Hiya!

While I do consider myself a part of the fighting game community, I still believe I am what they would call a n00b. That’s because I didn’t really grow up playing these kinds of games and only started with Capcom‘s Street Fighter IV. I didn’t live through the fighting game boom of the ’90s nor did I play many of the game from that time. So, when SNK announced they were in the middle of making Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves all those years ago, I wasn’t exactly elated by the news. I knew it was a big deal because of the reaction it got but I wasn’t jumping out of my seat. My only real knowledge of the Fatal Fury games comes from playing King of Fighters XV. I knew of characters like Terry Bogard, Mai Shiranui and Rock Howard from SNK’s team-based fighter but I’ve never tried playing the games they originally came from.

Flash-forward to the present and I’ve been playing a lot of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. So, what does some n00b who’s never played a single Fatal Fury game in her life think of it? Did City of the Wolves convert someone who’s never experienced its glory days? Read on to find out!

First off, I got to talk about the aesthetics of City of the Wolves. I really do like its art direction as the colors are very vibrant, giving it a more anime styled look. The stages are also really gorgeous with each area filled to the brim with Easter Eggs for longtime SNK fans to point at and state how they understand that reference. Unfortunately for me, I don’t really get many of them. Still, I can appreciate how much love they put into the stages as, at the very least, they are never boring to peer into the background as something is always happening.

I do have a problem with the overall sound design as, under its normal settings, most of the sound effects are too loud! They seem to drown out the other audio like the characters shouting out what special move they’re doing. I am also a little disappointed with the soundtrack. I know SNK is known for creating very memorable background tunes for their fighting games. None of the new tracks seems to stick out in my mind, though. They’re not bad but they’re just not the earworms I expected.

Now, let’s go to the meat and potatoes of City of the Wolves: the actual gameplay. SNK created a very mechanically dense fighting game as there is a lot to talk about here. Even before we get to the main gimmick of City of the Wolves, the REV System, the basic fighting system is already very complex as players are spoiled for choices here. An example would be the simple act of jumping as, in City of the Wolves, there are 3 types of jumps! There’s the normal jump, the short hop and the dash jump! This immediately makes the simple act of jumping in somewhat scary for the person getting jumped on as they would have to determine what to do in that split second. Should they go for an anti-air, meet them in the air with their own jump attack or just block?

The variety is not just limited to jumps as well. Unlike in Street Fighter 6, which I’m guessing most n00bs are more experienced with, City of the Wolves has proximity normals. This means your regular buttons will have different attacks depending how close you are to your opponent. So, you really have to keep an eye out on your distance as you might not get the right attack you want if you’re too close or too far from your opponent!

There are also things like universal anti-airs and universal overheads, which also adds to every characters’ offensive and defensive arsenal. Heck, even with the simple act of blocking, SNK added several options, like the REV Guard, Just Defense and, for those multi-hitting attacks, Hyper Defense! The last two are pretty important as, if done successfully, the player executing it gets a sliver of heath back! This can be pretty handy if you’re skilled enough to execute this during the heat of battle!

Is your head spinning from all of these options yet? Well, we’re not done with the basics as there are also some optional offensive tools and I do think these are the most important for high level play. These would be Brakes and Feints. With some special moves, such as Terry Bogard’s Power Dunk, this allows the player to cancel the first hit of the move so that it doesn’t complete its animation and the rest of the attack. Why would you want to do that? Well, if the Power Dunk is blocked and you don’t do a Brake, Terry Bogard will jump up and leave him vulnerable to a counterattack. Braking can alleviate any mistimed special attacks. That’s not its only use! Braking can also be used to extend combos and even fake out attacks so they don’t come out at all!

However, the most powerful basic technique just might be Feints. In City of the Wolves, you can perform a Feint move, wherein your character pretends to do an attack but it’s just a fake out move. While this seems like a nothing ability on its own, its true strength comes from the fact you can cancel into a feint from any regular cancellable normal attack. This means you can do a big attack like a close heavy punch, cancel that into the Feint and then link into a far standing heavy punch and then cancel that into a special move! This can lead to really big damage but that’s not the end of how you can string on a combo in City of the Wolves!

This is when we have to talk about the REV System. The REV System kind of works like Street Fighter 6’s Drive System… but in reverse! Instead of having a full Drive meter, you have an empty REV meter at the start of each round. As you block, do REV Arts, REV Guard or REV Blows, the REV Meter starts filling up. Unlike Street Fighter 6’s Drive Meter, you do not want your REV Meter to fill up! If it does, your character enters an Overheat state. If you are in Overheat, you won’t have access to any of the REV System’s abilities and, if you block too much, you will eat a Guard Crush, leaving you wide open for a painful combo.

