Retronauts - 702: Fatal Fury, Pt. 2

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

We’ve got the old stuff back! Kevin Bunch, Diamond Feit, Will Cuevas, and Brian Clark return to Southtown to cover the rest of the Fatal Fury 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, the cats are so tough, they wear brass paws. We're returning to the mean streets of Southtown for part two of our Fatal Fury retrospective, you know, the whole saga of Terry Bogart and his cohort of friends and duck kings. We have a lot of ground to cover this week, and we'll be jumping right into it. So if you need a bit of background, I encourage you to check out the first part, which went up back in January. And we covered the first three games in the series, as well as the anime adaptation. So rejoining me on the roster, this lineup of people, who do we have here on the East Coast? Just drank a lot of water, and now he's full of pee power.

It's Will Quavos. Oh, that's dark. Who do we have in the Midwest? This is Brian Clark from One Million Power, and I'm in a good mood. You can keep your spleen. And who is in the hometown of S&K? Good morning, this is Diamond Fight, and my Shittanui is right. I do have a lot to learn about my femininity.

Oh, yeah. We're getting into some real interesting localization choices in this era of the series. Yeah. So since this back half of the series also is in the back half of the 1990s, this is sort of the time frame when the fighting game boom and arcades was starting to cool off. the gaming industry in general was sort of contracting a bit you know Japan it was contending with a strong yen which was impacting the international income that companies were bringing in there was the of course the recession was hitting in Japan at this point

and I feel like all of these play a factor and how comparatively limited the reach was for these next few releases you'll find that they had very limited exposure on consoles and computers as compared to the previous three games. And, you know, Fatal Fury sat out in 1994 as far as having a new entry, but characters still showed up in King of Fighters' 94 and Art of Fighting 2. So, you know, S&K was cooking for a little bit, and we got two games in 95, one of which is pretty great, and the other one is Fatal Fury 3.

Zing. Zing. So Fatal Fury 3 came out March, 1994. and someone in here was very gracious to it and marked down and had the coolest intro in the series. It's very strong. Let's get one thing straight. If we make a joke about Fiddle Ferry 3 being not so great a video game, it's not for lack of effort. You know, they put in the work, the just, you know, what is it?

The attract mode. If the game, if you don't even put money in this game, it gives you like a dollar's worth of experience, honestly. because you get some huge sprites, you get huge faces, introduced to the new character, Geese is there, and it's his feet, and Geese feet, if you look up, I think if you look up Geese Howard Giff,

this is one of the top results, because Geese just spins around in his chair and slams his feet down, like in front of the camera, it is an incredible, just massive sprite. Huge, huge, huge sprites. This is the one with that kind of like, that Dutch angle shot of Yama

Like the door opens and he's just there like grinning with his freaking Yamazaki face. He's coming out of a warehouse and he's reacting to the sun, which implies that he's been in that warehouse for a very long time beating the shit out of people. That about tracks for Yamazaki, though. Yes. That's what I'm saying. This is your introduction to the character. And it's like, this is who he is. He's going to, he spends his time in the dark.

He beats people up. He doesn't really like the sun, but he's not a vampire. He will go outside if he has to. Yeah, you know, I cannot fault this game for its presentation because, you know, the intro is super cool, the character sprites, they completely redrew everyone, at least the, you know, five characters who came back from Fatal Fury Special, and everybody else has like a very, it's very well animated, like, for an 1995 game, this looks great. Yes. And you have like the character select screen, they sort of call back to, uh, the first two Fatal Fury games, or it's just like everyone in a little group and they're all hanging out together. And yeah, to talk a little bit about why this game apparently looks so

great, but has kind of a bad reputation for playwise, back in October 2024, Yasayuki Oda, who worked on this game and is still at S&K, and I believe he's the producer on the new Fatal Fury game coming up, at least coming up for us. I think by the time this goes live, it already be out, and you will all be telling us how great it is, or vice versa. But he remarked back in October 2024 on Twitter that the games development was impacted by the Hansheen earthquake in January 95. So this game, again, came out in March, but they couldn't push back the release date. So, you know, they had to ship the game out without final adjustments in playtesting,

which is why it's kind of unbalanced and kind of janky, even for a 95 game. Can we just, for a moment, I just need to hit on the facts here. So when we talk about the Hansian earthquake January 85, that was a really strong, very short, but very powerful earthquake that hit just outside of Osaka, Awaji Island, which is closer to Kobe than Osaka. But, you know, everyone in Osaka felt it. Everyone in the entire area felt it. And it mostly impacted Kobe. but when I say mostly I mean it tore the hell out of Kobe

like highways fell down fires destroyed you know hundreds of homes I think the death toll was in the thousands I would say up until up until 2011 that was like the modern disaster natural disaster of Japan that people talk about

you know we're recording this in early 2025 which we were celebrated the 30th anniversary I mean you don't celebrate anniversary but there was a lot of commotion when the date occurred. My wife, you know, my wife was living in the area that time, so she remembers that day very strongly. So for anyone living in this area and working in this area, that would have been just a massive, a massive event. And, you know, especially if

anyone, I don't know about the staff wise where they were living, but like, if any of the S.K. staff were living in Kobe or in the area of Kobe or family in that area, like, they would have been incredibly distracted for weeks. You know, they might have had to bury someone for. all I know. Like, it's, it was huge. So it's, it's really, you know, we made jokes about this a couple episodes ago. We talked about the 2011 disaster and how that made Capcom change their mind about certain things. And that was clearly some sort of economic thing. But this was, this was up close and personal this event in January 1985. I'm looking at the, uh, Japan meteorological agency size of the intensity scale, which is, you know, basically their version of like the Richter

scale. Osaka, their region was classified as six plus or six upper, which is the second from the highest intensity that they could have had. So, like, yeah, it was a for Osaka specifically, it was a rather big deal. The only area that got it worse was who got the highest JMA 7 was Hiogo. Right. That's the prefecture next over, which is where

Olaji Island and Kobe and where the most of the damage occurred, the worst damage, I should say. Yeah. So, you know, among the many things that got impacted by this massive natural disaster was Fatal Fury 3, which is, which feels like a very odd thing to say, you know, of all the, the things. But, you know, that's what Odo was telling us, you know, last fall. So, which is interesting because I had never heard that story before and like none of the interviews really talk about it. But, I think somebody would have made the, like, connections. Now that we've said it out loud, it feels like it should be like a little obvious,

but, you know, it's just like probably just completely like just missed by, you know, the enthusiast. Yeah, like they probably like worked on it up until the quake happened and then just had to shove it out the door when the time came as it was. But yeah, this is this is why the internally they felt the game was a failure and why instead of continuing the series with like Fatal Fury 4 and 5, etc. They tweaked the name to the Real Bout series, which we'll get to it a little bit. Well, that's mind-blowing to me. The idea that Real Bout, Fyther Fury is essentially the Metal Slug X of Fatal Fury. That is tremendous. It's like, okay, well, we can't make a sequel sequel, because this game, we don't like how this game turned out.

So let's just give it a different name and keep going. All right. And release by your end. Yeah. So, you know, in addition to all of the weird behind-the-scenes activities, like the game itself does take some big swings away from what Fatal Fury 2 and special had done. So, you know, getting into like the roster, I guess we'll point that out up first. The only characters who come back are like the big three, you know, Terry, Andy, and Joe, plus Mai, who was really popular and introduced in Fatal Fury 2, though, as was pointed out in the comments here, she was not. originally going to be in the game.

She was originally going to be replaced by a female character named Alice Chrysler. Because fans liked Mai so much, they ended up putting Mai back in here with like a new outfit and everything. Can you imagine? Can you? Because we know, we know what happened when they eventually released a K-O-F game with No-Mai. And the internet, by that point, the Internet was around. The Internet was like, you know, no-mai, no-bye.

