Retronauts - 665: Fatal Fury

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Are you OK? Fatal Fury busts out, as hungry wolves Kevin Bunch, Diamond Feit, Brian Clark and Will Cuevas discuss the early years of SNK’s breakout hit fighting game series. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week on Retronauts, we're hungry like the wolves. I believe this is going to be episode 665, which is an auspicious number, but one-off from the most auspicious number, unfortunately. But in this one, we are talking about the Fatal Fury fighting game franchise from S&K, which does not have anything directly to do with, you know, Satan or anything, but it does have NeoGeo. And the NeoGeo is red in those cabinets. And, you know, I can kind of see the combination. No, no. I'm very punchy. It's been a very long day. So, yeah, at the least, this will be the first half of a Fatal Fury discussion. There are a lot of games in this series.

They, S&K, released nine arcade Fatal Fury titles between 1991 and 1999, which is a very intensive number of games. So without further of due, let's go through who's joined me for this one. Who do we have here with me on the East Coast? Waiting on is Alice Reveal trailer, it's Will Quayvas. She might come back. I don't know. It's a distinct possibility. I'm thinking maybe not until the end of like season one of the City of the Wolf's

D.L.C. But, you know, fingers crossed. I've been, you know me. I've been asking her for literal years now. And it's like, oh, man, the pop off if she gets at it, is going to be phenomenal. And who do we have in our central time zone? It's Brian Clark from One Million Power And I didn't just bring soy sauce for geese

I brought soy sauce for everyone Thank you That's very kind of you Yeah, and who do we have out in S&K's hometown? Wobba, Wobba, I'm in the pink today Diamond Fight is here Do not ask me what that means

Do not ask what that means I have no idea what that means I'm not even sure Terry knows what that means No Terry is a very Terry would be one of the original hymboes that's very much a head empty head empty arms big man.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, yeah. Is there a total blueprint for a hymbo? Yeah, so Terry Bogart, of course, the central protagonist of the Fatal Fury series. This was sort of S&K's flagship fighting game franchise in the 90s. Is that fair to say, everybody?

I think I think I could. It's ironically not. the first fighting game on Neo Geo, only because they weren't really sure what a fighting game was for the first few months. You know, I think, I think King of the Monsters are considered a fighting game, even though it's more like a wrestling game, you know? Yeah. But, yeah, Fatal Fury hit, Fatal Fury hit big, and then all of a sudden, you know,

a couple of years after that, S&K very much got into the fighting game business where they were making lots of fighting games. Very, lots, very, very into fighting games, and we love them for that. Yeah. And I would say sort of Fatal Fury was sort of like the vanguard in that regard. Indeed, the very, as we get into it, the very first game is actually called Fatal Fury the King of Fighters. And then somehow the King of Fighters becomes a different game and becomes a bigger game. And we're not mad at King of Fighters. We love King of Fighters. But yeah, I would say Fatal Fury counts as the first and, you know, the grandfather, if you will, I don't know, the great uncle, Patriarch. Patriarch. There we are. It's definitely male-oriented. I think it's fair. It's Patriarch. You know, there's women in the series. Patriarch is a good word for a very organized crime-oriented fighting game series.

That's true. The central villain of this franchise is very much a criminal, like, overlord, ruling over a town, city, a metropolis. Possibly a weeb? I hate that word, but I mean, it's a weed mobster. That is absolutely accurate. I hate using that word, but I can't, it's Geese Howard. What I'm supposed to say? I guess he's video game's original weeb then. He kind of is. Just like, all right, here's this man who's from Florida.

He's a Florida man. And he's hanging out at the top of his tower in a coma. He's got the pagoda tower. He's got, yeah, he's got the, he's got the pants, you know. I've often wondered if he owns anything that isn't like his full, you know, Hakama dress or a suit? Like, does he have, does he have casual clothes? Or is it just like endless copies of those two outfits?

I'm now imagining Geese Howard waking up at like, you know, 8 a.m. in the morning. He's just, just, just a suit already slick back hair. He just, he just wakes up, like, just like a Jack Donagie kind of guy that's up ready to go, ready to do some crimes. I could see Geese rocking like the Fundoci, you know? Oh, sure. I don't want it. Oh, my God. That's an image.

DLC. They're saving that. They're saving that for City of the Wolves. That would sell units. I'm not going to lie. I know for a fact that that would... Fondoshi Geese-Haward would sell units. Yeah, so like, S&K, basically after 1999 and they had their bankruptcy,

they sort of abandoned Fatal Fury entirely and went all in as far as fighting games go on King of Fighters and Metal, or not Metal Slug. but they win in all on that too. And Samurai Showdown. So they kind of abandoned Fatal Fury and literally everything else for, you know, decades. Which is crazy because they, like, lore-wise, they abandoned it at such like a critical, like, turning point in the franchise. It's like they, they, I mean, we'll get to that later in the episode, but they just kind of set up some really great storylines and then it just went dark. Yeah.

It's like, oh, oops. To be fair, to be fair, S&K did not choose that. The financial system chose that. And, you know, I get them credit for rescuing as much as they could. You know, if you use the common, I think the common terminology these days is spoons. Like, you only have so many spoons per day. It's like, S&K had like three spoons. Like, what do we got?

A KOF, that's a spoon. Semery Shuner, that's a spoon. Metal slug, that's a spoon. And, shh, we're out of money. Damn it. So, but, you know, it survived, you know, and somehow survived. Everything's survived. We're, you know, here we are, 24, going on 2025, I think by the time this episode goes out.

And suddenly everything's alive. Art of fighting might be alive, you know? I mean, everything's as far as opposed to it's on the table or maybe under the table. You know, I can hold out for my last plague, Samarajor showdown, a crossover hit, which I'm sure is going to happen any day now. Hey, they gave us Hibiki and Sam show. The president has been set. It's time. That's true.

But, you know, even though Fatal Fury, the series went dark for. 25 years until they announced the new sequel finally that's supposed to come out in April 2025, I believe is when they set the date. They've kept the Fatal Fury characters very visible because most of S&K's most popular characters do come from Fatal Fury. So like Terry Bogard, Geese Howard, who we've, as we discussed as a weeb, my Shudanui, Kim Coppwan, they're all from Fatal Fury. all in basically every King of Fighters game, they're in basically all these crossover games

that S&K is done with Capcom or Aureka, Fatal Fury showed up in, or Terry Bogart showed up in fighting X layer. Oh, he did. Terry was in this Chinese fighting game that's now defunct called King of Combat, where he was wildly overpowered. Like, seriously, you just have to look up videos on YouTube of this guy in that game. it's comedically how good he was. He's in Smash Brothers.

But not my. But not my. My is not for good boys and girls. But now they aren't together in Street Fighter 6 and they look really good. They look really good. You know, they didn't just slap those two into Street Fighter 6. If you pay attention to like, you know, the animations and like just just the overall look of them, it shows, it really shows that they, you know, put a lot of love and, you know, the lore into those. characters and their models. It's really

exciting. Also, I guess if Nintendo was keeping track of appropriateness for kids of King of Fighters characters when they put them into smash, they completely ignored Terry's history of alcoholism. That's true. Which we can touch on.

Terry is a drunk. And a baller. He does play basketball. That's in the lore. You can look that up. Also, big sandwich fan. We know this. Big sandwich, especially when They're big sandwiches. But yeah, there was a 2018 popularity poll that was published in Famitsu, and they did it for the NeoGeo Mini, which shows, like, the mini arcade console that had come out around then.

And it was sort of a popularity ranking of S&K characters. Terry and Geese were the top two by a pretty wide margin. Terry got 257 votes, and Geese got 188. and then after that was Naku Ruru from Samurai Showdown. And after her, not too far down, was my at number 4008 votes, which, like, yeah, it's 2018, it's some years ago. But I don't think those positions have really shifted much, especially since Geese showed up in Tekken 7, and people adored him in that. Apparently, he has like a whole storyline reason for being there. and they've thrown by and all sorts of weird stuff, like Dead or Alive, Street Fighter. S&K Heroines.

S&K Heroines. Terry was an S&K Heroines. I think it needs to be said that an all-female fighting game, they tossed in Terry. Somehow, the man is so popular, he started in a game that's all women, and he just became a woman. And, you know, that's someone's journey out there, I guess. I don't know. But it's, yeah. It's Jerry's journey.

Really, really just the winningest fighting game character of all time. And, you know, of course, all these characters in K-O-F, as well as a bunch of other Fatal Fury characters that, you know, we'll touch on a bunch of them as we're going through the games. And the biggest character that I think Fatal Fury has contributed is the city of South Town, which is where these games take play. because S&K reused that same, like, setting for the Art of Fighting games. They used it for Savage Rain. Those take place in, like, before Fatal Fury and after Fatal Fury, respectively. And they use it in King of Fighters multiple times. They even blew it up in one of the King of Fighters games.

Like a satellite laser at the end of King of Fighters 2000 just blasts South Town for some reason. It's like S&K's Raccoon City. Is that what it is? Yeah, it's kind of funny. They liked it so much they made a second one. Second South. Mark of the Wolves. And yeah, it's really funny.

Because I was trying to look this up, like sort of the history of South Town. And it does not seem like it's based in any specific city. But in Fatal Fury, too, when you're fighting Terry, it fly, or not Terry, you're fighting geese. And Fatal Fury Special, excuse me, the plane will fly to Florida, and you'll fight him in Geese Tower, which means South Town is in Florida, hence Geese is a Florida man. Appropriate. I've heard people suggest that it's based loosely on Miami. I have now been able to track down where that came from specifically, but it doesn't come across as Miami, so I think it's sort of like an amalgamation of, okay, here's the American cities on the West. coast and in California that we've visited.

And here's all of these American cities from, like, action movies that we really like. It's a very beach-heavy city. There's a lot of palm trees, so it's definitely warm. And people are definitely hanging out there that's probably surfing. Clearly, lots of people have time to just fight in the streets and watch people fight in the streets. Which definitely seems like Florida. But then again, South Town also is a Chinatown. And, you know, Florida has a lot of great.

reasons to be there, but on my visits, I have not seen a particularly strong Asian-American community down there, so I don't know. Yeah, I'll take that one under consideration, this Florida-Miamy connection, but it kind of checks out, at least geographically. But yeah, Southtown, big deal. S&K loves it. It's probably going to show up in Artifighting 4 that they announced in KOF-16, God knows, maybe it'll throw it into a metal slug someday, just lean in fully on it being a Florida city. Then you actually could have zombies in it, officially making it S&K's Raccoon City. Apologies to everyone in Florida.

I just, I can't, I can't stop. You know what I'm going to be. And one of the other things that I found really interesting about Fatal Fury is that it's sort of the pioneering game in how you tell a story through fighting games. If you look at the early Fatal Fury games, they have cutscenes in an arcade machine. And they're not super in-depth, but they sort of give you an idea of, like, okay, there's a story here. It's kind of playing out in the background. And, you know, S&K still does that.

And other companies have picked up on it since as well. There definitely was a bold attempt there. And like, yeah, it's easy in 2024 to look back and say like, oh, this is kind of basic, kind of rudimentary. But, I mean, we're talking this is 1991, you know, where, you know, that wasn't really done a whole lot. And it's cool that they made that attempt to do that because fatal fury, the appeal for me personally, you know, really is the lore. it is one of the most like fleshed out and coherent well you know the occult stuff you know aside it's it's got a lore that you can follow it it tracks it it makes sense in universe why things happen when they when they do and again this is one of the the first you know arcade fighters out there so

like they they did kind of set a precedent they really said they really set a good precedent um you know I know that, you know, Street Fighter got turned into a movie and Mortal Kombat got made into a movie. And there are some animated Fatal Furies, but, like, Fatal Fury has all the stuff it needs to be a live action 90s-esque, you know, like martial arts movie right up there with, like, you know, like Ninja Turtles and all the Power Rangers stuff we got. Like, they got all the right parts. For me, I think that's a huge part of the reason why I just, I fell in love with NeoGeo in the first place. the fact that early, you know, all the early games had a lot of character, like, personality wise, and the fact that Fiddle Fury begins so strongly and has this sort of core cast, and you introduce these characters, and they, they all have things going on. You see them right

away. It's like, oh, this guy and this guy's brothers. These guys are friends. They're angry at this guy. And, you know, compare that to Street Fighter 2. Like, I played a lot of Street Fighter 2 in 1981. Like, I played a lot of Street Fighter 2 in 1991. But it's like, unless you beat a game, Unless you beat that game and you see an ending, you have no idea who anyone is. And even then, it's not really that clear. You know, it's like, oh, Blanca was a baby? What? And so much less, it kind of gets thrown out later.