The crown jewel of the REV System is the REV Accel technique, which allows you to cancel any REV enhanced special attacks into another REV enhanced special attack! In theory, you can chain all of your characters REV enhanced special attacks into one combo. This will do a good amount of damage with diminishing returns thanks to damage scaling as well as the fact this will fill your REV Meter much quicker. So, it would be best to avoid the temptation and just limit your REV Accel cancels to suit the situation.

Along with the REV System, City of the Wolves has the Selective Potential Gear, or SPG, system. This apparently is a carryover from Garou: Mark of the Wolves wherein you select a portion of your life bar and, when your health reaches that point, your character gets enhanced strength and also is able to perform REV Blows and their Hidden Gear, which is essentially your character’s ultimate Super Combo. I do not like this at all! I suppose there’s a strategy where to put it but I can’t figure out where to put the SPG section to suit my gameplay! I also don’t like how it locks out moves, especially the Hidden Gear as this is supposed to be your biggest attack!

Now, got all that? Well, if you didn’t, tough cookies and git gud! This is what I think is City of the Wolves’ greatest strength and greatest weakness. Having all of these options and abilities is great but, as someone who is new to Fatal Fury, it is very difficult to wrap my head around all of them! I know high level members of the fighting game community have already built all of this into their muscle memory. As a n00b, the simple act of even performing a Feint cancel and linking it to another normal is just so difficult! I do believe anyone can get good in City of the Wolves as long as they practice, practice and practice even more. However, more casual players who just want to jump online and do a few matches will just get pummeled to death against the ones who will dedicate themselves to learning all of the intricacies SNK inserted into City of the Wolves.

Thankfully, for the most casual players such as myself, City of the Wolves does have a lot of single player content to enjoy so you don’t have to go online just to get beat up. However, I do kind of feel it’s not as flesh out as it should be. For example, the game does have an Arcade ladder, where you pick your character and win the latest King of Fighters tournament, with the prize being the supposedly deceased Geese Howard‘s legacy. You get little comic cutscenes during the penultimate and final match before you see the ending as well as pretty well-acted voiceovers. As good as the comic images look, I kind of wish they were animated as well, using the in-game models to act out the scenes instead of just these still images. Oh, in higher difficulties, I can’t help but think the AI is just reading my inputs. So unfair!

Their main single player mode is Episodes of South Town. This is… weird. Episodes of South Town is essentially a combination of the Arcade ladder mixed with RPG elements. You go around South Town and get into fights with random fighters as well as the rest of the roster. As you battle, your character will gain experience points and you can level up your character to get increased stats like more health. This is also the way to unlock minigames as well as artwork.

Episodes of South Town is fun but it feels really outdated. Instead of having your character running through South Town, you click on locations on your map. Instead of watching characters talk to each other, you have still dialog boxes pop up. It eventually get very repetitive as you’re going to see the same no-named enemies throughout your run through this game mode. It just comes off as very undercooked.

What’s not undercooked is the Color Edit mode. Here, you can change the color palette of each and every character in the roster. I’m not very artistic but I like to pretend I am! So, I actually spent a lot of time crafting new color swaps for all of the characters. With some clever changes, you can color Rock Howard to look more like Kyo Kusanagi, Billy Kane to look like a punk-rock version of Captain America and, my personal favorite, Mai Shiranui to have almost the exact same outfit as Cammy in Street Fighter 6! It takes a lot of work to get it right but, when it works, it looks fantastic!

This does make me wish SNK gave us the ability to also edit the menu system and the game’s overall UI. The menu system is stylish but can be hard to get used to and moving to one section can feel slow. Even starting up the game can be a slog as you have to go through a lot of unskippable logos before you get to the thankfully skippable intro movie before you can start playing! There’s also a lot of loading in-between stuff. I’m playing City on the Wolves on a gaming PC with an SSD hard drive so I can’t really understand why the loading of things can come off slow! Even when doing the combo trials, it had to load something when you pass and get to the next one! Why? It’s still the same characters and you’re just changing what I’m supposed to do for the trial!

So, what does a Fatal Fury n00b think of City of the Wolves? While I can say it’s overall a good fighting game, I do think it can be a little too complex for me. This is something I have to put my time into in order to even start getting really competitive. I’m not sure I’m willing to do that as I do have other things in my life besides playing a single fighting game. The single player modes are okay but aren’t really anything exceptional. I’m not saying I’m going to drop City of the Wolves anytime soon but I’m also not saying it’ll be something I’ll still be playing it consistently. I’ll probably pop it in when the new DLC characters come out (since I already paid for them) but I’ll be more entertained watching high level players do magical things in tournaments rather than play it.

Byee!

What are your thoughts on Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves? Let me know in the comments section below!