Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves Team Discuss Updating the Series After 25 Years

The Fatal Fury series made its debut in 1991 with Fatal Fury: King of Fighters around the time when other fighting game franchises were starting to appear or hit their stride. The biggest ones we know and love today, including Street Fighter, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat, came from that era. While those had new iterations every several years and kept consistent, Fatal Fury‘s last entry was Garou: Mark of the Wolves in 1999.

Now, almost 26 years later, developer SNK is back with a new main entry called Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. The video game industry has changed quite a bit since Fatal Fury‘s hiatus, including increased graphical fidelity, stronger technology, and new gameplay mechanics. Not to worry, however, as SNK has still kept up with the times by creating new entries in its other fighting game franchises like King of Fighters and Samurai Shodown.

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves has introduced a new combat mechanic called the Rev system to bring it in line with modern fighting games. There’s never been a better time to be a fan of fighting games. With the recent releases of high-quality games such as Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and Mortal Kombat 1, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves intends to deliver on fan expectations.

At Summer Game Fest 2024, Anime News Network sat down with chief producer Yasuyuki Oda, art supervisor Nobuyuki Kuroki, and producer Joshua Weatherford to discuss why it took so long for a new Fatal Fury game to release and how it’ll fit into the wider fighting game community.

So City of the Wolves is the first Fatal Fury game in 26 years. Can you tell me why the wait was so long?

Joshua WEATHERFORD: After Oda-san and Kuroki-san made Mark of the Wolves, they left the company and started working at Dimps. So when they returned to SNK, they wanted to make a new Fatal Fury title.

Yasuyuki ODA: When I returned to SNK, the big plan that they had at the company was to revitalize the King of Fighters series and keep making titles in that IP specifically. So we’ve gone through that and revitalized games like Samurai Shodown. For the future King of Fighters titles, we want to keep going through and bringing back those dormant IPs. Now, we finally have the opportunity to do so with Fatal Fury.

The last game was Mark of the Wolves, released in 1999. Back then, it was a pixel art style. So Fatal Fury missed that whole 2000s and 2010s era in fighting games where they transitioned from pixels to 2D sprites to 3D models. Can you tell me about how you decided on the art direction?

Nobuyuki KUROKI: 3D allows for a lot of expression and graphics, which were big reasons why they went with the style that we went with. The American comic style fits the Fatal Fury series well. A lot of games have the Japanese anime look to them, or they’re realistic.

So, instead of making something similar to those and just looking similar, we wanted to go in a direction that hadn’t been done enough.

Can you tell me the inspiration behind the Rev system? Was it to bring Fatal Fury to the modern ages?

ODA: Mark of the Wolves didn’t have many super flashy attacks. So, if we wanted to make a new Fatal Fury that was overly flashy, it may not have made sense for the game. Instead, we wanted to enable players to do cool things while putting work into the game’s combo system. It’s still working in that combo system. Giving players more ability and agency to play however they want is the big push behind the Rev system.

For the new characters, you have Preecha and Vox Reaper. Can you guys tell me the design process of creating new characters?

KUROKI: One of the challenges, for example, with Preecha is that we were trying to mix both aspects of a Muay Thai fighter and a scientist. Those aspects in a person feel like water and oil, right; where they don’t mix. So, trying to find a way to blend them into one character was something that we had to work hard on and balance correctly.

A few days ago, it was revealed that Terry Bogart and Mai would join Street Fighter 6. Do you have any plans of having crossover characters with other fighting games in Fatal Fury?

ODA: So if you go across the way to CAPCOM‘s booth, Nakayama-san is the director of Street Fighter 6, so please ask him to put characters in our game!

Of course, we would love that to happen. A lot of fighting game fans want that as well. We hope everybody goes onto social media and posts a lot about how they want to see characters from other fighting games in City of the Wolves. If enough people post about it, maybe it’ll happen.

Fatal Fury has been getting a lot of attention. We’ve had a lot of good fighting games come out recently, such as Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and Mortal Kombat 1. How do you think City of the Wolves will be received within the fighting game community and gaming community in general?

ODA: We hope the fighting game community gets bigger with these new games. We’re also hoping that more fans outside of fighting games and from other genres will also come in and start liking those games, as well as a more diverse group of people as the community grows.