But it's like, Fidel Fury from the start has a lot sort of together. And you see that in Art of Fighting. And then you see it. That's why it even makes sense for those things to even cross over. The fact that they already had, we've got these characters, we got these characters. Oh, well, why don't always have them come together? So, like, Street Fighter is like the tent pole, if you will. Of just showing, hey, you create a bunch of characters, you give them something to do.

You give them first names and last names also. Like, these people have actual names. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. You know, you doesn't have a last name. Maybe if you is his last name. We have no idea. It's a real Mario situation.

What is Luke's last name? You know, he's a new character and Capcom still can't get into it. It's true. But Terry Bogart, he's got a first and last name. Yeah. Vox Reaper in the new Fatal Fury, first and last name. They're very silly and triard, but so is he, so it works. First name Griffin, last name Mask.

There you go. And yeah, this was a big focus for Nishiki Takayama, who was the producer on Fatal Fury and a lot of S&K's fighting games in the 90s. He had this idea, if they used ancillary materials to flesh out all of these characters, and, like, the backstory in the world, like, uh, image albums and, and magazine articles, um, MOOCs, like the magazine books. I know it's real term, but I'm always going to laugh at some. Yeah, it's so, it's so strange. But, like, his idea was, like, if you did this, people would identify with the characters more than a standard fighting game would allow, and therefore, they would be drawn to, like, you know, check out your games more often and, and check out these characters. And I think that's why when they did crossovers like King of Fighters, it really worked because

everyone was like, oh, hey, I know these characters. Now they're all fighting each other. Awesome. I want to see how this goes with all these different characters who I enjoy. Good old multimedia world building. Yeah. It really is amazing to me when you think about how much Fatal Fury is doing, how much load-bearing Fatal Fury is doing at S&K and all of the games that came out S&K.

and the fact that Takashi Nishiyama came to S&K from other companies where he created games that also built a legacy in those genres as well. Yeah. He, like one man, Takashi Niyama, like this one man is the center of at least like three different genres of video game and like two different major companies. I mean, three if you count I rem is major, but I guess I don't know. But still, like once upon a time. It's a huge, it's a huge amount on like on his shoulders. Like, God forbid, God forbid, if time travel is real, we need to protect Takashi Gino's entire life because if any time travel or messes with that man, it would destroy all that we know and love about this heart form.

I've always found it very interesting that if you count, you know, maybe Street Fighter 1, which he also created before Fatal Fury as like the birth of the fighting game, you can argue whether that's true or not, but let's just say it is. he invented both the side-scrolling beat him up and the fighting game. One guy. I mean, obviously there was other people who worked on them, so not one guy, but, you know, one guy who masterminded it. I mean, he was the lead. He was the lead. He was the guy's like, let's do this, let's do this, you know.

And you can, yeah, you can point out that he was not there for Street Fighter 2. He had already left by the time Street Fighter 2 arrived. But that's also kind of the magic. The same year we get Street Fighter 2 from Capcom, we get Fatal Fury, which is like his own Street Fighter 2. too. It's like, oh, I did a fighting game. It went okay. You know, maybe some bad voice samples, whatever. Here's my new fighting game. It's called Fatal Fury

or in Japanese, Garo Densetsu, which is literally the legend of the hungry wolf. Garo is such a wonderful word. It's like, it's like starving and wolf together. I don't know why Japanese has a word for that, but they do, you know? It's a really cool name. It's really, it's really fun

to say. Really fun. I didn't know, you know, all that part about, you know, it's like two words mashed together. I just like, I just like saying Goro. I like playing Gero, and I like saying it's fun to say. It makes me wonder, too, if, like, his idea of, you know, uh, spinning up more merchandise to elevate a series, like, if he only came to that idea because it was a fighting game and he had so many characters

to work with or like if he hadn't gone into fighting games, if he would have sort of come to that, like, staying along, like, the beat him up path or whatever. It's, because I don't think really, uh, Kung Fu Master or Trojan got particularly that heavily merchandising for merchandise for as much as I like both of those games. Well, you know, Kung Fu Master, that was based on a movie, wasn't it, the Jackie Chan? Yeah, yeah. Meals on Wheels or Spartan X. Yeah. So I think maybe he saw that is like merchandising

from the other side. And he's like, hmm, that's a good point. So file that away in the back of my head. Yeah. And, you know, this was during the bubble economy where you could merchandise the hell out of anything and it would sell. So I think that was also a factor. And yeah, there's a ton of merchandising for Fatal Fury. You know, they, like we mentioned, they spawned two anime TV specials and a movie.

Several image albums, like, and I was looking up Fatal Fury soundtracks some months ago, I kept coming up with, like, image albums of the characters singing, and I'm like, oh, wow, there's more of these than I expected. I had no idea that Fat, I knew Street Fighter delved into that realm, but I did not know Fatal Fury did it, so I probably know what my next Yahoo! Auctions project is. Yeah, you got to find some albums about geese singing about. Yeah, God, I hope so. Please, geese, be singing a ballad about South Town or something, like, oh, God. We need at least one of these characters singing a song in English. Like, I don't know if it's going to be... Oh, yeah.

If it's going to be Terry or Geese or, I don't know, Franco or something, but someone's got to sing a song in English. I'm sorry. Not Andy. Andy's gone full Nogintzu, but still. Someone, at least one of these guys is going to have, you know, a story to tell and a song in their heart, and it's going to involve, you know, victory.

Kimme Kimmer Kim Kim seems like the kind of guy that would get a little too in a karaoke if you invited him to a to an outing But in terms of like

the multimedianess of it I just want to bring up the commercials in Japan for the Fatal Fury games were really cool they were like one half uh gameplay and then the other half was you know uh basically a live action a fight scene and there's a tiny little bit of continuity going from uh you know commercial to commercial like nothing too elaborate because after all these things were like 30 seconds long 15 seconds of it

maybe was you know the the live action but even with that they are still pushing a lore they are still pushing uh their world building uh and i just really i kind of I know we're well past that era, but part of me kind of wish is that for like City of the Wolves, that's what they would do with the commercial, you know, for their advertising as well. But I understand that the cost of that would probably be, you know, astronomical. And then plus like TV commercials today. They don't reach. Does anyone care?

No, the only commercials I see any more on Twitch because I. Maybe just like filming it as a YouTube promo or something would be kind of a neat throwback. I could see that. I mean, the idea I had for City of the Wolves, if you don't. don't mind me going a little bit of tangent here was as we do these character trailers, you do a live action character trailer that

that kind of introduces a character into an ongoing story like Rock Howard just walking down the street and all of a sudden like, you know, Billy Kane comes out of nowhere and jumps them. And then they have like little fights. And then it cuts to in-game footage of whoever is the center of that trailer. And it shows like what they do, like, you know,

like their specials and their supers and their combos, all that. And then it kind of cuts back to like the live action. And it kind to set something up for like the next trailer and it's like man that would be so cool but that also sounds insanely expensive and unrealistic but a man can dream you know i just i just really want the live action commercials because they did that for sam show too and i just i love those so much yeah it's it's probably too cost it's probably too costly for video game companies these days but japan still has a long and proud legacy of commercials that are attached to other commercials

you know, Tommy, Tommy Jones, I think, is approaching 20 years as a boss, coffee spokesman. And, you know, we're not that far removed from the saga of Long, Long, Man, which is like, I never saw those on TV, but those went around the Internet, and those are, like, now a legend of themselves, the Long, Long Man. Google, Google that, folks, Long, Long Man. I could say the Ventura was not that long ago either. But, yeah, they are, they are really great commercials, and it's so fun. I mean, I think, I think everyone in this podcast had probably a good portion of, our audience, you know, wishes they were hanging around in Japan, the late 80s, early 90s, where they just could have been, you know, a foreigner just showing up on commercial,

like, hey, you can be a salesman, you could be a fighter, you could be someone that Terry Bogart punches, right? Yeah, yeah, I'll do that, you know? Yeah, sure. Please, punch me Terry. I'll take a hit from Terry. That's one to put on the resume punched by Terry Bogart. I think it's the commercial for Fatal Fury 3.

It is like, it's like the camera view is through like a limousine and it's following Terry who's just like, just like, just kind of like. just drop it through this tree. It's like the worst gait I've ever seen. And then it's like, is that terrible God? It was just like, you know, just horrible Ingrid, you know, it's so good. It's wild to think that you could have commercials for arcade games on TV. Yeah, that's true.

Like, I don't think that was really a thing over here. I know they tried in the early 80s, but never really stuck. It's just such a weird proposition of like, we are going to advertise to you a product that you can't actually buy or at least probably can't afford to buy. AES was pretty cost-orhibitive. Yeah.

Go find it. Go find it and put money into it. We won't even tell you where it is. It's somewhere. Go look for it. You'll love it. It's everywhere you want to be. The game center.

You know, Shirley Midway, surely Midway was spent at least a few bucks on like a Moral Combat commercial somewhere, right? If anyone would have. You know, somewhere in the Chicagoland area, someone must be out there. maybe it was on local cable or something i wasn't living here at that time but uh we're illinois right after wainsworld you know what wasn't there like the like some like beat tier actors who got cast

to like be mortal combat characters on like a daytime yeah they did a tour oh yeah there were tours yeah that's what that's the tour and they're like remember kids martial arts is for like honor and peace and it's just like you're a movie that's basically a uh uh uh in a cult version of blood sport like What are you on about? Do you know what game you're advertising? I remember somebody spying out in your game. By all means, listeners, go back to what we have, we have a couple of Mortal Kombat episodes already out there, go back, we talk about all these early games and how they're promoted

and the tours and the actors, and one of those actors went on to become a director that you've might have heard of, so it's a fun story. But yeah, now we're talking about it, I am kind of surprised we never did get a live action Fatal Fury, even in Japan. I mean, maybe, I mean, we're getting a lot of good, video game. We're getting some great video game movies. We're getting some not so great. I'm not

going to, you know, pick and choose here. But I mean, we're in a time now where movies based on video games are becoming, you know, a little more commonplace. And we got new city of the wolf, you know, new fatal theory game coming out next year. Maybe fingers crossed. Maybe the stars will align. And we'll

get, you know, something. Even if, even if the CGI movie, like I, you know, I'll take anything at this point. The tier martial arts movie. Direct a video, make it happen. I'll be frank. I'll be frank. If someone who lives in Japan and I see a lot of properties coming out here and they get, you know, TV specials or or film adaptations, I feel like the bar is really low and most, most adaptations don't even clear that bar.

You know, I, like, easily one of the worst films I've seen all this year was a adaptation of a TV, TV game show, essentially. Like, why does a TV game show have a movie in theaters? I don't know. But Fujit TV paid for it. They put it in theaters, and even Japanese viewers are like, what the hell is this? So I fear, I fear that if S&K signed on and had, you know, had some Japanese company, like, you'd get a bunch of comedians in there, you know, a couple idol singers, you know, it's not Johnny's anymore, but, you know, ex-Johnny's dudes. And it would just, it would be a real nightmare. I feel like, like, the live action Jojo movie is, like, one of the better jobs out there.