Yeah. But even in 1995, taking this character that. clearly went over a lot of people between Fatal Fury, and of course, where I talked about the K-Off 94-Mai was eye-opening for a lot of people. You know, if they came out, Fido Fury 3, it's like, yeah, my shit annoyed, we don't know her. Please meet our new star, Alice Chrysler. Like, I don't even know the Japanese word for pitchfork, but they would have been out. They would have, the people would have marked on, marched on Esaka, and burned S&KHQ to the ground.

Come on. Alice Chrysler? Are you kidding me? It's not a great name. And also, like, nowadays, like, when you don't have enough of a returning roster from fighting games, like, I'm thinking back of, like, you know... Third Strike is a good example. Yeah, like, third strike, it's like, it's tantamount to a war crime, right?

But in this one, from all I could tell, from, like, looking at reactions in, like, Japanese game magazines and things at the time, nobody really seemed to, to care. Like it wasn't that big of a deal. In fact, like this, like we were saying, this has a little bit of kind of a weird, you know, maybe bad reputation now, but like it didn't seem to at the time. Like people didn't seem to put off by some of the odd things that did and, you know, not many returning characters. It's interesting. I mean, it's a short list. Sorry. It'd be interesting to talk to people who were like kind of there at the time as it came up, because now that we have this like kind of like earthquake thing as like the perspective, you know, like maybe

fans were like a little more sympathetic as like, okay, they're really going through it right now. So let's cut them a little bit of a cut them a little bit break. We won't know that unless we like, you know, find people who were there at the time and maybe like asking like what their thoughts were. I think they get a lot of, they get a lot of leeway here because fatal fury was basically about three guys and you had a bunch of other characters. You know, some of them had, were memorable, some of them weren't. But fiddle fury was about three guys And Geese. And Fennell Fury, too, kind of had to blow up the roster in a hurry, you know, sort of, you know, itchy and scratchy and friends style.

And then, you know, again, some of those characters remember, some of them are not. So to switch from two and special to three, I think they had, they had some elbow room. It's like, okay, do we really need Chang, Chang to come back? Do you really need, you know, Yamada Juby to come back? No, they don't. And he, I don't think he ever comes. Does he ever come back? No, he just shows up in like endings.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some of these characters are just gone and it's like, it's fine. We don't need those back. But I think three play, I think, again, Mai is kind of like the linchpin there. If they had dropped Mai and it was just Terry, Joe, Andy Geese, I think that would have been too few. Yeah. But with those three plus my and geese, although, you know, again, it's a bit of where the geese need to come back because, again, he's supposed to be dead. But no, he's, you know.

He was. I guess his little scar. He's got a scar. He's got a better. Was a scar and special? I don't know if it wasn't special. I don't remember off the top of my head. It's more prominent now.

He's got a prominent scar on his chest that was not there in Philadelphia 1 for sure. That's all you get from falling off of a building, just a scar on your chest. It's actually not so bad. When you're tough like Geese Howard, that's the case. I mean, the man has money. He had, you know, he paid for the top, top surgeons. It's like, okay, we put all your bones back.

We've given you fresh blood. We do have the scar, and he's like, fine. Well, the scar will make them look cool, so that's why he's got to keep it. Speaking of Alice Chrysler, I wonder, because I know,

like, 15 odd years later, they did Apache slot Fatal Fury Machine, then that the character, Alice, who later show up in K-O-F-14, and I kind of wonder if, like, this was the prototype of that Alice.

I'm kind of thinking the same thing, too, because, like, she is, like, she's like the Fatal Fury fan girl, like period like like if you know we'll get to grow a little bit later but a lot of characters in that game are you know fans of a character of an existing character like their protegees or whatever and like alice is very much that for the not just one character but like the three guys from fatal fear like she's like a little bit of a composite of you know uh Andy Terry and Joe um so

it's like it's the same name it's just Alice Nakata now so it's got to be in there somewhere Like, she even has, like, her own, like, kind of like, Terry-style hat. I'm pro-Alice, just for the record. I'm pro-alice. But. My brother, my brother, I get so much, you have no idea how much flack I get from, from friends for being an Alice fan. I'm just saying, I'm pro-alice.

I'm not against Alice as a concept, but the idea that Alice could replace my. No, no, no, absolutely no. Sorry. Yeah. No, I love Alice, but that, that's, that's heresy right there. But, you know, in this game, it had, like, a, pretty fun roster of new characters, and a few of them really became very popular in their own right. Like, this is, this is the game that introduced Blue Mary, who I feel has become another one of the big Fatal Fury mascots, especially because she's showed up in so many King of Fighters games.

We talked about Yamazaki already. He's one of the bosses. He's been everywhere. Also very popular. Apart from, I mean, geese, obviously, but like, I think Yamazaki is so cool. because of how, like, grounded he is. Like, he's not, you know, he's, for as much as I love Wolfgang Krauser, like, he's not this, you know, long,

what is, Krauser has, like, purple, long purple hair, right? Or am I imagine? Yeah. A long purple hair and man wearing golden armor. Like, there's something to be said for the, but Yamazaki is just like a crazy yakuza who beats the shit out of people and, like, kicks dirt at you. I don't know. There's something to be said for that.

And his laugh, like, who doesn't love his, I don't know if he had his laugh in this, or if that was a K-O-F thing. I don't remember. I think he had it. I'm pretty sure the voice actor changes at some point, and it goes to a man named Ishi, I forgot his first name. But yet, the K-O-F version of Yamazaki is the one that sort of, like, takes the most place up in my heart.

Yeah, I think same. You know, the roots are all here. The basic character design is here. Like, he generally fights wearing just like all black pants, a tight black t-shirt. And usually he's got a hand in his pocket while he's fighting, which is really badass. the character portraits generally add is sort of like like a fur coat kind of thing

which is like that's so cool it's such a cool look I love the fur coat right like that's the right level flamboyance like you said Brian like golden suit of armor like come on man who are you are you the king of France no but Yamazaki

strolling around town wearing a fur coat but he takes the fur coat off when he kicks your ass okay fine fine he's not quite yakuza's Majima but he's like you know just right where he needs to be. He's playing in that neighborhood. His hair, he's got the cool, like, what is it?

Like, the side shave and the side shave and the slick back, yeah. And it's died. In a lot of his character are, too, he's, like, really menacing looking. Like, he's always, like, glaring straight at the camera. He's got, like, always like, like, these almost, like, Joker-esque grins to him. Yeah, or crazy eyes or whatever. Knife in the hand, you know, like, he's really menacing. Yeah, got to watch out for that dirt kick to come at any minute.

Shut. Yeah, he was a great. boss character. And the rest of the characters they introduced in here, I feel like never really got any traction outside of Fatal Fury, but like Fatal Fury heads like them. There's a priest Sokaku who's apparently

a rival to Mai for whatever reason. There's like a Hong Kong cop like Hanfu who uses Nunchucks. Very interesting Capoeira fighter Bob Wilson. And a kickboxer named Franco Bash, who I don't really think

does a lot of actual kickboxing. I mean, he's a kickboxer in the sense that he boxes and he kicks. Yeah, right. Literally, he is a kickboxer, but he doesn't have the look of, you know, say, Joe or Huagai or anyone we would think with the sport of kickboxing. But he does wear boxing gloves and he will kick you, so fair. Yeah, he's just a big, beefy guy. And also, is he a retired kickboxer? So maybe he forgot a little bit, like, how to do it completely.

