Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves review: one last show in South Town

Very few fighting game series get a second act. Most fade. For a series to get there twenty-six years after its first big moment, after the company behind that series has been through bankruptcy and acquired — twice — is nothing short of miraculous. But no miracle is free; like all powerful magics, they extract a price.

In the case of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, that price is the end of SNK’s alleged independence under the MiSK Foundation, and a stain on what should be (and otherwise is) Fatal Fury’s triumphant return to prime time after more than two decades away. Every time I play City of the Wolves, all I can think is: It did not have to be this way. But then I remember that we exist under capitalism, where art matters less than money and appeasing the people who have it, and I realize that this is the only way a modern Fatal Fury game could have been made.

There’s always a catch.

Uninvited guests

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is the so-long-awaited-we-basically-gave-up-hope-of-ever-getting-it sequel to the legendary Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Garou was something of an experiment akin to Street Fighter III, taking place 10 years after Real Bout Fatal Fury (but crucially not Real Bout Fatal Fury 2: The Newcomers). Only series poster boy Terry Bogard made the transition; the rest of the cast was new. City of the Wolves splits the difference, offering up classic characters like Billy Kane and Mai Shiranui, returning favorites from Garou like B. Jenet, Rock Howard, and Tizoc, and fresh faces like rushdown monster Vox Reaper and Preecha, apprentice to Joe Higashi. It’s a good roster: you’ve got your shotos-but-not-really in Terry and Rock, grappler in Tizoc, war crimes characters like B. Jenet, mix-up enjoyers like Hokotumaru, and so on. Every archetype is represented here, and every character feels unique.

The problem lies in the guest characters. Normally, I wouldn’t spill ink over cameos save to say that “X character is in the game, and that’s cool.” Ken Masters throwing Terry Bogard his hat in Capcom vs. SNK 2? Iconic. Perfect. A show of respect and an acknowledgement of the rivalry between two of the genre’s oldest all-time greats. That’s not what’s here. Instead, our guest characters are soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo and Salvatore Ganacci, a DJ you’ve likely never heard of.

Why are Ronaldo and Ganacci here? The likely answer is that they’re both close with Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who chairs Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which bought a controlling interest in SNK in 2021. Ganacci is quite close to the Saudi royal family and has performed at various events in Saudi Arabia. In fact, he’s got a concert in Saudi Arabia the day City of the Wolves comes out, and he performed at Wrestlemania this past weekend as part of a tie-in promotion for the game. Ganacci’s appearance is annoying, but his character is largely a joke (he looks at the camera knowingly when he executes a crouching jab and his DP is essentially the man T-posing into space; he’s also likely the game’s worst character) and he did contribute to City of the Wolves’ music.

Ronaldo is a different story. In addition to being charged with tax evasion (and taking a deal where he paid a large fine to avoid jail time), Ronaldo was accused of raping a woman in 2009. He would later admit to it in a leaked legal questionnaire, saying “She said no and stop several times” and that he apologized to her afterwards. At the time, Ronaldo’s defense attorney claimed that the documents were altered, but did not offer evidence to support the claim. Ronaldo currently plays for Al-Nassr, a Saudi Arabian team that has made him one of the highest-paid athletes in the world and is also owned by the Public Investment Fund.

He’s incredibly strong in City of the Wolves, but also barely in the game. He does not have his own arcade story, nor is he in Episodes of South Town, the de facto campaign. And unlike every other character, you cannot edit his colors. He doesn’t even provide his own voice. In 2022, SNK claimed that being owned by Saudi Arabia had no effect on its creative output and that the company had complete creative freedom. I’m not sure I believe that’s the case anymore. Do you?

The play’s the thing

What’s infuriating about this is that SNK has made a great fighting game with City of the Wolves. It looks and sounds wonderful, it’s satisfying to land combos, and the systems are unlike any other fighter. What defines City of the Wolves is the Rev system; essentially, any Rev Art (think a souped-up version of a base special move) may be canceled into any other Rev Art move to perform unique combos and blockstrings. The downside is that doing so builds heat. Rev up too high, and you’ll overheat, losing access to the Rev system until you cool down. You won’t just lose access to Rev Arts, either. You’ll also lose Rev Guard, which keeps you from taking chip damage, allows you to block in the air, and pushes your opponents back when you’re on defense, giving you more opportunities to escape. Plus, you open yourself up to the risk of getting guard crushed.