And that's still not that great. I'm sorry. I loved it, but it's like, eh. Firing some shots here, but we're getting a live-action Minecraft movie. So, you know, if we can have that, that anything is possible. That's true. Anything is possible going forward. As long as we hand-wave it away by saying it's for children, anything is acceptable.

Fatal Fury is for the children. Yes, clearly. They announced an Eternal Champions movie, anything is possible. Oh, God, that's right. Anything is possible. I can't wait. See, I have to do an Eternal Champions episode at some point. right now. I'm glad we're all in agreement

because for like the last year or two I've been kind of saying like, you know, I'm kind of sick of everything being like superheroes. I think we need to go back to like that 90s or like, you know, martial arts you know, wave that we were on with like, you know, Ninja turtles and Power Rangers and three ninjas and, you know,

the live action double dragon which, you know, it's... Oh boy. Hey, one of my life's favorite trashy movies. It's so, it's so fun. But like, I just, I just miss that so much. And, you know, that's kind of perfect for Fatal Fury because its whole vibe is kind of like

you know, gritty 90s you know, fighting and crime, but it's, you know, the games but they're bright, they're colorful, they're beautifully animated, they got really fun soundtracks, you know, it's all the right pieces. I mean, that was kind of the North American cover anyway

for Fatal Fury 1, right? It was very much like leaning into that aesthetic. Some mullet guy punching Terry and Terry's sort of like falling over. And, yeah, it looks like it could be a VHS cover to some... It was like a roadhouse sequel or something. It does look like that, yeah.

That is some actual real, just some guy energy. Yeah. That's a... You know what? That's a good... segue to start talking about some of these games and the first Fatal Fury Fatal Fury the King of Fighters

or Grosensetsu. So this one, this is the first game. It was released to arcades in November 1991. For reference, I believe the Neo Geo debuted in 1990 originally. In arcades, yeah.

In arcades, yeah. The home system dropped in 1991, but, like, you, you had arcades units out there in 1990, so I consider, I consider 1990 the birth of the OGO, even though no one could own it yet outside of a operator. I mean, at the end of the day, it's really an arcade platform more than anything, so. And so also for reference, Street Fighter 2 came out in February of that year, and that sort of exploded the, you know, fighting game genre generally. it really sort of set the design tone of the entire genre for, what, the next 30 years, other than some weird little outliers here and there. The Fatal Fury did not really get to take up the Street Fighter 2 design sensibilities

because it was in development well before Street Fighter 2 had come out, as was the case with Art of Fighting, which is sort of of the sister series to Fatal Fury. As we mentioned earlier, this was designed by Takashi Nishyama, who designed Street Fighter One and then left Capcom after his work on that one. So this really is sort of a cousin to Street Fighter 2 and sort of reflects his interest in doing a fighting game that has a proper storyline, identifiable, very visually appealing characters. And that's why you have your three hero characters.

You have Terry and Andy Bogard, who are brothers. They're seeking revenge on their adopted father's death at the hands of crime lord Geese Howard, who killed them when the two of them were still kids. Absolutely 90s martial art movie plotline. Super 90s. So couldn't be anymore. This man, Mishihama and his crew, they were watching a lot of martial arts films. So, yeah, Terry is a street.

Heat Fighter. He's learned a lot of his dad's techniques from his dad himself, as well as his dad's old master, Tung Fu Roo, who was also Geese's master. So there's like this sort of like, I don't know the word. There's a triangle going on there that bonds all of these characters together. And Andy just, you know, sort of went off to Japan and trained under a martial arts master over there in his own form. And then they're joined by their friend Joe Higash. who's very loud, very, like, trash-talky. He's not really in this for revenge. He's just looking for a good time.

There's an interview about Fatal Fury 3 that was translated by schmoplations. And in it, they described that Joe was designed after the main character of, let me make sure I say this right, Abare Hakachu, who's a kid who fights criminals from Himitsu, Sentai Gorenger. And he's sort of the Key Ranger character. So he's brash, Life of the Party. He's not super serious. So, like, you want a goofier

experience in these series. You usually pick Joe. And if you want sort of that sort of, like, grittier sense, you want Terry and Andy. In practice, they all kind of play the same in this one, but... Yeah. Yeah. The idea is that. They're all Shoto's, you know,

Shoto's archetypes effectively. It's interesting that, because we know Takashi Nishiyama had a background in martial arts and who's very interested in martial arts. So you do, like, the characters do have different, like, they look different, and, like, their fighting styles are very different. But yeah, from a gameplay standpoint, it's like, okay, here's your, you know, fireball, energy blast, whatever. Here's your fly forward and attack them move. Here's your, you know, anti-air, essentially go up move. And, you know, the commands are pretty similar for all these moves. They're not exactly the same, but most, like,

They're very similar. They're kind of a little weird input, I feel, in Fiddle Fury 1, but, like, if you, if you get the rhythm, you can do them pretty regularly. But you have, like, it's very specific. It's not like, it's not like Street Fighter 2, but it's not like Street Fighter 1 either. It's got, it's got a different sort of feel to it. But it's a very deliberate, like, you do the semicircle and you push the button, and it usually works. Usually. Yeah, and I was going to say, they all have, like, one move that sets them apart.

like Andy's got his elbow dash and Joe has his his mash punches and I forget what Terry has I think crack shoot is what counts for that Yeah yeah yeah Coming from Street Fighter 1 That actually makes a lot of sense though

Doesn't it? Like if you think about how Street Fighter 1 had like literally one playable character It's like well okay How would you evolve from that? Well it's multiple characters They still mostly have the same moves They might look different

But they're all executed more or less the same So like it kind of makes sense Although, let's be honest, when I play Faddle Fury 1, for me, Andy's the only playable character because that one move will win 90% of fights. Yeah, the computer doesn't know what to do with the elbow dash. I'm just doing that all day. Back forth, back and forth. Punch, punch, punch.

And Fado Fury 1 is so stiff that, like, you, I mean, it's not as stiff as I remembered it, but it's still relatively stiff. So, like, it's one of those things where you have to kind of do whatever you can, especially if you're playing against the CPU. Yeah, and that's sort of the other fun thing, because this sort of takes the form of, like, a series of boss battles against computer opponents, unlike a lot of other fighting games. So, like, you can't pick any of these boss characters unless you're playing, like, the console versions. But you're working your way through Geese's sort of seedy King of Fighters tournament to try to get to him. So you get to pick your first opponent, and then everyone else sort of random from there.

Or all, it's not random, random. It's like a set sequence based on who you pick. But so you have Richard Meyer. He's a Capoeira fighter. I don't believe he shows up as like a playable character and anything else. But he shows up a lot in like the lore because he's the owner of the Pow Pow Cafe, which is another very popular location. There's a very recurring location for S&K. There's Michael Max, a boxer, who back in the day, my friend,

Kinn was always mad that they never brought him back. And he was like the only one of these characters who never showed up again. Yeah, he's, uh, just put him on a milk carton. He's gone. I don't really think he's in the background of some of these things. There's Swajai, who is another Muay Thai kickboxer like Joe Agashi. His schick is that partway through the fight, someone will throw him a bottle of booze. And he gets powered up when he drinks it and gets access to a very overpowered special move.

Yeah, I mean, if we're talking about alcoholism, I think, Guajai's obvious drinking problem overshadows the rest of the cast. I think, you know, it's like, it's like if you're, if you're worried about your weight and you hang out with someone who's obviously obese, you tell yourself, I'm okay, I'm okay. And I think that's what happens here. Everyone looks at Guajai and, oh, this guy's got the real problem. They're not analyzing themselves, you know. I'm sorry, Terry. I apologize for saying you had alcohol problems. In every piece of conceptual art I've seen of Wajai, I'm pretty sure he's always posing with a just comically large bottle of alcohols.

I'm like, okay, if I knew nothing about Fatal Fury, I would know one thing about this character. One very clear as day thing about him. But let's be clear, if there was a bottle that we could drink from and let you do that, what Wajai does, we would all be drinking this bottle every day. Oh, absolutely. I'd drink that bottle. I'm going to catch the bus. I'm like, oh, the bus stop. Rocket. Yeah, he's ridiculous. They put him in K-OF-13, basically for the same reason he's here

because he's a palette swap of Joe Agashi with like a different head, so it doesn't use a lot of memory. There's Riden. He's like a sleazy heel pro wrestler. He shows up as a face in Fatal Fury, too. But he's also most probably well known for being in Capcom versus S&K for whatever reason. He's their grappler pick. Yeah, and this, for the record,

this R-A-I-D-I-N in English existed before the Raiden in Moral Kombat but that version is more popular And the Ryden Middle Gersela too It's a weird It's a weird clash of characters And I think that's probably one reason why they went They went ahead and called them Big Bear in Philadelphia too

It's like oh there's already a Raiden Yeah we don't want it And the Raiden of course the Raiden Riden series of Schum-ups Which is also Conflict And then a couple of my favorites, we have Tung Fu-Roo, who is Jeff and Geese's martial arts master, and after you, he takes some damage.

He, like, powers up into this super buff form that is very much an homage to Roshi from Dragon Ball. Excuse me, Kevin. That's an original character. Do not steal all my original character of a bald, old man with a very long mustache and beard who looks frail, but wouldn't you know it, he can grow big muscles and beat you up? I've created that character. I made it up. My mistake, the legally and medically distinct tongue fu-roo. And Duck King

I do love that in later games They turn him into some sort of like weird Like Kenchral analog Like he can do sort of like that That charging move where Yeah He comes up I don't know that's or maybe I'm thinking And he does it

The CPU does it every time you jump in on them And this is an anti-air every single time I love S&K CPUs Yep yep And then there's Duck King Who's like this martial arts dancer And he absolutely rules And is the most 90s

Awesome. Ask character design. The bad of the Florida man. Are you kidding me? Probably the most fingers crossed hope for returning character for the upcoming City of the Wolves. I think if Duck King was announced at the upcoming TGS that we would just declare like a national holiday.

Yeah, I have not met anyone who didn't think Duck King was amazing. And at least on like the in like interviews I've I've read. and translated with like Japanese players, I feel like he's the character that's best remembered that S&K has done nothing with that like certain people haven't actually forgotten about, which is pretty

cool. Yeah, like they threw him in K-O-F-11 and he's just been M-I-I-A since. And then there's Billy Kane or as the computer, or as the game calls it, Billy Khan. He's geese's right-hand man.

He's sort of the the champion of the King of Fighters tournament. So you beat him and then you're like, you know, having a little victory celebration and then Geese's goons like pick you up and carry you off to fight Geese himself who throws off

his business suit to try and throw you off his building in a fight to the death. Which is really funny because like if you lose that fight against Geese there is an animation of him kicking you off the building and your character like starting to fall. And then it's like

continue? It's like, well, shoot, I have to continue now. He's going to kill Terry. It's one of the great examples of a continue screen that has agency and urgency and, but it's not traumatic. You know, it's not Ninja Guide, it's just, oh no, my character is in trouble.

And then, yeah, at the end, you beat Geese and kick him off the building and he falls to his apparent death, which is extremely funny. Yeah, and one of the great features of the original game is that It reads the internal settings, and whatever date it is in real life, it puts it up on the end screen.

It says, like, you know, Geese Howard died falling off his tower. And it still works. Like, if you play, like, an emulator and a modern system, and if you've got the, if you've got everything set up properly, it'll tell you, you know, whatever. 2024, 2025, it'll tell you that, you know, Geese died today, you know. Fatal Fury 2 does that, too, when you beat Krauser. I'm going to roll the clock forward so that on Geese's tombstone, it'll show that he's. He's like 250 years old. He was waiting up on that tower for a really long time, okay?

And yeah, if you're used to playing like Street Fighter 2, this game also does not really play a lot like that. Like you have your special moves and you can jump around like in that game too. But it's a three button game. There's punch, kick, and throw. Throws its own button. And honestly, I'm kind of glad it does because it works really well that way. It's so much damage too.