So he's just kind of going off memory. Yeah. He absolutely does not have a kickboxer's build. He's very just, he's very haggar-esque. Yeah, very Meghaggar. Also, we should probably acknowledge Hanfu is more than a little inspired by Jackie Chan. He's got, he's got the floppy hair. He's got the sort of really strange tank top that might be a one-zee underneath his pants, you know, like, yeah.

Okay. And this was, this was sort of the, like, the heyday of Jackie Chad and all those Kung Fu, like, cop movies. And, like, this wasn't the first video game to have a character who is, like, whole cloth, just, like, taking Jackie Chan's likeness and putting it in there. I mean, if this is 1995, this is the same year Jackie Chan gets his own video game, like, Mortal Kombat style, where he plays, like, three different characters, all being Jackie Chan's. So, this of fire? Yeah. Oh, there was two of them. Just this weird Mobius strip of Jackie Chan that just keeps spiraling in on itself.

I feel like we just need to talk, do a podcast about those Jackie Chan games. Absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, 95, 95 is also the year that America finally catches up with Jackie Chan because we get Rumble in the Bronx later in the year. But when Fatal Fury 3 would have come out, I would have no idea who Han Fu was. And I think by the sequels, I would say, oh, yeah, yeah, okay, that's where they got that. Okay. And then the final bosses are the Jin twins, Chanshu and Chon Ray, who I don't think anyone really cares that much about.

But for some reason, like, S&K kept keeping them around in Fatal Fury. for a while and like tossed them in battle Coliseum. I didn't even remember them. I just remembered Yamazaki. Nobody, nobody, nobody likes them. Nobody wants them back. Nobody even ironically jokes about bringing the Jin twins back because they don't want to like, you know, open that, you know, potential

future. Like, nobody, nobody that I know of at least likes the Jin Twins by any stretch of the imagination. Yeah, they're just kind of there. They're just, yeah, exactly. It's tough, it's a tough sell when you introduce new bosses and make them brothers and make them almost identical, because what happens is you create two different characters,

two different names, and no one's ever going to remember which one's Joan Shun, which one's Joan Rui, just like the bruiser's in Super Punch Out, like, I know there's a Nick Bruiser, and there's another brooder. It's Nick and Rick. Yeah, yeah, which is the last boss, which is the second to last boss? I don't remember. I can't remember those things. I'm sorry.

And in this case, it's like, one of them looks like Vegeta, and one of them looks like Uma Thurman and Pulp Fiction. but that's not wrong but they're twins and they're like they shoot fireballs and they basically go to the same tailor and it's like okay fine and we talked about you know in the notes here like this time the plot is about like magic scrolls yeah want to seek immaterality and and this seems to have been maybe an under bubbling thing because there's a lot of supernatural stuff in the works compared to say, you know, like, fiddle fury, the first fiddle furies are not supernatural at all. It's like, I hate geese, geese killed my dad, I want to kill geese.

And art of fighting is about crime lords and kidnapping, and we hate you, we want you to die. And K-OF, even the early K-F games are like, here's this crazy guy who owns a aircraft carrier, and he wants to turn, he wants to fight people and beat them up, and if you beat him, he blows up his aircraft carrier. Okay, fine. But I would say, starting with this game, starting with FedEx carrier, and then you look at K-OF-96, and then, Kevin, you mentioned, like, what? Samar Showdown 2? Samar Showdown 2.

Demons and possession stuff. I think we're seeing the, you know, maybe it's not Japanese, but, like, the Wicification, like, with double Cs, like, Wiccan, kind of like, we're getting magical, we're getting mystical. Suddenly everyone's got a spiritual energy or a thousand-year-old demon that they're placating somewhere. Like, I think the Jins, the Jins talked about some sort of 2,000-year-old history. like they're like it's hoctu shinkin like come on what it would talk about i wonder i i wonder what the influence was that shifted that zite guys because there has it's it's no coincidence that like because it's not even just s and k like a lot of like other franchises even outside the fighting out of fighting games were doing that too and it's like okay what what thing happened that was just

like okay everything is going to be magic now i thought there was some hit like movie that had like supernatural seams or something but i mean it it also could be the 90s you know like after, I'm saying, at the end of the 80s, the Cold War is over a lot of, you know, a lot of long-term fictional franchises. Like, okay, well, we can't do our regular enemies. What do we do now? And in the case of the U.S., we always went to drug lords. But maybe Japan's like, okay, what if it's a demon?

Yeah. A demon drug lord. Yeah, why not? Why not go all in on that? Demons can sell drugs. They need money, don't they? Sure. How did we get here?

What's going on? that's Fatal Fury 3's influence right there I asked the wrong question I'm sorry it's all the viewer all the listeners because I'm going to say we have we have this like plot line where geese is back and he's going after these immortality scrolls

but you wouldn't necessarily get the like the stakes of this game based on the absolutely deranged localization it got like this was an era where S&K had deranged localizations in general but this one is particularly unhinged Like, you've got Blue Mary telling, like, borsh belt jokes.

You've got, like, references to cold medicine. And Andy's asking, my, what in the great ice cream man are you doing here? I was allowed to bring that one up. And basically, everyone is extremely excessively sexist towards my and Blue Mary. So it's bizarre, just even by S&K standards at the time. I invite you to Google it. I found a blog recently that just had screencaps of the Japanese and English. side by side, and they translated everything, just so you could see that, you know, the Japanese

was basically concerned with plot in general and character. And some of the English lines do reflect that, but then a lot of them would just like say, oh, well, we've got so much text base. I might as well write a completely new sentence here about the Great Ice Cream Man, because everyone knows the great ice cream man in America, right? Like, wait, what? Sure. You know? Sure, why not? Absolutely. So the English text, it's not like it's crazy changed, like a lot of the flavor of the original message is there, but someone's just said, okay, write as much as you want. Like, I guess maybe they're paid by the letter. Maybe. Actually, my favorite is there's like a running, like, interest and fascination with, like, Joe Higashi's underwear for some reason.

Well, I mean, truly, who isn't fascinated by Joe Higashi's underwear? He is a fashion icon. I retract my concern. There's also, I was refreshing my memory with a summary of the story. And apparently Richard Meyer opened the Pow Pow Cafe 2. He couldn't name it anything better than just sequelizing the Pow Pow Cafe, which is very iconic. But you know, he already got worse than when we get to Garo then. Okay, I don't want to go of tangent, but I must say there was a pizzeria in my home.

hometown, very popular named Capricio, and in the 90s, they opened a second location not that far away, and they literally called the Capricio, too. And wouldn't you know it? Quickly, the sequel overtook the original, and today there's only one Capricio. It's okay. They're still around. I think it's a family-owned business. But to me, I'm okay with businesses getting sequels if they are owned by the same

general group. Like, if I, you know, if I hire you and you leave my restaurant and you open a sequel restaurant that's like them's fighting words yeah that's true so you're saying this is the most well-observed a bit of americanism in this game americans love a sequel what would you know that's true i mean uh kevin you remember uh bruce lee that was near old zanidu technically it's full name was technically its full name was bruce lee too yep it was not just brew it was bruce lee too it was a chinese spot that was right next to uh where the old zanidu location used to be at yeah the only restaurants i've personally seen that have done this have been Chinese restaurants, interestingly.

Yep, you, thank you. So I guess we should probably touch on the mechanics for this game because these actually inform how the Real Bout games really play. A lot of the ideas in those games really get their start in Fatal Fury 3 in much messier forms. So Fatal Fury 2 and 3, or 2 in Special, had the back lane that you could jump into. This one adds a third foreground lane that you can jump into. It also retools the lane system a little bit. If I remember, right, you can do, like, one attack and then you return to the center. I know that's how it works in the real bounce.