You’ve also got feints, which are exactly what they sound like. They pull double duty as a fake out that allows you to bait your opponent into reacting to an animation and to cancel certain normals into a feint for a faster recovery, opening up combo routes you wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. Then there are brakes, which allow you to halt certain special moves in their tracks. Brake a DP after the first hit knocks your opponent into the air, for instance, and you can use it as a launcher that opens up new combo routes on hit and new pressure options if they block. It’s a great system that rewards knowledge, execution, and creative play.

Finally, there’s the SPG, or Selective Potential Gear. Before each match, you select when you want your SPG gauge to activate: the beginning, middle, or end of your health bar. Once it reaches that point, you gain access to Rev Blows, incredibly powerful, safe on block, armored attacks that will blow through most anything including Hidden Gears, each character’s most powerful Super that is only available during SPG. The SPG part of your health bar is small. A single good combo will knock you out of it. Now, you can extend that by Just Defending (blocking right before a move hits you), which restores health, but staying in SPG can be tough, and maximizing what happens you get out of it when you are can be the difference between a come-from-behind classic and a heartbreaking loss. Choosing when you want it — a weaker version to build an early lead, or a stronger version you have to wait for — can make all the difference if you can capitalize at the right time.

Combine all of this with a stellar cast, guest characters aside, and City of the Wolves does the most important thing a fighting game can do: It ask you to make complex decisions on both offense and defense. How much heat are you willing to build in a combo? Do you cash out with a stronger super to confirm the round or choose a weaker move and carry some meter over to the next and risk losing on the next interaction? Do you send that Rev Blow on wakeup knowing it’s throwable? Risk it all on a DP or a super? How are you going to play neutral? Fighting games are at their best when they ask you to think, and City of the Wolves has a lot on its mind.

There’s one gameplay decision I’m of two minds about: Smart Style, which simplifies City of the Wolves’ buttons into Punch, Kick, Smart Combo, and Special move. In theory, this is great because everyone should be able to play fighting games. In practice, it’s extremely frustrating to fight against when you’re getting hit by a combo someone is doing by pressing a single button that takes half of your life bar. That doesn’t feel fair and it doesn’t solve the fighting game accessibility problem either. Sure, you’ve removed the barrier of entry for something like a DP, but you’ve essentially just taken the first rung off the ladder. The hard part of fighting games isn’t motion inputs and combos. That’s just muscle memory. You can sit in training mode and grind that out. The hard stuff is learning to play neutral, decision-making, understanding risk/reward, and matchup knowledge, and there’s no button that will do that for you.

Execution can and should matter. Choosing what combo when, drops, mistakes, the clutch moments, hell, even being able to do a DP when the chips are down … that’s the stuff that separates good fighting game players from great ones. The DP motion is the way that it is so you can’t block and do it at the same time. You have to open yourself up to perform the move. My hope for something like Smart Style is that it will help new players along and incentivize them to learn the game properly, but the more I see options like this, the more concerned I become that the genre is sacrificing a piece of its soul for quick gains in the stuff that’s easiest to master the and least likely to determine long-term success. People don’t stick with fighting games because they can do combos; they stick with them because they learn to appreciate everything else and come to love the fight, win or lose.

Can’t have it all

It all plays well, but I could have told you that just by looking at the menus. There’s an old joke that no fighting game is allowed to play well, have great netcode, look good, and have decent lobbies and menus. Something has to be sacrificed. The monkey’s paw always curls. Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves’ menus look like they were made in Microsoft Paint, so I knew it would be a banger from the moment I first launched it.

On the positive side, City of the Wolves has all the things a fighting game needs: full cross-play, a tutorial that will walk you through the basics in great detail, a mission mode that is essentially a series of combo trails for each character, Survival and Time Attack modes, Standard versus, and more. Arcade mode is where the story stuff happens, told through a series of animated, comic book style stills between fights. What’s here isn’t deep, but I did enjoy seeing what feels like the end of Terry and Rock’s saga, which hit me a little harder than I expected it to, and catching up with the rest of the Fatal Fury gang.

