Molding characters around story instead of shoehorning them into it? In a fighting game?
Consistency and believability have never been pillars of fighting game storytelling. It’s not at all to say that developers don’t take extra time to try to weave character threads together into meaningful tapestries, but trying to blend so many personalities and arcs while prioritizing motivation to everyone fight each other is almost a fool’s errand from the get go.
NetherRealm Studios’ did set a standard with their cinematic narratives that we’ve seen other major developers imitate, but consistency can still so quickly take a back seat to personality as soon as Tekken starts missing Heihachi or Capcom decides they don’t like their current Street Fighter protagonist. That may not quite be the case when it comes to SNK’s upcoming Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, as a new PlayStation Blog interview with director Hayato Konya reveals SNK is aiming to prioritize story, and they’re doing so with a 25 year gap since they last put pen to paper.
The interview begins with some talk about the history of Fatal Fury, specifically how developers at SNK at the time aimed to mold the game to be similar to a cinematic experience (something we might expect nowadays, but not so likely back in 1991 when the first of the franchise emerged).
From there it touches on visual design and the updated mechanics that aim to give familiar fighters a fresh feel, two aspects we’ve taken a close look at in recent months.
Then Konya and Soeda turn their attention back around to storytelling, namely the fact that they’re now picking up a narrative that has technically been dormant since the last Fatal Fury entry: 1999’s Garou: Mark of the Wolves.
“Garou left us with a lot of homework,” Konya told PlayStation. “What happened with Hotaru and her brother? What’s going on with Kain and Rock? We want to focus on telling those stories to completion and making sure that we’ve tied up all of those things. So we have a lot of work to do.”
Instead of only worrying about capturing a general theme surrounding certain characters, or revamping their stories entirely, SNK appears to be molding their characters around the story and not the other way around.
“It’s been 25 years since Garou was released, and there’s a lot of people who are still playing that game now,” continues Konya. “But we consider the story very important. And if the story requires this person to lose powers, lose their arm, then so be it. Still, because this is a long-awaited game, we don’t want to change it so much that it becomes alien to people looking forward to seeing these characters again. It’s a balancing act,” he concludes.
Though most of the game’s initial roster has been revealed, we don’t really know too much of the Southtown tale City of the Wolves will tell us. Perhaps there’s a narrative-driven reason behind the transformation in Mai Shiranui’s appearance?
While we will soon have some Fatal Fury content in Street Fighter to tide us over, the harsh reality is there’s still a six month wait until Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves releases on April 21, 2025 for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Steam, and the Epic Games Store.