I'm pretty sure it's how this works in three. I was going to re-familiarize myself because it's been a couple months and then the power went out. So, whoops. But they called this the oversway system, and it's kind of the basis of how they would keep tweaking the lane system in the future real-bout games. Or like overdue system, honestly. Sorry. I'm not a fan of three lanes. I feel three lanes was a lot.

It's too much. I feel like two lanes was fine. Even if you had a lot of like jumping back and forth, I feel like maybe fix the two lane system before you go to three lanes. This really felt like them flexing or like, look, we can have more sprites in the foreground too. Isn't that cool? Yeah, yeah.

How many lanes can we have? The sky's the limit. So it's like a California interstate. It's like one more lane. That'll solve the problem this time. One more lane. Just one more lane, bro. That's all we need and that'll fix the traffic.

And, you know, this was a time when 3D fighting games were starting to take off. I kind of wonder if that was a factor as well. That's a good point. Yeah. Let's also introduce chain combos, which they were very basic in this game, like a predetermined series of buttons. In directional presses, you push them and you get a combo out of it. Every character here has like, I think, two or three as opposed to the later Realbouts games, which just kept adding more and more to each character to where you get like six or seven routes.

for everybody by the time you get to two. So it's an interesting idea. I think it's a good part to have in Fatal Fury. It works in this system. Then we get to the stuff that is really weird. And so this game brings back the desperation attacks from Fatal Fury 2, where when your life gets low enough and starts splashing, you can do a super.

This game introduces hidden abilities. These activate in a one and one thousand, 2024 chance when doing a super. This is crazy. Do any other games do this? None that I'm aware of. But it gets better because you could also just put in a code when you pick your character before the match starts to make them readily available when your life is flashing.

But readily available in the sense that you have to do something specific with each character before you can do this hidden move. So, like, my has to be taunting, and while she's taunting, then you can do the input for the suit, the move, and she'll do it. Or Terry, I think he has to be in the middle of a combo, a specific combo. I think it involves a power charge or something, one of his moves. And then you can put in the motion, and it'll do the super. These only work once per round, and yeah.

It's a baffling decision. And if you go without the code, it's like, man, the idea of a fighting game that has an element of R&G to it just sounds horrible. Horrible. Yeah. You know, my main focus, like, I'm more on the competitive side. So hearing R&G being a fact, it's like, no, can't have that. Yeah, you cringe if you're a competitive player and somebody mentions R&G in a game. It's like, no, I can't practice for that.

And then K-O-F-15 gave a shingo who has a crids, random crits. It's just like, okay. Yeah, like, I like the idea of this is like an Easter egg, but at the same time, I think Street Fighter 2 did it better, where you have the Easter egg where sometimes where you throw a red fireball. Like, it's not functionally different, but it looks different. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, when you read this out loud, it feels like they made a bug on purpose, you know?

Right. It's like, if you do a move during a backdash and, you know, it's Friday the 13th. It's not a plug. It's a feature. You can get, you get a different animation. Like, okay, thanks. Cool. Yeah. So, it's an interesting concept. They don't bring this back at all in the Real Pout games. It's gone.

Thank you. And this also adds in a grading system. And Diamond, you wrote in here that this might be the first game to do that. And I honestly can't think of any others that did before it. I'm trying to think. I know it was, it was definitely a basic part of Street Fighter 3, but that's 97, and I'm stumped. 95? I think it's pretty early. It's pretty early for a fighting game to say, you know, A, B, C. I can think of games that did it later. Like, you mentioned third. It's like, didn't CVS1 do it, or am I misremembering that? I know the real bouts did it. Mark of the Wolves did it. Did CVS1 do it? There were a lot of point

systems. Some games had like point systems that would give you like more points or less points, basically performance. I know K-F-99 had a whole like, like battle rating system, but that was America. I mean, CVS1 was 2000 anyways, so that's kind of a moot point because, you know, again, this is what, 95? So, yeah, this could very well be the first game to do that could have very early, if not the first. Yeah, you know, the future is now and started by S&K. I like, as an aside, I like, I like grading systems. I think they're really, I think they're neat. I think they're nice to have. I just think they're neat. I just think they're neat.

My little grading system potato. Mm-hmm. So there's not too much else to talk about Fatal Fury 3. It got ported to the Sega Saturn in Japan and Windows 95 in Japan. And that was it. It's never made it to any other platform. I wonder how many Windows 95 players there were of Fatal Fury 3. I want to bring my Windows 95 set up to the next local.

Land party. There you go. I do think that's going to be a theme going forward, you know, given that the early Fatal Fury's all got 16-bit ports, so not just NeoGeo, but also people who didn't own Neo Geos, which, let's face it, it's pretty small number. Other people could play these games and maybe grow up with them, and as we talked about last time, some of those fatal Fury ports had weird mechanics or things that weren't in the regular game, and people grew up with them, like, okay, that's cool, and people have memories of those. And I think going forward, a lot fewer ports are being made. And if they are, they're just being made to, like, you know, disk-based systems, which are essentially, you know, graphically identical, you know, maybe loading times factor in.

But generally speaking, you know, a Saturn port, a PlayStation port of a 2D fighting game should be pretty strong, pretty close to the original. So you're, like, you're getting a narrowization of the potential player base, especially as, you know, arcades are less popular, certainly in the Ogeo. like the window for the NeoGeo may be catching on is closed. Like at this point, it's already in the niche, you know, the sicko mode. Like, okay, here are our fans. We're going to make games for our fans.

And we're going to, we'll make our buck for these, you know, expensive cartridges we're selling. If you don't have them and you don't find it in the arcade, I guess you could import a Sega Saturn game. Maybe. Okay. Maybe you won't. And most of the Neo Geo library by this point is fighting games and metal slug anyway. I feel like, there's not too much else. Yeah.

The balance has shifted. You know, there's a lot, there's much fewer games in the system that aren't fighting game related, you know, or metal slug related. I guess Neo-Turf Masters is technically metal slug related because of the music. I suppose. A developer connection there, yeah. It sounds like metal slug. I mean, most MVS caps that I found in the wild typically had like either a metal slug and then

bubble bobble or samurai showdown. I think I played, like, one MVS cap that had a Fatal Fury game on it. And I don't even remember which one it was. It was so long ago. I've seen special around a few times, but I've only ever seen Fatal Fury once, and that was at that Long Island Retro Expo that diamond you were at as well. We were like, wow, Fatal Fury 3. You don't really want to play that, but it's cool to see it here.

I'll watch the attract mode. Let's go. Yes, yes, yes. There's the part of Yamazaki again. Let's go. I don't know. So I guess that's a good cue to move on to a game that people do really like, and is pretty rad. And that's real about Fatal Fury, which came out in December, 1995 in the arcade, just barely over the line.

I believe it came out on the NeoGeo home system, like shortly after the new year. And this had the tagline in Japan of so long geese, and in the U.S. Geese Howard must go, because this is where he canonically dies, unless they've retconned that again in City of the Wolves. We won't know that for a couple months. Oh, man. It's, it's, if I was a bedding man, if I was a betting man, if I wanted to put some money on it, I think I would put like at least 100 on him coming back for City.

He's coming back. But will he be nightmare geese or actually alive, like, canonical, like, canonically coming back? Or is it just like, you know, like, yeah, exactly. They'll find a way. Well, because KOF15 is already introducing time travel mechanics, so it's like, you know, the sky's the limit now. They're setting it up. I mean, geese was in 14, so yeah.

I mean, they recognize that geese is popular, and they're not going to just, like, not put him in this game. I think he's going to be a download character because I know people will pay money for geese. Yeah. That's my prediction. Whether or not he's actually alive, that's another story. You know, money for geese would be a good name for a theme song, you know. They'll give that to him with the next game. And he's in soy sauce, money for geese.