Most solo players will spend their time in Episodes of South Town, a story mode where they choose a character, select fights on a map, and level up and equip earnable skills. It’s a very basic RPG and fairly barebones (there isn’t much voice acting, and you don’t really choose what happens when you level up), but I enjoyed how little it wasted my time. I saw the fight on the map I wanted, beat up whoever was there, and moved on to the next thing. It reminded me of fighting game stories from back in the day; I didn’t have to do everything, though there are some fun optional fights with specific rules like “you will either do no damage when you hit this person or all of their health bar.” When I found an optional objective, I felt like it was worth doing the extra fights, but I also didn’t feel like I had to grind much. Episodes from South Town is fun and breezy. It’s a good way to practice with your chosen character that respects your time, even if the presentation isn’t going to light anyone’s hair on fire.

For sickos, the real fights will be waged online. This is, unfortunately, where City of the Wolves stumbles. It’s not in the netcode, mind you. City of the Wolves’ rollback is excellent, and I’ve played games with friends overseas that felt like the two of us were sharing an arcade cabinet. It’s everything around that. Getting into lobbies is a chore; you can’t just select someone from your Steam friends list and invite them. Instead, you have to either be friends with someone in-game or send them a room code generated by the game which … may work or may not. Oh, and you’d better make sure you’re on the same servers.

Even the room layout is odd. You select options with a mouse cursor tied to your control scheme of choice. It can be difficult to tell when someone is queued to spectate or play, and the whole layout is generally just ugly. City of the Wolves clearly doesn’t have the budget of Tekken 8 or Street Fighter 6, but there’s no excuse for not being able to invite or join my friends without going through all of this nonsense in the year of our Lord 2025 when Halo 2 solved this problem in 2004.

Always a catch

I’m going to be honest: I’ve struggled with this review more than any other I’ve ever written. I’ve struggled with how to balance my belief that, when the characters are on-screen and beating the hell out of each other, Fatal Fury is one of the best fighters on the market. I can live with the questionable lobbies and presentation issues. There’s always a catch, right?

The other existential problems are harder to grapple with. I can’t imagine that the developers at SNK wanted to include either of these guest characters, that this is what they wanted to spend their time and money on. I can’t imagine that Ronaldo is this strong by accident. I can’t imagine that they were revealed last, long after so much goodwill was built up around this game, right before its release, because that’s what SNK believed would be best. And I can’t escape them. I can’t turn them off. I will see Ronaldo online because he’s one of the most popular athletes in the world and very strong in the game. Even when I finished Terry’s arcade mode, where I was oddly touched by the story I’d just witnessed, there he was doing soccer things in the credits. It’s like whiplash. One moment I’m playing with friends and having a great time. We’re all so happy Fatal Fury is back. It feels so good to play. The next, I’m staring at a credibly accused rapist on the character select screen who seems to only be there because he plays for a Saudi Arabian soccer team. Maybe I’m wrong, but I fear that I’m not.

Can you love something and be viscerally disgusted by it at the same time? Doesn’t something have to break? City of the Wolves would likely not exist without the Public Investment Fund. SNK probably wouldn’t either, and I can’t blame anyone who developed this game for using this opportunity to make something they loved. But people like Ronaldo get thrown out of the fighting game community. Guys like Infiltration, a multiple-time EVO champion who was convicted of beating his wife, and TempestNYC, another EVO champion who couldn’t keep his hands to himself. The list goes on. This community is deeply queer, largely made up of people of color, and extremely protective of its grassroots origins and the people in it. Corporate, moneyed influence is something it — no, we — have always fought against because this community is ours. We built it. It’s not for sale. Every year, some of the greatest fighting game players in the world turn down the chance to compete at the Esports World Cup for life-changing money because it is funded by the Public Investment Fund and they do not feel safe, as queer people, in Saudi Arabia. I’m sure City of the Wolves will headline the next event in Riyadh next year, and more people will have to decide what they believe. At some point, you are who you choose to be.

For a long time, folks have been able to keep these things separate. But here’s Ronaldo, along with Salvatore Ganacci, thrown in our faces for as long as this game endures. City of the Wolves is a good fighting game. It is. And it could not have been made under different circumstances. But in this time, this era, this world, it feels particularly telling. We all exist under capitalism. Nothing, and nobody, is innocent. The rich and powerful get away with everything. If you can’t earn people’s respect or a place at the table, you can damn sure try to buy it.

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is a game I’ve been waiting for for a long, long time. And now that it’s here, I wonder if it was worth it. Everyone has a price, especially for the things they hope never to sell. What’s yours?

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves was tested on PC.