Yeah, it does like a quarter of their head. health every throw. So that's sort of like the key to beating opponents in this game is that it has a very like, what's the way I want to say? Every opponent has an exploitable weakness and for my understanding it's very much intentional with the way the game was designed. So if you know how to get them to do something that will screw them over, you can just sort of let them come up and get tossed or punched or whatever. Especially easy if you're using Joe, because he can just slide and the computer doesn't really know how to handle that, or Andy's elbow dash.

It really speaks to what you were saying, Kevin, earlier, but how this feels like a series of boss battles. It's like you can, there is a two-player mode, which we'll talk about. It's very interesting, but really the game feels like it's meant to be, you go up there, you put a coin in, you try to survive South Town and come up on top, and if you don't make it, well, better luck next time, whereas by this point, you know, this is the fall in 1991, by this point, we were all going crazy, you know, battling each other in Street Fighter 2. And it's like, that's just, that's why that one exploded and this one didn't, because, like,

I wish, it's too bad, because I wish more games offered a Fatal Fury-like experience for two players, but we just don't see that very often because it's not economical, certainly in front of an arcade standpoint. Yeah. And again, it's also like a very beat-em-up philosophy, too, like find the boss weakness and exploit the weakness. Like, that's not, I mean, maybe some fighting game bosses, but that's not

tactics you think of when you think of a fighting game, at least not weaknesses in that way. You know, you're thinking of weaknesses in, like, an opponent's strategy or something, not like a CPU's weakness. Yeah, and it's sort of like, yeah, it does sort of set this as a half step between like a Street Fighter 2 style

fighting game and something like final fight. Yeah. The way it's set up. And before I jump into the sit two-player mode. The other thing that really sets us apart is that has a two-lane combat system. So there's like the main layer and then there's a background layer.

You cannot jump between them yourselves most of the time. The computer can and you can sort of chase after them when they do so. And that's sort of the that's something they expand upon in the later Fatal Fury games until

they finally drop it entirely. But it's very sort of half-baked here. I think this is the best way to put it. I always remember the way it works in Fatal Fury, too, being the way it's always worked. And so when I went back to one, I was like, how do I switch planes? And you can't. You can only knock people into them.

And then jump over after them. Yeah. Or they'll jump back and you can jump after them. It's a choice. My favorite is that you'll start getting into like a loop where you're both jumping at each other in the air between lanes and like just going through each other. It does feel like a game mechanic that was probably birthed by, you know, the fact that NeoGeo was just so good at scaling sprites. It's like, oh, well, if we move in the background, we can make the sprites a little smaller. It's like, oh, it feels like you're, it feels like a 3D even though it's really not.

And then, you know, the concept sort of expanded over each game. And I would argue they inflated it to the point where it actually bursts later on. We're like, oh, there's too many lanes. There's too many lanes. Yeah, yeah. It's too much. Definitely feels like a sort of like, we're going to create this mechanic purely because the hardware allows us to do so, so we might as well.

We're not going to think it all the way through, but we're going to do it just because why not? It's the fighting game equivalent of a Nintendo DS game that makes you blow into the mic. But they kept with it for years. But it's not nearly as embarrassing as that, though, is the thing when you're playing it in public. Like, people don't laugh at you for changing planes in Fatal Fury.

At least I don't think they do. But if you're playing Phoenix Wright and you're trying to blow that dust over the fingerprints. Everybody is looking at you. Yelling objective while you're playing in the bathroom. Yeah. Yeah. And what they didn't keep was the two-player thing. So if a second player joins, you both wail on the computer opponent together and you knock them out.

And then you fight each other over who gets to stay on the machine. Yeah. Another example of that half. Very double dragon. Another example of that half step between. you know, beat-em-ups and fighting games. Yeah. So, could you call this the birth of the dramatic battle concept in a fighting game?

Ooh, take that street fight. I think so. Yeah. I mean, this predates the Street Fighter 2 movie and very much predates Alpha. So, sure. Let's say, let's say Capcom stole it. Capcom stole it wholeheart. S&K did it again.

We're going to be able to be. Um, this was reasonably popular, but not really so, not like amazingly so. I saw someone put in some details here about gamest. Yeah, that was definitely me. So gamest, I don't think it exists anymore, but it's an old Japanese game magazine, sort of like a hardcore arcade goers magazine.

And they did yearly awards where they had the readers vote on the most popular games. This got 10th overall with Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition taking number one, which is not surprising. but what I thought was hilarious is Fatal Fury at number 10 ranked under Art of Fighting which got number five and under World Heroes

which got number nine but it did get force in like a different player popularity category between SF2 and SF2 champion edition and Captain Commando I mean clearly the the readers were starred for robot Nazis

and it's like Fiddle Fury has a lot of different characters but there's no robot Nazis. And it's like, well... That's true. It also came in under Taito's Metal Black, too, which is all right by me. Yeah, that's fair. Metal Black's got...

Sorry, Fatal Fury. Metal Black's got a better soundtrack, and I love the Fatal Fury soundtrack, but let's be real. Yeah. I mean, Glass Half-Fault, 1992, there's a lot of arcade games out there, so you get the top 10. You get in the top 10, you're doing pretty good. I was going to say, like, to be, you know, 10th with everything going on. It's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, you can't really count that out.

And I know it was reasonably popular in the U.S. too. I don't have the replay magazine figures in front of me, but I remember reading that operators were quite pleased with how it was doing and their NeoGeo machine. But I guess that was one of the strengths of the NeoGeo machine in general. The fact that, you know, if you had the right unit, you could have one machine that had, you know, two, four, I think was four the biggest. Six. Were there six? There were six ones. Yeah.

So I know when I usually saw it, it was usually part of a multi, a multi-cartage system. So it's like, you put Fidel Fyrie in there. And if a new game comes out, you know, maybe you replace one of the games, but you keep Fidel Fury in there. And like, I always, you know, my local spaces usually had a Faddle Fury for many years. It was like, you know, there was always room for another game to go in there. It's like, oh, well, here's a shooting game and here's a Fidel Fury. Oh, well, Faddle Fury 2 can replace Fadil Fury 1.

And, you know, that's just. Yeah. Unless you work in an arcade where the owner insisted on putting only one game in a multi-slot machine, like, was the case with me. Oh, no. That's a different story. Sue that person. Sue them. What a time that was.

I'm trying to remember if I ever saw this at an arcade machine. I must have, but I don't think it really, like, made an impression on me, because I know there were NeoGeo machines at like Pizza Hut and the Little Caesars near where I grew up had a bunch of arcade machines, but

yeah, don't remember this. I do remember, seeing the console versions of it because this did get ported to the Super Nintendo, the Sega Genesis and the X68,000 in Japan, which, uh, these, these did have proper versus modes. They were stripped

down a bit, but you could choose from the computer opponents. Um, there was also, uh, a reissue on this PS2 Fatal Fury Battle Archives, uh, volume one, which, uh, has like a unique arranged soundtrack, which is pretty interesting.

Because eventually this did come out on the NeoGeo CD, but the Neo Geo CD was some years down the line. So different arranged soundtracks between those. Yeah, and by the time the CD's around, like, we're way deep into Fiddle Fury and K-O-F. So I feel like the number of Fidel Fury one enjoyers has got to be pretty small at that point. I mean, I know my Fiddle Fury story is that I definitely played in arcades and I liked it, but I enjoyed the sequels a lot more. But years later, and I mean like years, I want to say, like, late, maybe like 98, 99 or so, I managed to get a clearance of the Fidel Ferry 1, a clearance cartridge, $5. $5 FD4 Fentafir 1.

It's like, I'm not saying no to $5.00, Fentafir 1. And it's like, you know, by that point, you know, I'm already in a CAO of 98. It's like, obviously, I'm not going to, it's not going to replace 98. But, you know, I can have a good time of Fentle Fury for $5? That's $5. What's $5 now? When I got my Neo Geo in 2002 from the Gibraltar Trade Center, which is now very much gone in Taylor, Michigan, that the seller threw in two Neo Geo games, Cyberlip and Fatal Fury 1. Hey?

And, you know, at that point, I was... He cared very much about you having variety in your NeoGeo gaming experience with those two picks. Yeah, yeah. I could have also chosen baseball stars, but I think I made the right calls here. Yeah, baseball stars is good, but yeah, I agree. But, come on. Which is funny, because, like, at this point, I was playing, like, CVS2. I was playing K-O-F and Fatal Fury Special, and here comes Fatal Fury 1.

I'm like, well, this is a game, but, you know, I eventually very much appreciated it. It's a fun game, and it's a very weird game, but I think it kind of holds up. Certainly better than Fatal Fury 2 holds up, but we'll get to that. And yeah, I guess this is a good point to note the the aforementioned TV specials. The first one was an anime dramatization of the events of this game. It's like 45 minutes long directed by Masami Obari, who among his many, many, many other projects. You can just look up everything this guy's worked on. He returned to direct and design an animated short for KOF15 that they did post on YouTube as part of their

like advertising for the game. So, hey, maybe they should just get him to do another one for City of the Wolves. Hey, hey, we were, hey, let's go. Do not threaten me with a good time. And I don't know if anyone's watched this one recently. I watched it last night for the first time in probably, uh, 25 years, but, uh, it's pretty good.

I watched it a couple years ago. I think what makes the, these animated, uh, is that, uh, they were brought over to the U.S. and localized in like the mid-90. which made them like sort of mainstays of that sort of early anime rental and fandom space. So I feel like people who may not necessarily have played a lot of the Fatal Fury games probably remember them mostly from those early dubs and VHS releases and everything. I would argue that probably the success of the Street Fighter 2 animated movie told distributors like,

hey, let's get more of this, you know, get more of these fighting game cartoons. I don't care if the game is famous, just get it over here. So I think you had a lot of, a lot of stuff. I think, you know, I guess in a way, a rising tide carries those ships. So it's like, oh, Fatal Fury anime, sure, go ahead. And, you know, definitely me and my friends were fans of the game already. So I'm like, oh, cool, Fatta Fury. But I think we were the outliers, I'm sure.

Do anyone else have anything they want to say about Fatal Fury, one, any final thoughts? I suppose we should address the fact that it is deeply cowardly to have a champion of your fighting tournament fight with a big stick. I really... I don't think really... I mean, I guess they are the bad guy, so it tracks, but it's like

if the second to last boss of your fighting tournament carries a stick longer than his own body, and when he loses the stick, he refuses to punch you until he gets a new stick, and you can't really hurt him,

I would say the rules are weighted against you. This is why I don't like Billy Kane. He's a cheater. But you know what? That is also It's sort of like his first appearance of him being just a complete schmuck that he can slap around because once he loses that stick, yeah, he just sort of sits there and cowers and you can't punch him and then until someone throws him a new one, which he jumps up to grab, and then as soon as he lands, he just sort of stands there for a minute, and you can just throw him and he'll drop his stick again and you go through the whole thing. So like, I don't know, this he's hit when I was playing this the other day, he is the one character I got a perfect victory on because he just. He just stood there like a putts and let me demolish him.

If nothing else, I think this reflects very badly on geese for making this man as champion. Right. And now he's the boss of the Howard concert, the Howard connector or whatever. They didn't have anybody else. He's all they had. Nobody. I mean, you're not going to get Lauren's blood to do this. You're not going to get, what's his name, Hopper?

No, it's Billy. It's Billy or bust. He's a coward, but he's a loyal coward. Right. Exactly. Sometimes that's all it takes. So on that's all it takes. December 1992, and unlike the first game, they had Street Fighter 2 now to look at as a

as an influence. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Very much like, you know, friendship ended with Street Fighter 1, Street Fighter 2 is my new best friend. Like, we are now doing, you know, South Town is memory. Every character now has a, you know, a home country and a, and there's a map, a globe that shows you where they're from. Even characters who are clearly supposed to be together, like Terry and Andy and Joe are now in three different countries. Why? Because that's what Street Fighter 2 does. Everyone's, everyone's all over the world now. And now you've got four bosses. And, yeah, it's like, it is on paper, it is so transparently Street Fighter 2 again that it's almost comical. But I still played the hell out of this game because I love Fiddle Fury 1. It's like, oh, Fiddle Fury 2. Give it to me.