Yeah, why not? Come on, guys. I mean, he needs it. He owns a giant tower. He needs more money. Got to make the tower bigger. Plus all the hospital bills. Yeah, what income does he have now that he's dead?

I don't know. True enough. So this game, it brings back all the characters from Fatal Fury 3 and adds in Yamazaki and the Jin Twins as playable characters, which is great because Yamazaki's cool. The Jin Twins are there. They bring back Duck King, Billy Kane, and Kim from Fatal Fury special as well. So you got some more big names. Really, no other new characters.

That's just it. It's like, okay, here's these sprites we already had. Here's some characters we know people like, and we're giving you back. And honestly, that's fine. In fairness, they are new sprites, though. Like, they definitely re-jew. Like, you know, especially, I got to say, the real-about version of Duck King is pretty impressive because he's basically always dancing and when I say always dancing what I mean is

he like turns one way and then turns the other way and like every part of him like his feet his head his hair his face he's constantly moving back and forth and he's got the little like bird it's not a duck but like what is it like a chick chick chick or something like I think so yeah I think it's a chick he's got a little bird with him at all times he can like summon the bird to like build meter or something like he's got some kind of like ability there like they put a lot of work into this new you know he must have been a nightmare to animate yeah i feel like duck kings uh in general in this game is just like a flex from their their animation team just like look what we can do now i looked at max their 3d 330 giga now i looked up a while ago and i'm super blanking on it

right now but like the base kind of like dance move that he does there's a name for that and i forget what it is, but it's got like a real name to it. It's his now, as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. As far as I'm concerned, it's the ducking. Yeah, exactly. So they also reworked how the system mechanics work. So instead of having four

attack buttons, like the past couple games, you now have three attack buttons. You have punch, you have kick, and you have your heavy attack, which is, you know, whichever button the character uses. The fourth button is now specifically for like doing the oversweigh late, shifting stuff, which is kind of the approach they'd take through the rest of the

Real Bout series. And honestly, I think it works really well with the rainbow layout on a lot of Neo-Geo cabs. Because you're not really stretching your hand out to like do combos a whole lot. You just have like these three buttons right next to each other. Yeah, it feels a lot better because of that, I think. Yeah, especially if you're playing on a cabinet. I mean, obviously you're playing on a modern stick. You can you can map them however you want, depending on how you're playing it.

But yeah, if you have that original layout, it's like, I can do this, but it's not the most comfortable thing in the world. Yeah. This also introduces a super meter in its entirety. It's not just flashing light, although that's still there, too. So bear with me. Once the meter is full, you can do your S power, which is just standard level one super, if you will. If your life is below 50%, your health power begins flashing. And at that point, you can do the S power for free, even if you don't have a full super bar.

And if you do have a full super power, you can access the P power, which is a different, more powerful super move. And once your meter fills up, it slowly drains out. So there's some strategy involved there where you, do you want to take a blow to the face if it'll get you below that 50% and while you still have meter? So you can do the big super, like, uh, You got to make that call. And I would compare this to the system that they had in KOF at this point, although there's no charging. You can't just charge meter. But at this point, KOF 94 or 95, it was basically built around, yeah, if you have a full meter, you can do a super.

If you have low life, you can do a super for free. If you have low life and a full meter, you can do a bigger super. And they would keep that going forward, and they'd call it like the extra. Super desperation move or whatever. They had like the extra mo, like starting in 96. Oh, right, right, right. They, no, actually 96 was the hybrid version. Starting in 97, they give you the choice of, do you want this version or do you want this

version? Do you want the extra version, the advanced version? I'm thinking back now, because we just talked to this earlier this week. We recorded a episode about Capcom S and K games. We talked a lot about the various systems they incorporate in those games. So I'm a little dizzy, but yeah, this is on par. I would say, what I'm saying is Real Battlefield of Fury is already on par with the other, what's happening in the early KOF games

and it's going to dominate KOF going forward, whereas KOF's going to say, okay, let's try other things. It's kind of on par with what they were doing with Samurai Showdown, because starting in two, you had the meter that once it fills, like it drains out slowly, although there's no visual indicator of that. While you have that,

you can do your weapon flip, and in Sam Show 3, actually, you can charge it manually like you can in KOF, which is interesting. Can you just punch yourself to get angry? Yeah. So it's definitely something they were like considering at the time. All right.

This also, you have the chain combos back. They're more fleshed out here. Every character has a few more routes. And here's the one that I feel like people sort of are ride or die with Real About One with. And it has ringouts, like a 3D game. So you have stages. They have walls like your normal fighting game stage, except the walls can be damaged as you

like hit someone into them. Even if they're blocking, they'll still get like. pushed into the wall and it'll take damage and eventually it'll break and once it's broken you can immediately win the round by knocking the other person out um they have all sorts of really cute like animations and little uh flares for this like you getting knocked into an elevator or or a subway train or my favorite there's a there's one where you get knocked into like some some wires and you get electrocuted and start a fire the next round The fire is just going, and if you get ringed out in that direction again, your character catches on fire.

I thought this was so cool, and I don't think, I don't think this is in any of the real bouts, right? I believe this was the only one that they did ringouts for. Special brings it back, but in this, and that one, it doesn't win the round in special, and you just, uh, you just get stunned. It's just this one in special, yeah. Even though I'm sure people at the time might have been like, ah, they put, they put Virtua Fighter in my Fatal Fury or something, but I don't know. I really thought it was cool because, like you said, so few 2D games even attempted to do it. I'm not the biggest fan of ringouts. They're okay. Like, like Kevin said, like it's more of like a 3D fighter thing and I'm weirdly okay with them being there. Like, I'm okay within like Soul Calibur and

virtual fighter. But the idea of like a ringout and a 2D just feels kind of weird to me. It's nice that they put so much effort into making it flashy and showy, as Kevin pointed out, because that I think softens the blow a little bit. It makes it like, like, okay, it's, you know, at least I get to see like a funny little animation of, you know, like, you know, something happening to make it worth doing. I think in theory, if you're good at using the lane system, you can avoid getting caught in the corner.

Yeah. But it is a pretty steep price to pay. If you get caught in the corner and, you know, you don't even get hit, but you just like enough chip damage, I guess, if you will, they can bust through it. it, and you just lose, and it's like, okay, well, that kind of sucked. And then once it's broken, it's like, it's open, and then anyone can fall in there. It's kind of a weird thing.

But it is sort of like, you have to respect the amount of work that went into it because there's so many different scenarios, like two characters go out at the same time, and whether you win or lose the match, you might have a different animation. Like, the train thing, Kevin mentioned, he didn't mention that when you go on the train, the train leaves the station. Yes. So you get a whole, like, you know, animated sprite of your character, like, waving goodbye or being angry on a train that leaves. It's a lot of extra work for them animation-wise.

People get knocked on top of the train. People get knocked, like, out of windows or into, like, background things. There's a whole ship in one level, like, at a port. And you can knock someone into the ship, and then the gate opens on the ship, and they come back out. And then the gate is open for the next round, and then everyone can fall into this gate. It's really, it's an incredible amount of, like, hours spent on art for a feature that I don't think anyone particularly wanted to deal with. And if I remember, right, this game also had, like, special animations if you, like, knock someone into the foreground when you win a match. I think three did this, too, actually.

But, uh... Yeah, there's like a special K.O. If you're, like, an oversweigh K.O., they those, like, it's almost like the, like the Turtles games where you throw the Foot Ninja into the screen. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what happens. There's a good, again, it's a special. giant sprite that comes at the screen. Like, it looks amazing. Yeah, this game just, like, has a lot of cool stuff going on in it.

