours of play. But Street Fighter 6 doesn’t overwhelm you at the beginning.
Fatal Fury does. On paper, there’s also an optional control scheme here, but City of the Wolves places an incredible amount of emphasis on mechanical precision. In concrete terms, this means that even the first enemies in arcade mode will beat you to a pulp if you don’t understand what you’re doing.
The single-player options are also significantly… drier than in Street Fighter and Tekken. In arcade mode, you fight your way through a few battles as usual and defeat a boss at the end, while in the more extensive Episodes of South Down, you grind your way through dozens of battles to level up a character and unlock more and more bells and whistles.
But this bit of fuss doesn’t distract from the real core of the game: you have to master this combat system. You have to understand that in this game, you don’t just roll away after a fall, you can roll away in four different ways. You have to realize that there are short jumps, long jumps, and really long jumps. You have to learn what the ominous Rev button is all about, which hides five different functions.
That probably sounds tough – and it feels tough too – but there’s another side to the coin: Fatal Fury may be complex, but it’s also much slower and more readable than other fighting games. If you follow online fighting game matches, you’ll hear all kinds of terms flying around: whiff punishes, okizeme, meatys, pokes, reversals, and so on.
Street Fighter 6’s beginner-friendliness hides the fact that you’ll still have to learn all this stuff at the end of the day. Fatal Fury, on the other hand, throws you in at the deep end, but then lets you learn these techniques in a very clear way. There are extensive tutorials, practice modes, and so on. Unlike many competing games, the abilities of the individual fighters in Fatal Fury don’t vary that much. This means that once you understand how the game itself works, you can play all the characters well.
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is a very unusual game. After 26 years, I wasn’t expecting a new Fatal Fury game, but it breaks with what the competition is desperately trying to do: instead of hiding how merciless fighting games are, it lets me get beaten up properly. It gives me all the tools I need to really get my teeth into the world of challenging beat ’em ups – but I have to bring the motivation myself.