Yeah. Yeah. So you now can pick from eight characters like Street Fighter 2. you then fight through everybody including a mirror match like Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition and then you go up against four bosses you have a returning foe from the first game an evil Spaniard an American boxer and then the final boss it's always an evil Spaniard

Also it's also we need to say again The first game had a boxer And like no no no that guy's out We need a new We need a new bigger boxer A bigger boxer And then they boot this guy out after Fatal Fury 2 to get a different boxer for three. And the boxers really just can't catch a break.

And then, yeah, they just keep going through boxers like candy. So, yeah, we have Terry Andy and Joe back. Ryden is now playable under the name Big Bear for potentially the reasons we were discussing a bit ago about Mortal Kombat. New characters, you have Chang Sinzan, who is another student of Tubar, who is another student of Furu. He's like a Chinese businessman. He's kind of cool. There's Judo Khad Jubei Yamada. There's Kim Kaplan and Maishirnui, who, you know, probably S&K's a most recognizable character, I'd say, globally. He needs no introduction. And it's really funny to read in one of the interviews about this game that they did not originally plan on her being like a female ninja character. She was originally just going to be a male ninja. And then at some point someone decided, oh,

we should probably have a female character because Street Fighter 2 did it. So that's how we got my. And returning is unplayable bosses. You have Billy Kane. He's your original Fatal Fury 1 guy.

To his credit, Billy Kane major glow-up. Apparently, you know, Fatal Fury 1, he's like a beach bum and like overalls and no shirt. Now, apparently he's British, so he's got a really fabulous London Tower theme stage, a really good theme song, a nice jacket. He's like, this is his look going forward, and I'm here for it. He's still, and he no longer cowers when you knock, because you can't knock his cane away anymore, so he's, he's a little more aggressive. He can be challenging, actually, can be.

I won a Fatal Fury movie now specifically of Billy Kane, and that's that whole like 90s thing of like the rags to riches. like New York Street kid who finds out that he's actually got like a super rich like grandma in like London or something and it's just like you know whirlwind adventure of you know comical mishaps because you know he's just a tough talking to street kid and all of a sudden now he's in like proper British society's that's basically Billy Kane's story right there once again a very 90s sort of kids movie concept well if if Fatal Fury 2 takes place where they believe geese is still dead then maybe geese like left Billy some money as

part of the ruse. Yeah. You know? Here, Billy, go ahead. Get yourself cleaned up. Get a jacket. You look cold. See, I have Axel Hawk.

He's the boxer. He's supposed to be retired. There's Lawrence Blood, who's a bullfighter, and it's just such a cool design, cool stage, cool concept. I really like Lawrence Blood. And his name is cool. Come on. Oh, it's very cool.

And then the final boss is Geese's half-brother, Wolfgang Krauser, who's like, a German crime lord in his own right. Who I feel like doesn't, maybe I'm missing some things, but, like, I don't feel like he's as well remembered as he should be. I think it's a kind of case where, like, if you almost had to be there, because, like, if you play the three or two and you get through that entire game, meeting Krauser at last and fighting Krauser on his stage where he has an orchestra behind him playing Mozart. It's Mozart.

As a kid, this is why I learned, like, you know, a bit of classical music. And he would disappear from the games, like, Fiddle Free Special, he's already not that special anymore because Geese is back, and that game's all about, like, you know, crazy 2-1-2, crazy versus modes and stuff. And then he's missing from three. He comes back in a couple later games, he's in real bouts, and I know he's in 96, but I think they feel like they downplay him a lot in favor of new characters, and indeed, KOF gives us Rugal, who basically steals kind of the best parts of Krauser. So Krauser kind of gets a raw deal there, and it's like, I'm sorry. But, like, at the moment, when Philadelphia 2 came out, Krauser was, like, incredible. That entire finale is just, you know, an amazing. He taunts you.

You know, if he wins, he taunts you. If you beat him, he, you know, like, praises you. It's an amazing finale. And it was like, it's stuff that me and my friends talked about for years, you know. I'll chisel your gravestone. Sleep well. Yeah, it's funny because I didn't write it down, but I was looking it up, and I think he's, like, the only character in this game who is voiced by an actual, like, American actor. Michael Beard.

Yep, Michael Beard. The voice of so many early NeoGeo games, Michael Beard. And he voices Krauser and all of his appearances in the 90s. See, if they should bring him back as D.L.C. and have Michael Beard come back to voice him again. Make it happen, S&K. So is it the same actor? Because I know in Federal Fury 3, they credit a different actor. Krause was not in Federal Fury 3, but they have a guy named B.J. Ward, and he's the credited actor for Franco, and he's the narrator.

But then they credit him as Krauser in later games. So I don't know, does Michael Beard hand it off for to B.J. Love, or sorry, B.J. Ward. That's a different actor. B.J. Love is the credit his name? So is Michael Beard really B.J. Love? Or is it a different actor? We need to investigate this. you're getting into some real Pepe Silva type stuff right here I don't see anything in the notes in about it but I look at like Krauser's like character design I get really bad or not not bad but very big Fiss of North Star

Yeah with this gold armor and everything The gold armor The gold armor just the just the bod like just very Yeah you know very very very very coat or very T shaped But yeah that you know Really just if you were there he very much just a memorable, kind of like in your face character. He was cool

in the second anime OVA too. Yeah, he was a big part of that because the second TV special really was traumatized, and traumatized, whatever. They are adapting the second Fatal Fury game.

I've been up since 7.30. It's fine. And yeah, he sort of like beats up Terry really bad in that, and that's when Terry becomes a drunk, and Krauser just, like, sort of goes home and gets back

to his day job. Basically. Wait, wait, wait. Wait, Krauser's a day job? Yes, apparently he's a bodyguard. Did he show up in the armor? Yes. He's a bodyguard, a professional bodyguard, and he shows up in the armor to work.

And he just, like, took a day off to go beat up Terry Bogart. I mean, sounds like a good way to spend a day to me. Sure. And yeah, Terry became a drunk and eventually had to sober up so he could get his revenge. Truly ridiculous.

So from a gameplay perspective, they shifted this to be a four-button fighting game with two punches and two kicks, which was just kind of standard for a lot of NeoGeo fighting games. I don't think that really stuck for Fatal Fury itself, but it's not unusual. I mean, it's basically what they would use for K-O-F, you know, two punches, two kicks. I mean, they'd have some different ideas of what pressing the buttons would do together, but your basic light punch, heavy punch, light kick, heavy kick. That's basically what they're going to do for most K-O-F games. And a lot of other games, too, when they realize, oh, I think we got something here. Mm-hmm.

And you can use different button combinations and directional combinations to leap into the back plane because they brought that back. So now you can just do that whenever you want. You can knock your opponent into the other plane on stages that have other planes. They don't all do. And you can also do a dodge attack, which is something I didn't really, like, understand the concept of until some months ago when I was trying to figure out some, how you actually play Fatal Fury special well. And I had to dig into the Japanese internet. And it turns out there's a whole wiki about that game over there.

Yeah, that's a move. That's a move that I never understood as a child, but also the computer would do it consistently, especially when I attempted to do any of, like, cross-playing stuff, because the Dodge attack is essentially, you've got a lot, you've got eye frames, you know? So if you do it right, and the computer does it right, you can almost nullify any attack by just sort of doing it the right time. And it's like, oh, well, whatever you were trying to do, forget that, I'm just smacking you in the face. And it's like, well, crap. It's like, it's almost like a parry, except that you just get, you just get hit. It's like, well, what are I supposed to do? And you can only really do it when you're, like, when you block something, you sort of come out of the blocks.

So you can't just do it willy-nilly, but. But the computer can. But the computer can. It's, it's completely unfair. Yeah, the computer in this game is truly ridiculous. This game has, like, a really awful degree of, like, reading your inputs. Yeah, this is absolutely insane. I can think of a couple patterns that the computer reliably falls for, and, basically,

Basically, each character, I would try to figure out how do I, what moves from this character's repertoire can I exploit to take advantage to the fact that the CPU will often, like, if you attack low a couple times, they'll block, and then if you launch an attack, they'll try and counterattack, but you'll hit them with your counter. So, like, for Big Bear, I'll, like, do, like, I'll do a bunch of mashing low attacks, and then when they try to counter, I'll do Big Bear's charge, and I'll usually hit them. Or Chang, I can do, like, the leaping attack. where he sort of jumps into the air and crashes down on them. Like, they fall for this a lot, not every time, but a lot of the time. And it doesn't feel great, but it's also like, if you figure it out, you're like, hey, I figured it out. So I deserve to win. And this was one of the first games to have, like, a proper super attack in it, too, which was very interesting.

So once you have low health, your life bar will begin flashing. And at that point, you can do an additional special move, an infinite number of times. They called it a desperation move, which is sort of what S&K called supers for years and years and years after this. Yeah. In Japanese, it's Cho Hisatswaza, which is like, yeah, very literal, Cho is the super. And Hisatsu is basically like special, but I think they often try it as super, so it's like super desperation. It's funny, you say infinite, and that is true, but with the caveat that all, almost all of these commands are redonculus. Redunculus.

Like, some of them catch on, some of them become standard in other fighting games that have super moves. Others do not because no human being should be asked to do these commands, you know? I mean, Fidel Ferry 2 isn't even the worst. I would argue

Fiddle Fairy Special is the worst because that's where you get Geese's pretzel command. But, you know, some of the attacks in Fidoferi 2 are pretty out there. I know, like, what is it? Someone's got a charge, like, up I think you got to charge up or charge, like... How does that even work?

You got to, like, jump. I think you jump and charge it. Yeah, you would have to just do the jump. Or have just a very laggy move to keep people grounded while you do it. Yeah, I think Jubei, either Jubei or Big, no, Big Bear's got the flame breath. I think Jubei's command grab is incredibly hard to pull off, I feel. Like, Terry's is one that's actually kind of easy, and that's why it becomes, like, the norm. The power guys are, like, by the time you get to KOF98, like, lots of characters have a power

tower geyser style command, even though their moves are different, but everyone's got the quarter circle, half circle forward. Although Terry, you can shortcut it. And, like, only Terry can shortcut it. I don't know why. It's just, it's a Terry move. He can shortcut it. If I remember, Mize is really easy to do, too, because it's just, like, forward, then down

back, and then forward again. Right. And I think... Kim's is supposed to be pretty easy to do, because I certainly see people do it all the time. Yeah. Andy's... Andy, I think it's tricky. I think Andy's got a dagger.

in there. It's like, oh, shit. Yeah, I cannot do Andes consistently. And it's also a really hard move to pull off because it's, you launch into the air and you're on fire. So it's like, if you hit them in the air, that is fall down, it's like, you really have to get, like, if you get them in the right spot, you'll hit them a lot of times. But then, like, if you're going up and you come down, they might hit you out of it. It's a, it's a very strange move, honestly. It's, yeah. There was an attempt.

There was an attempt. So, yeah, the sort of lore behind this game, you know, this mysterious German nobleman, hosting a second King of Fighters tournament. He's inviting people from all across the globe, not just South Town. You find out he's Geese's half-brother. He's looking for the guy who beat up geese in the first game, and he wants to challenge them and beat them up so that he becomes a new legend in his own right. Obviously, that doesn't work out for Krauser, but you got to respect a man for trying.

