After disappearing for 20 years, Fatal Fury is aiming to make a big comeback on the world stage, and things seem to be looking up for the long-awaited return to South Town so far.
While we’ve seen a lot of gameplay and a handful of characters revealed for the revival, the latest being B. Jenet and Vox Reaper, it appears to be time to learn more about what is being planned for City of the Wolves in terms of content and support.
Push Square recently spoke to veteran SNK Producer Yasuyuki Oda about Fatal Fury’s revival where he started to open up just a bit about Terry Bogard and crew’s next chapter.
Rollback and crossplay have already been confirmed in terms of multiplayer features, but what of the story and single-player options?
“Obviously, it has a standard arcade story game mode that you would expect,” said Oda via Push Square. “We do have a couple of other smaller modes that’ll add a bit more to the single-player experience, but no details to share about that right now.”
This makes it sound as though City of the Wolves won’t be hopping on the cinematic Story Mode bandwagon like we see in Mortal Kombat 1 and Tekken 8, but instead more so keeping in line with what they’ve been doing with recent titles like The King of Fighters 15.
That probably means Arcade Mode is going to contain the majority of the story progression with a handful of unique dialogue scenes and maybe a cutscene or two in the middle and end of a run — so we won’t be running around the city as Rock Howard or anyone presumably.
Picking up where the previous game left off, however, is influencing which characters are being chosen for City of the Wolves.
“The story was kind of cut short and left on a cliffhanger in [Garou] Mark of the Wolves, so a lot of character stories were not finished,” said Oda. “So with this game we were thinking of how to complete those stories for the fans of these specific characters. That was one of the key elements of deciding what characters are in the game.”
This certainly makes sense with the vast majority of the cast bring returning fighters from Garou while the only two newcomers also have deep ties to existing characters in Preecha and Joe plus Vox Reaper and Grant.
And that clearly means we’ll be seeing much more of what Kain Heinlein is up to for his master plan alongside Rock after all this time, plus he’ll likely be a playable character this time.
While the future of King of Fighters 15 looks to be nearing its end after two seasons, SNK is already planning what to do with Fatal Fury after it launches, including apparent surprises.
“So we’re already planning to have a long tail of support for the game, with a lot of character additions especially, and a lot of surprises I don’t think people will see coming as well,” said Oda. “So look forward to more information about that.”
KOF15 does have a few more characters in development, but with Terry and Mai Shiranui joining Street Fighter 6 as that series’ first guests, that certainly raises the questions about the world warriors coming over to SNK.
Oda has also talked about wishing to work more with Capcom in the future while SF6’s developers are open to a Capcom vs. SNK 3 too, so perhaps those will indeed tie in with the surprises.
Fans should expect to learn quite a bit more about Fatal Fury and KOF15’s special characters next month at Evo 2024 while City of the Wolves is still on track to release in early 2025.