I mean, this might be going on, like, a real, real tangent. But, like, you know, of course, we celebrate S&K for just, like, their amazing, just pixel art across, like, all of their games. And, of course, Fatal Fury does that really strong. But what I really like about, like, when we start getting into, like, the real bout era is, like, they start having fun with what they are presenting to us. Like Fatal Fury, the three games thus far, and, you know, and they're kind of like secondary, you know, re-releases. They're beautiful games. We just, you know, talked about like that attract mode for Fatal Fury 3. But this is like where, like, there's like more like a zaniness to it.

It's more energetic. It's louder if that's even possible. You know, like, you look at like a character select screen, like in the background, it's like, okay, cool, number one guy. You can do it. You know, stuff like that. It's just a lot of, like, embellishments all over the place. And the music is more kind of, like, just rambunctious. And it's just, I really just love the real bout era for that, for that.

It's just like, just the pure, like, manic, raucous energy that it has. And that, you know, these are all just many examples of, like, how they achieve that. I think Kevin touched it earlier where it's, like, Fatal Fury 3 is sort of, like, the genesis of this sort of separate series. And artistically, I feel like it definitely, like, the main sprites that they make. for Fiddle F3, and then, you know, as each one goes forward, that sort of stays pretty consistent. But as each, as each real-bought game occurs, I think they add more and more flourishes and change animations and just make little tweaks. And in some cases, redraw entire characters. And the motif seems to be, no, no, bigger. Go bigger. You know, instead of

Joe, in Fiddlebury 3, Joe has a super where he throws the big, the big tornado. And it's like, it's a big red tornado. Okay, fine. and then I think special twist it so it's like at an angle and it's got multiple parts that are rotating differently and then like it gets red and then it's like moving across the screen like that's a move that doesn't really change its effect but the way it looks and the way they present it changes dramatically and I think so kaku especially like so kaku specials are all like he knocks his staff on the ground and summons some sort of big like spirit force but in each game the spirit gets larger and, like, more electric and covers more lanes.

Like, I think in the first game, it's, like, a single lane, but, like, by the time we get to reel about two, like, it covers all lanes, you can't escape it. It's kind of, it's really cool. And it feels like three quarters of the screen. Yeah, it's massive. It's massive. That's what I love. It's kind of a comic, I would say, like, almost an American comic book feel. Like, everyone's getting bigger and angrier and more muscled.

Especially Frank, though. Again, they redraw Franco at some point. I don't know if it's Real About Special or RealBout 1, but like, Franco has a brand new sprite, and he just gets even wider, and his arms almost have, like, they look like they're almost independent sprites on a different body. Like, that's how big he looks. You got to get that, uh, that wide load, uh, that you put on the back to, like, trailers, put that flag on him. He's built like a refrigerator. Mm-hmm. That is a, that is a rectangular man.

Yeah, it's marked in here that this game ranked number nine in Gamest, as did Fat of Fury 3. And some of the games that were ranked above it include, you know, Alpha 2, King of Fighters 96, Virtual Fighter 3, X-Men Street Fighter. Psychic Force. Psychic Force got ranked above it, interestingly. And, you know, other games like Ray Storm and Dungeons and Dragons, Shadow for Mistara. So, like, these are... It's a lot of competition. This is like an era in arcades where, like, you're really looking.

for something to stand out because consoles are obviously getting more powerful now. I think the PS1 had come out in Japan at this point. 3D graphics were becoming more of a thing and we're getting more refined

and you had to like stick out and S&K is making games on NeoGeo hardware, which at this point is getting kind of antiquated and how you're going to make your game look good? How about we do what Capcom's doing with the Alpha games? just go for this, like, very cartoon-y visual style with a lot of, like, bright colors and

sharp sprites and animation flourishes. And I think it works out really well here. I think it works out better here than it does in the alpha games, honestly. Yeah. Now, I'm imagining a person who, like, just knew Neo Geo from, like, the only game they played was like NOM1975 or something and then went to this. They were just like, oh, my God. What happens?

Honestly, Brian, I had a similar feeling with it. I played a lot of early NeoGeo games, and then I sort of stepped away for a little bit, and then I came back. But my return game was 98, and I was like, whoa. Yeah, that's a jump. Oh, I like this. Yeah. And I guess we should touch on the story a bit. So, as the title suggests, this is about killing Geese Howard.

And in the ending, the canon ending, if Terry or Andy defeat Geese, They knock him over the side of his tower. He refuses their attempts to save his life and falls to his death. And Terry has to adopt Geese's son Rock and raise him as his own kid. And I think you can see he's not identified in any way. But I think there's a kid hanging around Terry in his Fatal Fury 3 ending. So I think that's an early hit of what they wanted to do with the character where he's like, if you beat the game with Terry, he's paling with this kid. He's like, hey, call me pop.

And, like, there's no real context there. You know, we don't know the kid's name. We don't know that it's geese's son. We don't frankly know. Maybe Terry's committing a sex crime. We actually don't know this. But I'm just saying, based on that one, you know, that one single frame drawing for Fiddle Free 3, we eventually get an entire new character and almost the genesis for an entire new series later on. So, S&K, clearly they don't throw anything away.

Good for them. Yeah. And Brian, you noted that this game does have probably the most badass cover out of any Neo Geo game. And I think you're right. It's Shinkero, right? It's chinkero drawing? Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Just look it up if you have not seen it before. It's got geese just like sitting at his desk looking smug as hell, backed up by, you know, Billy and his bodyguard's Ripper and Hopper. If you think you haven't seen it before, there's probably a good chance you actually have. You've probably seen a parody of it. Just be like, oh, yeah, yeah. People have done so. many parodies of it too it's great it's a great cover art he's like he's in a throne right yeah

yeah he's in like a he's like in like a red velvet chair like gold trim he's in his black suit he's like sitting back he's got like one leg crossed over the other then of course like yeah he's got like two like kind of like generic looking bodyguards behind it but then also like billy cane is there like hand in a suit bandana like everyone's in suits you know they're all like looking directly into the camera. It's really cool. It's like a S&K cosplayer's like right of passage that they have to do that at some point. It's a cool enough image for me to

forgive the fact that Billy Cain's in it. But like picture in Resident Evil 4 when like Leon sits in a big chair. Like that's the energy. That's the energy. It's like coming in it. I don't have time to sit. I don't have time to sit. Geese is time to sit.

It's it's the lake cross. It's Geese's Lake Cross that just really ties the whole picture together. It's not the ornate throne chair. It's just like, it's like the casual leg up. Where he's just like, yeah, I'm just chilling in my tower with my, with my boys. He's got the energy of like, you are not a threat to me. You won't even get to me.

You got to get through all my boys first. And then I'll stay my hands with your blood. You got to make that reference two times this week. Oh, to have that much confidence. And this did get ported to the PlayStation 1 and the Saturn in Japan. The Saturn port used the one megabyte RAM expansion, so it got all the extra animation frames that had to get cut for the PlayStation. And I do want to shout out, I believe it was last year, someone in, I want to say Brazil, somewhere in South America, did an unofficial port of this game to the Mega Drive. I have to check this out.

It's really impressive. It's actually very, like, well done. It's not a direct port, like, they pull in elements from other Fatal Fury games, but, like, it's really cool. Very impressive. Anything else about real about one? Just real quick, going back to Geese's endless confidence, it takes a really confident dude to start falling off of a really tall tower, get saved by the guy who's trying to kill you,

and to snatch your own hand away and say, nah, screw it, and laugh as you go down. I hate you so much. I'm going to traumatize you for the rest of your days. It's my final act. He looks up directly into the camera. and just smiles and laughs and, like, arms wide open. He's just like, nobody makes me bleed my own blood.