I'm fascinated. Especially taking time off of work for it. Yeah. It's busy. I'm fascinated by, like, the how. family tree because you have uh you've got geese you've got crowzer rock uh cane from grow and then of course like geese's wife is like kind of wrapped up in there i believe that like geese's wife is cane's sister uh sister yeah so that would make cane like rocks like uncle

and it's something about the howard family just family tree just kind of fascinates me and then you got terry rocks adoptive dad but that's not till like you know way later down the line yeah I do like how Thela Ferry 2 teases the ending in that as you get deeper, deeper into the game, you start in between the matches where you already have, like, cutscenes of, like, the characters bantering with each other. You get little snippets of someone going through people you've already fought, and I think for first-time players, you might assume it's Geese. Like, Geese is coming back for revenge, but in fact, it's not Geese, it's this other guy you never met before, and he's, like, supposedly even more dangerous than Geese, or you think so, even though in the future they would decide, you know what, we just like geese more

and they would have much more geese content than Krauser content. Yeah, and like, he's beating up the fighters that showed up in the first game but didn't come back for this one. So like, oh, that's why you don't see Duck King again. Duck King just got his face rocked by some guy,

which I thought was cute. Like, this game has some very interesting presentation. It's just kind of hard to play because it doesn't have a combo system, like, at all. So you can do a lot of like single hits, but nothing really feels good. Did one actually have a combo system?

Not exactly, but like... It'd be kind of like loose or something, like things that felt like it, but certainly it didn't have a counter, even if it had a system. But then again, neither did Street Fighter 2. Yeah, this one is just, it's very strange to play, and there's probably a reason why no one plays Fatal Fury 2 nowadays. Because Fatal Fury Special just does it better. I think the big thing about Fatal Fury 2 is the fact that because Fatal Fury

one was developed, you know, basically alongside Street Fighter 2, and even though it came out months later, it's like, it's very much like, it's not a reaction, you know, it's a reaction to 1, not 2, but by the point, by the time you get Fatal Fury 2 out there, you know they know Street Fighter 2. They borrowed so much from Street Fighter 2, but it still doesn't really play or feel like Street Fighter 2, so it is kind of a very strange game if you're in a Street Fighter 2 because it's not really going to, it's not going to really scratch that itch. It's just going to resemble Street Fighter 2 in many ways, which means. makes it stranger, I think.

So I'm pretty late to being a fan of Fatal Fury and S&K fighters in general, but I do distinctly remember as a kid, part of the reason was just that like MVS caps were like hard to find where I grew up in a small town in Louisiana. So like, you know, I didn't really have like that arcade access. We had like the PX and a skating rink and that was about it. But I do remember one time coming across an MVS cab that had, it did have Fatal Fury to on it and I was just like oh okay cool another fighting game just like Street Fighter and I plugged a quarter in tried it out got demolished I was like hmm put another one in

you know gave it a second trial I was just like oh man what like wow this kind of sucks and then put a third quarter in I was just like wow I kind of hate this I was so I like I was so used to Street Fighter I was like why is he going in the background why can't I do anything I don't get this. But, like, I was also, like, six, seven at best. I was, like, just still very new to video games at all, let alone fighting games. But it just, it, it, it left a not so great impression on me, but because, like, you know, there was really nothing else accessible. You know, I just kind of forgot about it for years until, um, you know, CVS2 came around. But yeah, it just, it just was, it wasn't a great first impression, but I, I have since then forgiven

it's it's a very weird game playing it after streetfighter 2 um i feel like it's not as awkward as something like mortal combat but it's awkward in its own like unique way i would say that like like like it was unintuitive but but again i was also like you know i was a child so maybe that that that's definitely a factor into it you know i think i guess street fighter 2 was like a little more beginner like like a little more intuitive the the thing that's surprising about that is that this actually did better in the gamist rankings for that year than Fatal Fury 1 did. Uh, they, they had special and, uh, two in the same ranking because of how they did their

rankings and those games came out much more close to each other than, uh, one and two did. But this one actually tied with super street fighter two for third place. And it got beaten by special. and Sam Show won. So, interesting. For as awkward as it is, it actually kind of ranked better. Yeah, for like a game from 1992,

this is pretty good. I don't know how many fighting games from 92 you've played recently. Yeah, not many. That aren't Sam Show won. Yeah, this is pretty good. Tying, tying with Street Fighter 2, that's really nothing to see with.

Yeah, super granted, but still. And it did beat World Heroes 2 by a good margin. World Heroes 2 only got 7th place that year. Redenions. And this got ported around a fair bit, too. It's on Super Nintendo, X-68,000 again, PC Engine CD, which I do have that copy. And it's interesting because it has a very unique arrangement of the music that is different from what you get on, like, the NeoGeo CD or any of the soundtrack albums. It's kind of cool for that alone.

It was also on Game Boy, which is fascinating. It's like that and Samurai Showdown one, I think, were the first of their sort of handheld S&K fighting games that use that like super deformed look and play style. And it's, it's really good. It plays surprisingly well because I played both that and Game Boy Sam show. And other than just like there being like a lot of kind of like, I mean, it's a cartridge. So I don't want to say loading time, but it just feels like there's like a lot of. downtime between like the round ending and like score being

tallied and stuff like that but other than that like it controls pretty well it looks great sounds good I mean I mean for being on a device like the Game Boy it could be so much worse that's for sure there were some there were some Famitsu reviewers who said that they

thought the characters look like they were from a Cooney Okun game it's kind of do not an insult no it's not an insult at all it's very much a compliment it was also on the Genesis and I really want to highlight the Genesis version because this particular version of the game came out after Fatal Fury Special

did. And, you know, they realized at that point, like, well, okay, we can't just put out Fatal Fury 2 because it's the old version. No one's going to buy it. So they sort of like mashed the two games together. So you've got the cast of Fatal Fury 2, but you have like a wild

combo system based on Fatal Fury specials. So like you can actually like do stuff as these characters and have some like all sorts of strange combos going together. There's also hidden codes that you can use to unlock a menu for other wacky mechanics, like juggle combos, like a modern anime fighting game. That's bonkers to think about in Fatal Fury, too, juggle combos.

Yeah, it's super busted. That would dramatically change Andy's super, you know? Mm-hmm. And my favorite is there's a code that adds in a full 48 colors per character. Which even today is like unheard of, even though you have basically infinite space on these modern games. They don't do it. So that one got such reputation that they, didn't they put it in one of the Genesis minis? Because it had, yeah.

Yeah, I forget this is the second one, I think. Because I think the first one had Street Fighter 2. Yeah, because the second one is definitely were more of like the, how I would put it, like the deviant games got put. Yeah. Sickos. Exactly. I mean, it had columns, too, for God's sake. So, yeah, very cool version of the game.

You should check it out if you have a Genesis. It's not very expensive. I feel like I'm required to go, ha, ha, yes. Every time I boot up my second Genesis mini now. Thank you. You know what I'm going to be. You have a lot of Yeah,

Nine months later, September 1993. This was a sort of a rebalanced, reworked version of Fatal Theory 2. They drop all the story stuff to make it a dream match, which was something S&K loved doing for a while. It's just like, all right, here's a game with a bunch

of characters you love. There's no storyline. Have fun. It's non-canonical. It's just you know, it is. Non-canonical, yep. Yeah. So they dropped those, but they added in more characters. They rebalanced it.

They did some mechanical changes like, say, the combo system that exists now. So you can, like, chain attacks together or cancel them into special moves, which makes this kind of an unhinged game to play, because characters can just, like, go on the offensive really hard. And they tweak some of the move lists for some of the characters. As far as new characters go, they brought back Duck King, Tung Fu Roo, and Geese Howard from Fatal Fury 1. And the four bosses from Fatal Fury 2 are now all playable characters. So you've got a pretty good-sized cast there.

And they also added in a new secret boss. So if you can beat this game without losing a round, which I have done, it's not easy in the slightest. You fight Rio Sakazaki from Art of Fighting. So this is the first, like, dream crossover fighting game event that S&K did. The seed is planted. Yeah. Yeah, it's also this game's version of the general challenge, I guess. Maybe before the general challenge, but...

Yeah, Kaiser Knuckle has the general challenge if you finish the end of the game and you have to fight the general who will just who will just whoop your ass because he's super overpowered. If you watch a high score girl, there's a whole bit about it. But, yeah, Rio is extremely overpowered. Like, he has all his art of fighting moves and no meter to, like, limit. his usage of them. But yeah, he's super fun. If you're playing on the console version, you can unlock him

and just completely demolish everyone you play against. And they sort of built on this again the next year in 1994, because Artifighting 2 came out, and they included as a secret boss there, a young version of Geese Howard, like 10 years before Fatal Fury 1 takes place, which is kind of cool. These are basically the video game equivalents of the Craves.

Reddit teases that we get in movies now. It's like, if you're really, really good of this game, you can find a secret boss in this game in Fatal Fury Special. And if you're really good at Artifying 2, which I would argue is even harder to beat, you can find a secret boss in that game. And wouldn't you know it, later in 94, you got KOF94. So it all comes together.

That's the Avengers of 1994 right there. So yeah, this game, I think of all the games we're going to talk about in this episode, this is the one that is still most remembered and most played and probably the most highly regarded. You can go on YouTube basically any day of the week load up the channel for

Game Center Mikado in Tokyo and they will probably have at least 12 Fatal Fury special tournaments or casual matches and just like what the first page of results. They have so many tournaments. They even do

specifically because of how hard the CPU is they specifically do player versus CPU tournaments for this all the time and you can just see people just getting absolutely destroyed by the CPU in this game. They also, if you go to their location in Takedanobaba,

they have taken the Taikonotatsujin machine by the door and replaced the banner above it to say Garo Densetsu specialu. Yes. So they have a Fatal Fury special banner on their Taikonotazujin machine. That's right. You remind, the last time I was in Tokyo. I went over there and I saw that. I took a picture of it. I'm like, what,

am I having a stroke? What's happening? I don't know what the explanation for it is. I think it's just funny. I think that's why they did it. It's got to be like an inside joke or something that just took off. Yeah. And like there's a, there's the Japanese game wiki for this. I think it's like linked in the dream cancel page for this game. So if you really want to figure out how like it works mechanically, uh, Japan's got you. They've figured this game out in and out. it's super cool Yeah also I would point out that

When the Neo Geo Mini came out in 2018 This was Like they didn't put Fidel Fury or Fiddle Fury 2 on there But they put Fidel Fury Special on there Yeah I think later Later editions they made was like They mixed it up and they put some of the older games

And took this one off But like the basic models that came out at first Were like this was the start of Fidel Fury As far as they're concerned I think as far as a lot of people are concerned Yeah, they know. They know what people want to play, and it's Fatal Fury special. And I think the actual combo system is probably why, right?

Yeah, it feels good to play it. It feels good to, like, chain moves together, put your combos together. I don't remember if you could combo into any of the supers in this game, which maybe it's for the best because they're all super good once again. You still have the awful motions from Fatal Fury, too, but now mechanically, the rest of the game sort of evens out with them. I mean, it's, it's kind of like a champion edition for Fatal Fury 2, where it's like, if you have a choice of Street Fighter 2 or Champion Edition, you're just going to play champion edition.

So it's like, if you have a choice of 2 or special, you're just going to play special. I really feel like this, it's hard to make a case for going back to 2 when special exists, you know? Yeah. Not that I didn't play 2, you know, a lot, but most of my hours playing 2 were before special existed. And once I got special, like, okay, well, thank you, too. Thank you for your service. But now I play special. You play, too, for, like, academia purposes or, like, enthusiast purposes.

You play special for fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this was one of the first games I bought for the Neo Geo after I got mine because, you know, it's a super cheap cartridge. Even today, like, at the time, I think I paid $25 for a Japanese copy. And, yeah, I played the crap out of this game. I managed to loop in a bunch of people I lived near who also liked fighting games, and S&K games.

They're like, come on. Let's play some Fatal Fury special. Also, for my money, Fidel Ferry Special, this is the best version of Geese's theme song ever. This is my favorite. Yeah. It's the iconic version of his theme. Especially with the animation and the door is opening. It's just, it's so beautiful.

Yeah. I guess with that song on repeat. Like, I would... I don't know if I would need food or water. If I had the song on repeat, I would just... It would sustain me through, like, D-Space travel. It's just... You'd have, listening to the song on repeat, you would at least have soy sauce,

which may sustain you enough to continue living. Yeah, just enough salt intake. Yeah, a lot of the new songs in this game are great. Like, Tung Fu Roos theme and Duck King's themes are both excellent. Dance beat, I forget. Yeah. I forget what's called. And, you know, shout out to the arranged soundtrack for this particular game,

because it's super good. Yeah, this was, the fit and very special soundtrack was what taught me the difference between OST and AST, because I remember when I played this game, I loved it, and so this was already the 90s, so I was old enough to go to New York City and look for, like, you know, CDs and, you know, import stores. And I remember I would find the album, but different albums, like, which one is it? And I would learn that, oh, the OST is the original soundtrack, and the AST is the arranged soundtrack. So even though the music is essentially the same, that have different. instruments that have different, you know, maybe they have some tracks when it have vocals added. So I'm sure I ended up gutting both and listening to both many, many times. But, yeah, this is what drove me there because I really was into the, like, I love the music Final Fury too, but again, Fadda Fury Special just has more music, so sorry. I like that. I think that's why they voted it, why Gameist voted it second in Best VGM, and it lost a Sam show,

which is a respectable game to lose to. Yeah. First place in graphics, too. That's pretty good. That's interesting to me. I mean, I don't think the graphics in this game are bad, but I don't know if I, I don't know, I'd have to look at everything that was up to that year, I guess. Was it a slow year or something? Maybe.

The stages to me are very special. I love the amount of attention they put into every stage, you know, the fact that some stages have backgrounds and some stages don't. So, like, you know, on Billy's stage, if you get knocked in the background, it's just a bunch of gears back there. So you just take damage and you come back. So it's like, you know, and. And Lawrence Blood Stage has a literal, like, bull stampede. It's fantastic. I love it.

Yeah, it's cool because it also brings in, like, a mechanical consideration when you're doing, like, a versus mode for this game. Because whoever the challenger is, you get their stage, right? So if you're playing against someone who's picking one of those characters whose stage has no backdrop, you have to keep that in mind while you're fighting them. And sometimes that's fairly bad because, like, Axel Hawk, he kind of gets blown up by Fireball. unless he has another lane to jump back to. But his stage doesn't have a second lane, so he's kind of boned. And on the other hand, you have my stage where she has, you know, normally she has her move where she, like, jumps off the wall and does a dive.

But on her stage, she jumps off of a pole in the middle of the boat that you're on. And that one's much, much harder to counter because it's hard to tell, like, when she's vulnerable again, what side she's coming down on. And that makes her super good on her stage. There's a reason she's one of the best characters in the game. It's like Vega. It's like Vega. It's like Vega has the fence in Street Fighter 2. But once you, what's your champion edition? It's like, okay, well, he just jumps real high now.

Good luck. Good luck. So this did get ported around a lot, too. I think more than any other game on this list, really. Oh, yeah. It was on Super Nintendo. Sega CD, PC Engine CD. Once again, using the arcade card, having a unique arrangement soundtrack.

It was on the X-68,000 again. Also on the FM Towns computer line, and the game gear of all platforms, which is actually a pretty good port and almost justifies a game gear link cable if they didn't cost so much. How do you play it with two buttons? So, you know, on the NeoGeo Pocket games, it's sort of like how long you hold down the button. Ah, that's right. Yes. It does that. Okay.

I see. The characters are tiny, which I think Famitsu complained about on the, the game here, but like, it works reasonably well. Let's see what we got for time. We can at least talk a little bit about 1994, and we'll see what we go from there. So 94 didn't have a new Fatal Fury game, but it had like Fatal Fury adjacent things happening. So you had Artifighting 2, Geese's your new final boss. Apparently, he was a police commissioner before becoming a crime lord.

Tracks with, you know, Miami, I guess. Another great storyline right there. The start of darkness for Geese Hour. I want to say that expanded. Yep. at King of Fighters 94 which we talked a little bit about is inspired by Ryo's appearance

and Fatal Fury special. And the conception behind this was you're going to have characters from both Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting, duke it out, and it sort of snowballed from there. So accordingly, you have Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting teams.

You also have teams featuring Kim and Mai, which were apparently fairly late additions. Kim replaced Zanadu on the criminal team who didn't show up until K-O-F-14, you know, decades later. I was Zanadu. And my, yeah, I love Zanadu. He's so great.

They need to bring him back. And Mai replaced Billy Canaan Big Bear on a team with King and Yuri from Art of Fighting, which I think they made the right call there. Yeah, that's like an iconic team now. Women's team is easily top three, most memorable, you know. You know, that would explain, that would explain why Mai is suddenly from England in K-O-F-94. Yeah, absolutely. You know, she's very Japanese, but somehow she's in England hanging out with King and Yuri.

Like, King being British, I could see. But she's French. Yeah. They weren't in France. And Yuri's American, too. Yeah, I don't know. They had to put him somewhere, I guess. Why not England?

And then you had the, this was also sort of, speaking of Mai, this was also kind of where, sort of the modern conception of my as being like a super sexy character got its start between the Fatal Fury 2 anime that made her a lot sexier than she shows off in Fatal Fury 2 the game.

Yeah. Do we want to talk about the K.O.F. 94 my sprite that is... I think we have to at that point because... So boobilicious that by default, by default, if you play Kof 94 on an American Neo Geo, it literally, like, edits her movement to stop her from bouncing. You have to, like, enter a code or change regions or something, and then, like, you unlock it.

It's like, it's, like, it's right up there with, like, blood. Like, there's no blood and there's no moving bosoms. We can't have children see this. It's like, you know, for me, it's for me as a teenager, obviously, in 1994, I was like, you know, it was like looking into the eyes of God. I was like, what, what's happening? Is this what video games can be now? When I played CVS 2 as a teenager, and that was my first true exposure to S&K and their characters, there's a reason why my team for CVS 2 was King, Joe, and Mai.

There's a reason. Yeah, definitely the CVS sprite is definitely channeling My 94, absolutely. Yeah. Sorry, Joe, the reason wasn't you. I played Joe because, you know, like you said, he's the, the brash loud guy. And I actually loved him about that. I liked King. I thought she just looked cool.

And then Mai, she has other, other looks. Turns out she's also just a really good character. So, you know, shoutouts to me future-proofing my CVS2 team as I started to play competitively. Listen, I'm just glad they're finally leading into Mai's love of heavy metal. Oh, yeah. The outfit, the, the, the, the, the base outfit for. Versidia is fantastic. A funny bit of lore for all the characters is like you learn what their favorite hobbies are

and their musical interests. And yeah, apparently, Mai is a metalhead. And that never really came across in any of the games. But now it is. But yeah, KMF94. There's an interview about this game where they were talking about how one of the artists was just like, hey, do we have space in memory? I want to touch up Mai's idol sprite.

And the producers like, sure go for it didn't really know what they were planning and then they showed them that and he was like I'm not sure we actually have the memory to fit all of these animation frames in wait so we have one

we have one legend to think for this apparently yeah he didn't identify who the artist was he just said it was a woman who was working for SNK but yeah it's funny because even if you look at the later Fatal Fury games like she has a much less pronounced movement

compared to any of her K-O-F appearances. And it's the K-O-F appearances that have really, like, cemented for that character. In the Schmupplations interview you link to for Fatal Fury 3, one of the questions is like, hey, so Mye's wearing more conservative clothes this time, is there a reason for that? And the guy's like, no reason. So it's like, people already notice. Totally brushes it off. He's just like, oh, she looks fine. Yeah, people already notice, like, hey, what happened to my?

What are you talking about? There were even people in the Famitsu reviews of some of the ports of, I think, special talking about, like, she's a little less bouncy in this port. And it's like, well, all right, that's what we're evaluating on now. I see where it is. This is the next 30 years of video gaming discourse in 1993. Again, S&K Innovates. Yeah. And then, you know, because they had all these KOF games going forward, it was an annual franchise for a long.

time. They pulled from Fatal Fury a lot to sort of fill those ranks. So, like, geese shows up, Krauser, Tung Fu-Roo, Billy, Big Bear, Huajai, Duck King. Several characters from the later Fatal Fury games also show up and continue to show up. So, like, if anything, Fatal Fury is like the farm for K-O-F characters. And Nameda Love-s-Ru-Sle-Lot-Me

are Mugna-Sawgy Ah A-na-a-N-Cak to be D'E And also in 94, Fatal Fury

The Motion Picture Day, which was a theatrical release from as far as I can tell with an original story not based on any of the games you have a lot of like high budget fighting sequences strangely features Reiko Chiba who is a real life actress and singer as a minor character and I was trying to track down what this was about and apparently she played Nakaruru in the Samurai Showdown 2 commercial

and in the Samurai Showdown movie that came out the same year and recorded image songs as Nakururu and Mai, which she did with like a photo shoot and costume to help push. So it's sort of like a weird, I don't know if I'd call it like an in-joke, but it's a very like obscure reference decades later that she's in this. Oh, well, she's the original Pink Ranger. Like she was the, so before like the show that was bought and turned into Power Rangers for the U.S. market, she was the pink. ranger in that show. So... Let me see.

Oh, yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Kiyo Sintai Ju-Ranger, which I watched for the first time a few years ago. Oh, wow. I think it's just a case of, you know, and this is still what Japanese Media does. Like, if you have something and you can get a celebrity of any level, even if it's just like, oh, she does some modeling and she, you know, she's done some, you know, commercials.

Like, okay, good. Let's get her in there. Because that way, you know, the fans will show up. They'll interview her. Like, it's still the case to. day where it's like if you have a movie like if a movie comes out in japan and they don't have a celebrity traveling in like a huge celebrity to travel in they will just get any celebrity of any levels like okay here get in the commercial you know wear funny costume and tell people that you

you love this movie and they will do it it doesn't matter who it is that was the wave at the time actually funny that we're on that topic because i'm brian i'm reading your your book right now and you touch up on that a little bit as we as the japan transitioned musically in the 80s into like the idle industry. That's kind of what happened was that there was a lot of cross-media efforts. A ton of it. And yeah, like Diamond said, it never really went away. It just kind of changed a little bit over time as to what they did with it.

Oh, wow. She's, okay, so she was 19 in 1984. She's very, like, yeah, young. Also, Osaka Local. So probably they picked her for that, too. Yeah, I mean, you don't have to go far to hire either one at that point, right? She also apparently voiced Chamcham and all of her game appearances in Samurai Showdown, at least in the 90s games. I think they've recast her eventually.

Does anyone like this one better than the OVAs? Because I get its higher budget, but I think the story is an original story, and I just remember it being very lackluster, like very much like quick, let's write a story for a fatal fury movie. Yeah, I feel like people used to like it more. I remember it being popular, like, when I was in college. But nowadays, I don't know, I kind of like the OVAs more myself as well. Yeah. During the pandemic years, which was actually right around the time that I, like, really started to dive into S&K. I kind of, like, had, like, this, like, one-month bender where I got into, like, any sort of animated fighting game movie, period, whether there was, you know, Fatal Fear.

street fighter you know it just anything and they all just sort of blend together what a bender to go on god i came out i came out the other side just i i think i might have frightened my brain a little bit in in in the process but it was pandemic what else was like going to do but yeah it's hard to say because like i said like all all all the all the all the oeas and animas and movies they all just kind of started blending together after a while yeah this one's got like a weird storyline where there's like some ancient mystical armor and if someone gets all the pieces they become like a god which is extremely it's extremely anime and i guess it sort of also extremely like later s and k but not certainly like these first few fatal fury games which are a lot more grounded they they start going into like

they they shift away from like that kind of like gritty 90s you know crime and martial arts into like they start putting a lot of like supernatural stuff into their games it it We're really about to start seeing that become a thing. Start with three. I would say three is the turning point. Yep, yep. I was looking ahead on the notes a little bit. And I think I was thinking about it.