And it's even more manic knowing what we know later that he's leaving behind a child. Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's very much, you know, excuse my language, it's very much, fuck that kid. Geese is not a good dad. He finds child abandonment hilarious. And to think that how bad of a dad. Dad, must you have been, to think, you know what, Terry Bogart will make a better dad than I was anyway.

I don't think he was like, this bum's not. I don't think he expected that to happen. I don't think he was like, like Terry Bogost, an irresponsible hobo. He's not going to adopt my son. And then he's homeless drunk is not going to adopt my kid. Maybe Andy will take him. Maybe he'll get lucky and Andy will take him. And he was a much better dad.

He's a good guy. Geese's failed gambit to pass his son to a loving family. I like the idea that Gies is like, yeah, you know, I secretly respect Andy and his stability. Look, Andy has my, you know, that's a hetero couple. You grow up in that household, you'll probably learn some ninjitsu skills, and you'll probably be okay, but instead, you grow up on the rails with Terry Bogart. Sorry, kid. Did you get to sleep in a studio apartment? My's over there in the wings, like, see, Andy, you could be a good dad.

Come on. on, come on. All right, Rock, this is my apartment. It's above a bowling alley and beneath another bowling alley. I'm going to be able to be. Okay, we're getting punchy. It's time to punch on to Real About Fatal Fury Special, which was at least January 97, about a year later. Like Fatal Fury Special, this has no real storyline.

It's just a bunch of weird stuff happening, Dream Match. Dream Match, yeah. And can I say, because of the earlier pattern, I always get this wrong, because it goes, it's Final Fury 1, Fatal Fury 2, federal free special you know anything goes but then it goes real bout special and then we'll get to real bout two

in 15 or 20 minutes or so it's like they change the order and I always get a confused in my head every time yeah there's not a huge amount to like talk about like what's due here so they they drop the front lane

that's gone finally the ring out barriers like we talked about they no longer like win you the round they just stun your opponent when you get knocked through it. They also don't have any brand new characters this time. They brought back a few from Fatal Fury special, though. You've got Tung Fu Rue, Chang is back because somebody cared about Chang. Not Jubei, though.

Jubei's gone. No. Lawrence Blood, who might still have the coolest name in Fatal Fury. And Wolfgang Krauser's back as the new final boss. But we have Geese back as a secret final boss as Nightmare Geese, where he's like got a sort of a demonic aura around his feet. He's like, isn't he like purply, kind of? I don't remember if he's purpley in this one.

I know he is in K-W14 when they did the Nightmare Geese skin. They also added in, for whatever reason, a few alternate E-X versions of characters. So like Andy, Billy, Tung Fu-Rue and Blue Mary have completely alternate movesets if you hold the start button when you pick them. That might have been like a field test for like just the concept of E-X characters because, like, didn't. Because 98 had X, EX characters. Did any KOFs before that have that, that mechanic? Technically, 97 did with the Erochi team characters, which would have been the same year. Yeah, this is January 1990.

So this is like, so technically that would have been cooking like probably like in like 95, 96. So part of me thinks that like only a few characters having an X form is like this is them field testing it to see how it plays out, you know. Yeah. And I seem to recall they added. like the X versions for Andy and Blue Mary to K-OF-98

so like they still exist there but they did not retain this for Real About 2 or anything also if you play this on the NeoGeo Home system you can play as geese otherwise he's unavailable Ma is back to her Fatal Fury 2 outfit

I know people really cared about that it's a really good sprite it came up though it did come up in a short blushing's interview they asked like the staff bunch of questions about 53 and they're like hey why is my wearing different clothes and he's like no reason just we drew different clothes like just felt like it yeah we don't want to draw the same thing over and over again i don't know it's not that different but it is it is a little different and they're like okay well we'll go back so all right and she'll proceed to wear this again

for the next 25 odd years yeah i'm sure it's starting to get a little stinky until street fighter six right. She finally got to change him clothes. It's finally happened. Yeah, at last. So, like, yeah, specials a lot of fun. This is the first real-bout game I got to play, because my friend had this on the NeoGeo

home system, and when he ran house sessions, we just played it all the time. I really like its takes on some of these characters, like Sokaku and Mai are a ton of fun in this game. They, like, changed everyone's move lists a bit, and rebalanced everybody. And they're

particularly good. I do like the reimagining of Cheng, because Cheng was always a heavy guy, but in this game, again, as we talked to us, the cartoonish aesthetic, like the comic book aesthetic, they exaggerate it even further,

and when he does certain moves, like, he almost blows up like a balloon, like he becomes like a sphere. Balloon. And I believe he has, like, one super move where he, like, hovers above you and, like, throws energy down,

and he just, like, he's floating above you because he's, like, literally inflated. Like, it's, again, animation-wise, really impressive. I guess it's kind of fatphobic, but, like, he's doing super moves. So, like, okay, I forgive you if you're doing, like, incredible powers. I forgive you. Just think of it as being, like, real Karnov energy.

Yeah, absolutely. It does have a lot of Karnov, like, yeah. Yeah, I actually, I recently picked up Chang in Fatal Fury Special, and I went back and started trying him in the Real About games, and I'm like, you know what, he, the animations make him so delightful to play. He's got the little, like, cartoon, like, fast feet. Oh, yeah, he does. It just really cute.

The Super Mario Brothers 2 Luigi kick. Yeah. He's got, like, the Blanca ball, but he also has, like, another heavier version where he just, like, blasts himself forward with, like, a chi blast. It's so cool. He's a goofball. Like, a kind of a joke character, but he's... But they still make him kind of cool, and I appreciate that.

And Tung Fu Roo, too. Like, uh, like, Tung didn't really have a lot going on in Fatal Fury. one and two other than, you know, getting big and muscly, like Master Roshi in here. Like, they sort of use that in interesting ways for his move set. And I don't think it's bigger. Like, I think in this first version, he has, like, one move. I think it's a super move where he trans, like, like Fatal Fear One, he transforms and spins around, but as either the thing is this one or maybe two gives him more moves where he

changes, like, temporarily and does certain attacks. I know there's one where, like, he poses with, like, a giant rip back. It's like an overheads kind of swing. Yeah. It looks, again, massive spright, looks great. Looks great. Yeah. Special looks cool.

I got a shout out the home ports because this was very interesting. So they got ported to the Saturn, of course, using the one megabyte RAM expansion. It has an extra blueberry music video that was originally only on the NeoGeo CD release of this game. It also came out on the Game Boy, which I don't know if you've ever played any of the Game Boy. S&K games, but if you've ever played any of the Neo Geo Pocket games, which are decidedly more available, they're very much in the same vein. We're going to use the two buttons and how long you press them if you do lights or heavies, and the sprites are kind of like chunky and super deformed.

I'm a truther for the Game Boy S&K titles. They're not like amazing, but like for what they are on, they do pretty, pretty dang well. I agree. It's just crazy that independent of quality that they were still doing Game Boy ports of these at the time that this came out. Yeah, this was right around when, like, Pokemon gave it a second win in Japan, so. Those kids who play Pokemon, they're going to, they're going to buy Real Bout. I know it. Sure. I mean, like, for the, for the original Game Boy line, the last officially licensed game for it was in 2002. It was like a, like, a one-piece game or something like that, but like that game.

It sounds about right. They've had an amazing run backed up, you know, very much with that, that Pokemon's second win, but, you know, that's a, that's a different episode right there. You know, you have to wonder, this is, this is 97 and these ports are coming out. I wonder how much this informs S&K's decision to get into the portal market. It's like, well, hey, we've got, you know, we've had these games on Game Boy for years. You know, we have these sort of, you know, we know how to artistically create these characters to work on a small screen.

maybe we should just do this ourselves, you know, possibly. I mean, that's a very good question. I would not be shocked if that was a factor. And the fact that the Game Boy had a second life because of Pokemon. Maybe it sparked again. It's like, okay, well, clearly the handheld market's not going away. No one else is stepping up to Nintendo. Maybe we can do it.