I was like, yeah, K-O-F does it. And Sam Show does it. And the metal slugs, even the non-fighting game stuff, the metal slugs do it. Because he started getting like aliens and zombies and said Goku three did it. That's that slog of a game. If we got a Neo-Turf Masters 2, we'd have to like, I don't know. One of the characters you could pick would just be. Buddha for no reason.

It'd be Battlegull for Ui, but on NeoGeo. Yeah, I did want to have talked about Fatal Fury 3, but I think this is a good point to stop at, because Fatal Fury 3 really sort of like, is the prototype for a lot of the

future Fatal Fury games, and I think it's best to discuss those as a unit. But this is sort of like the peak Fatal Fury era, I think, as far as it's mind share and population I think in the latter half of the 90s, it starts getting overtaken by King of Fighters, certainly, and the fighting game boom is starting to wind down, so they don't

have that sort of helping them boost it up. Isn't this like when S&K starts kind of running into financial troubles, too? Or was that later? It's the late 90s, so. I mean, I would compare it to, you know, when a parent has a child, you know, if your child may grow taller than you. So it's like, if you view KOF as the child of Fatal Fury, it just so happened that KOF sort of grew and blossomed into a larger presence than Fatal Fury did, but Fatal Fury still held incredible influence over that. So if you look at Fatal Fury, two, and then special, this is like the birth and growth of Fiddle Fury right up until KOF begins.

And then the two necessarily need to go in different directions because you can't, if you're going to have KOF and Fido Fury simultaneously, then the two, you're going to have KOF and Fido Fury simultaneously, then the two. mean they need to be different and they're going to be pretty different, you know? And even with that, though, you still, you look in the face of the child and see the parental DNA and you see that in K-O-F. Because like we said earlier at the beginning of the episode is that like Fatal Fury was, you know, it kind of held up the K-O-F roster for like a long time. Yeah, and I think. Still kind of does.

I think in 98, I think Terry's win quote in 98 is like, that's why I'm here every year. So like even at that point, they're like, even at that point, they're realized. Even at that point, they realized, oh, wait, this guy is in every game we make, isn't he? Yeah, okay. I'm going to keep putting him in every game. Put Terry in a metal slug eight. I'd be down for that. Oh, please.

He doesn't have a gun. He just punches everything. Yeah, burn knuckle. It'll be the, no, it'll be the FBI agent, Terry from the King of Fighters movie. Don't. You see what I mean? You see what I mean? If you ask for live action, Phil of Fury.

That's what you might get. That's what you might get. You're right. I just remember, I was like, hmm, after I was done with that bender, I was like, let's go see some live action stuff. And I looked up a clip of the King of Fighters movie. And it was the scene where Rugal is first introduced and he like comes in with like rollerblades, like a hockey mask and pulls off the mask. And he's just like, I'm the king of fighters. And I'm like, I just close the browser immediately. I was like, I don't need to watch this.

I'm good. My brain can't take it. That's Ray Park, isn't it? Ray Park. Yep, Ray Park. They gave Ray Park a speaking role as Rugo Bernstein. Holy sure did. He goes, I'm the king of foydas with like an accent indescribable.

I was just like, I don't need to watch this. I'm good. Everything about that movie is incredible and not in a good way. Look, Ray Park is an incredibly talented physical performer, but at no point should he be allowed to speak any words on camera. I'm sorry. I love him. I love his work.

Just have him play a mute, overdub him, do whatever you got to do. do. Do not give him lines. Sorry. Headless horseman. Headless horseman, perfect. Perfect roll for Ray Park. No head. No voice. The David Prowse of his day, truly.

So, yeah, the Fatal Fury, part one. Anyone have any final thoughts on, like, this era of the series? It was just the series generally. I mean, I would argue that Fatal Fury was integral in my love for Neo Geo, because, well, I absolutely loved a lot of the early games. You know, I'm a huge non-1975 fan. The other fighting games are wonderful. You know, I love the original Sengoku.

It's bizarre, but I love it. But I feel like Fatal Fury and then 2 and then special were like a really strong trilogy of, oh yeah, this is a cool game. Oh, this game's blown up. Oh, now this game is really blowing up. And we're teasing across over the other game that we made that was really cool. Like, I feel like everything starts from here. And I honestly believe that playing this game in 1991, 1992, 1983, it's at least part, if not the entire reason.

It's part of the reason I am sitting here today in Osaka. of Japan, able to speak a monocum of Japanese, and like, the music, the music from these games is still in my head, the characters of these games still fascinate me, you know, like, I would argue that my outfit today is at least part, Terry, at least part Blue Mary. Sure. I feel like I both can be explained with my no sleeves and my hot pink. Like, I'm claiming both of those. I'm stealing valor from Fatal Fury. I came this close to wearing a, my, my, my shirt today that had my King and Cheezeru

on it. It's a Nina Matsumoto work from a few years ago. And I remember wearing it to combo breaker back in May and getting stopped by a couple people and like, oh man, that's so cool. Where'd you get that? I'm like, it's out of print, man. Sorry.

But I agree. It is so cool. It's why I have it. All right. Note to self. Mug Kevin Bunch. Yeah, when are you going to Sanadu next? Kevin, when am I going to see you there? Because I still have your copy of Match of the Millennium as I need to give you back.

Brian, if you want to go next, go ahead. Sure. It's just so influential. And for me, the big thing is the character designs. I think they, even more so than something like Street Fighter, which is like, yes, they were designed around the same time. But I feel like they have a, and I mean this in a very good way, a less dated quality.

to them. Like, like, Fatal Fury represents, like, such a very specific, like, time and, like, anime and, like, Japanese character design. And all you have to do is just, like, look at Terry Bogard to see that. And that's just, I don't mean that negatively at all. I mean it in, like, an extremely charming way as someone who, like, loves Japanese media from that time period. Terry just kind of looks like a trucker, but, like, the kind of trucker who you'd want to hang out with. Yeah. I mean, the guys in jeans, Chuck's in, like, a ripped up plain white t-shirt. I mean, I mean, that's, you know, it's a little simple, but like, it's a enduring iconic look. Yeah.

And a cool hat. And a very cool hat, which he loves to throw around. Yes, he does. How many of those hats has he lost? Will, go ahead. So it's great that you guys were there when it happened so that you can give, like, you're, you know, you had to be there experience. That kind of time caps a moment. Because for me, like I said, like, I'm super late.

It's a fatal theory. I got Sam Show 2019 Samurai Showdown 7 is what really got me to to really pay attention to S&K, having known that it's always been a thing, but just never really making that effort. So I have no nostalgia for Fatal Fury. When pandemic happened, it was right after a tournament in New York called Lunar Bout that was basically a big love letter to S&K. They had all these S&K titles there that they ran tournaments for. And I was just like, wow, all this stuff is really cool. I should explore this. And then pandemic really fully kicked in.

So I had a lot of time to explore these things, not as a competitive player, but from like kind of a historian academic standpoint. So I go back and I look at, you know, all of these like the fatal theory one and fatal fury two and three and all that. And I have no nostalgia to cloud my eyes on this. And I'm looking at this. And I'm like from a player standpoint, like, yeah, this is rough. It's a little hard to go back and enjoy this as a player. but like aesthetically you know the the visuals the lord the music i'm like i'm loving every

second of this everything is so bright and colorful and larger than life and like you said brian it represents a very specific era that you know it dates itself but like it's very of that era street fighter too like you know that's a little longer lasting because it's a little more generic and I don't mean, I don't mean that insulting way. But I love that fatal fear, the S&K with fatal fear, really leaned into its air and went all in on this because it really makes it stand out, you know, and maybe it would have a little more staying power if the games just, from a gameplay perspective, functioned a little bit better. But like, yeah, as like this time capsule thing, it just, it's so fascinating. It's so cool, you know, and we got plenty more games to cover. I'm really hope, you know, and with City of the Wolves coming out next year,

really hope that there is a sort of revitalized fandom for that, especially because like 90s stuff is kind of coming back. Like just in general anyways, the 90s is kind of coming back.

And Fatal Fury is very 90s. So maybe that'll go hand in hand with like the current like, you know, pop cultural wave that we're seeing. Like the city is coming out like right at the right time. If you ask me. Yeah. It's just,

it's just so cool. One of just one of the coolest fighting game franchises. is, you know, ever made. There's really no other way for me to summarize other than it's cool. Yeah, I'm kind of with you there. The first time I really played a Fatal Fury game was Mark of the Wolves when it came out on Dreamcast. Because I hadn't really gotten the chance to really sink my teeth into any of the older ones because I didn't really get to go to the arcade that often.

But that one really, like, appealed to me. And once I started hanging out with a friend of mine, who had a Neo-Gio AAS and he had a ton of games. He had all these older Fatal Furies, got to play them at his place, really got a taste for him. That's what led me to get a NeoGeo and Fatal Fury won and Fatal Fury Special and, you know, onward from there. So even though it wasn't sort of my introduction to S&K or fighting games,

I do really like Fatal Fury. I think it really exemplifies what made S&K's 90s fighting game sort of golden period. So interesting and so cool. Especially, you know, the games we'll see in the back half. But even these first ones, they're interesting. They're a little rough around the edges.

But I think certainly special holds up very well. If you can play Street Fighter 2, you can play Fatal Fury Special and get a kick out of it. So this has been, with that, Retronauts, a Patreon-supported show. You can support us at patreon.com. Retronauts, as this is a free episode, I believe, on the schedule. This means you may not be a subscriber already, in which case you should consider doing so. At the $3 level, you get each episode a week early and at a higher bit rate. At $5 level, you also get access to Friday bonus episodes and Diamond Fight's weekly columns.

Talked about Fatal Fury and other S&K games multiple times. always, always great to read. Thank you. And the Retronauts Discord server, where you can discuss, you know, all sorts of cool stuff. So, I think it's a great deal. I think it's well worth your money. And thank you if you already support us. Keeps us going.

Where can we find all of you fine folks? Diamond, let's start with you. Well, most of my work is for Retronauts these days, but I am available around the internet. So I would say go to my website. which is fight club.me so F-E-I-T that's my last name C-L-U-B

that's an English word you already know dot M-E-Me Fight Club is me there it is Will You could find me on Twitter at Super Bullet Will totally not shilling for Alice

in City of the Wolves every last second that he gets I just earlier this year started being a writer for Superjump Magazine.com. Don't have many articles under my belt yet,

but it's something I've always wanted to do and I'm trying to get more into that. I'd say my primary bag is, you can just see me commentating various fighting game tournaments. So, you know, if you, I guess it's a weird thing to plug. It's a little outside of the norm

for some like retronauts, but, you know, if you are running any sort of S&K online or offline tournament and you need a commentator reach out to me, let's talk. And Brian. I'm on most social media

as B. Clark OMP, which includes YouTube, where I have a channel that covers all sorts of topics on Japanese game and music history. I have a website, One Million Power.com, which I post translations related to the same things to a Patreon for both of those at patreon.com.

slash one million power. And most recently, I also have a book that Will so kindly mentioned called Gameplay. He's holding it up right now called Gameplay Harmonies, which is out through limited run. And it's about games over the years that have actually featured Japanese recording artists and musicians in the games and not just their music. So if that kind of weird stuff sounds good to you, then please check out any of those things. Oh, is that like the Japan, the ex-Japan Sega Saturn game where you go backstage? Oh, that's in there. Yeah. You I believe it. Oh, nice.

It's about halfway in. And as for me, you can find me mostly on blue skies as far as social media goes at Ubersaurus. I also run the Atari Archive YouTube channel and website atariarchive.org. And that is also a Patreon-supported effort, patreon.com slash Atari Archive. And also through limited run games, I have a book Atari Archive that sort of goes through the first couple of years.

years of the Atari 2,600 in its library and its history. So if you're interested in early video game history and sort of what that looked like at the time, that's the book for you. And with that, thank you for listening.

Play some Fatal Fury special. Play goreau, you cowards. Good night. And Hail Satan. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.