They couldn't do it. I'm sorry. No. I mean, it's fine. Nobody could beat the Game Boy the first time run and nobody was beating it when Pokemon was there as well. But the New Geopocket, solid effort all. around and we talked more about that. I was about

to say absolutely, yes. I miss the NeoGeo Pocket color dearly. It's a shame that it went so, so soon because it's... Bless its heart. Yes. And I do have to shout out. There was a Japan-only PS1 release called Real Bout Special Dominated Mind that was released in June

1998 after Real Bout 2, which adds in two new characters. There's a weird little dude called Alfred, who's kind of like a pilot sort of character. And then there's the new final boss, the guy named White, and it includes a story mode where Billy's been brainwashed by White in a bid to take over South Town's underworld, which is very bonkers. And, you know, in the new City of the Wolves, Billy apparently runs the South Town Underworld, so I guess I can see it. Never mind that white is just a rip off from Clockwork Orange.

Yeah. It's just a straight up rip, like the eyeliner under the one eye and everything. It's just, it's so obvious. So compromises, they took out X characters completely. They took out the second lane. But in return, they gave everybody new moves and hidden supers. They added in like a super cancel mechanic. So it's like its own unique take on Real Bouts special,

kind of like the Genesis Fatal Fury 2 release. If you're an enthusiast, it's worth the visit. You know, it's worth checking out for like a night or two. You know, probably won't be your favorite, but it's interesting. It's worth the effort. Yeah, it's me. And that brings us to Real Bout Fatal Fury 2, which is the last of the real bouts, came out in March 1998, also no real storyline.

They do add in two characters, both of which are totally great, and only one of which ever showed up again. So the new ones are Rick Stroud. He's a Native American boxer whose move set was completely ripped off for Vanessa in the King of Fighters games, which is why he's never. showed up in King of Fighters. That being said, he is one of my frontrunners for hoping that he comes back to city.

He looks so cool. He's great, you know. And he's fun to play. Yeah, exactly. I mean, for 1990s, you have a native character who is not a horrifying stereotype. Yeah. I'll take it.

We finally move past Sunset Riders. And, yeah. And then we also have Li Xiongfei. I know you like Lee. She's a Chinese-American waitress, like a kung fu martial artist, and yeah, she shows up in King of Fighters 99 the next year and sticks around for quite a few entries before they finally phase her out. I just like the kung fu archetype characters in general and typically like the louder they are, the better. And that's pretty much Shane Faye to like the tea. She's very loud.

She is a loud mouth. Yeah, you know. It's interesting when you look at the Fiddle Fury roster over time, how they really lean into China in particular. Like, by the time you add Ling Xiaofi, like, you've got, what, like four distinctly Chinese characters, you've got Tang Fu Ru, you've got Hong Fu, you've got Cheng, you've got Li. Am I missing anybody? Who's like...

The Jin twins, maybe? I don't know. I don't remember where they're supposed to have been from. I mean, they could, like, they might be Korean, honestly, but... Yeah, they don't strike me as, like, China. They definitely give you like Korean lives. They have the dragon thing and the pearl thing, but, you know, whatever. Yeah.

But these, I'm sure someone knows. But those four characters are definitely specifically Chinese in their origin, in their clothing. You know, their background stages are all, you know, Chinese or Chinatown or China. It's like, okay. Yeah. Cool, cool, cool. Also, Lee has a funny super where she grabs you and just does like a blur of attacks and it just gives you 100-hunt-hit combo, which I just thought was, It's like, I don't think it actually 100 hits, but it's just funny to look at.

And then I'm pretty sure K-L99 or maybe another K-O-F added, like, an extra version where it's basically the same animation, but it has 102 hits. It's like, okay, sure. I do like that super because first, it's like a grab super. Yep. And if she whiffs the grab, she still does the attack. And if it hits, it'll do, like, less damage, but still pretty good for whiffing your command grab super. I'm going to swing my arms around like this, and if you walk into it, that's your problem. Yeah, yeah, she's, yeah, she's very flaily in her movements.

Yeah, she's got good animations. I love her. Yeah. A geese is a playable character again. You don't have to play him on the home version or anything. They added in, Alfred is a secret final boss. Again, he's not playable yet. You have to wait several months to play him in dominated mind, but he's here.

They tweaked the lane system again. So now you can, like, get into the swing. line, which is the second lane. And you're only there temporarily before you can, before you have to come back. Some stages are also single lane. They brought that back from Fatal Fury 2. I remember Sean Faye, in particular, her stage, has like all the delivery trucks and like traffic behind here.

So you can't get into the back lane, which is a nice little touch. And yeah, this was never ported outside of the NeoGeo ecosystem until, you know, the PS2 era when S&K put out their Real Bout collection, and later the hamster picked it up for Arcade Archives. But they did use this as the basis for the Neo Geo Pocket Fatal Fury game

First Contact, which came out the following year in May. This version adds in a new character called Lau for the Versus Mode, who shows up in Rick Stroud's animation for the Real Bout to an opening

sequence, and it doesn't show up again until Mark of the Wolves where he's a member of Bijun A's crew. On the flip side, they cut out a bunch of the characters because it's a tiny little cartridge. Yeah. Loush's all over the place, man. He's just out there just getting involved

in things. Yeah, it's keeping busy. And yeah, I feel like today this is the game from the Real About era that people actually play the most, which is funny for how difficult it

would have been to play it at the time if you weren't an arcade rat. It's definitely my most played Fatal Fury outside of Gero. I enjoy this game immensely because, you know, it is accessible now. And it is like, the feel

of the game is really good. And as I said earlier, it's just, it's just loud, it's colorful, it's raucous. And by the time you get to like RB2, like this, we're like, they're really just really going all in on that. It's fantastic. I think some people would probably argue

Garo is a favorite which I can understand but this is my favorite what I really appreciate about this one is they kind of eased up on the long chain combos from RealBout 1 and special

and they focused on like shorter but character specific combos which I mean I guess your mileage may vary depending on what type of player you are but I'm not I was never the type of person who was particularly great at stringing together long chain combos so I

I picked this one up a little bit easier than the previous Real Bout games. And you can't abuse the planes as much in this one either. Yeah. It's got a tier list like any other fighting game, but this one feels relatively balanced. It's really fast-paced, too. Matches go very quick in this game. And I really appreciate that, having played other games that are a little slower-paced. And speaking of, if there's nothing else to say about real about two, our next game is

Fatal Fury Wild Ambition, the Hyper NeoGeo-604 game. I've never played this. Released in January 99. Has anyone played this other than me? Kevin brought it one night to our locals before I showed down, Ripin' Peace, Sanadu. Just kind of like, just to show it off. And by the end of the night, he had quite the crowd around him. And people were cycling in and out of the game.

I meant to sit down and play it, but I was like, tunnel vision. on CVS 2, but, like, I looked over and I was just like, that's a, that's a large crowd of just, you know, like, looky-lose for it. They were, they were eating it up. Yeah, it's, it's a weird game. I wouldn't say it's a bad game, but it's a very, like, it's, it's an early 3D fighting game. It kind of has that energy. So it's mostly, I just have to add, I don't want to interrupt, but like, as a hyper Neo-Geo-604 game, I cannot recall ever seeing a hyper Neo-Geo-604 cabinet in my lifetime. I cannot.

Same. Maybe. Not until much later in life. Maybe I saw one at Chinatown Fair. Maybe in the back. But it's a big maybe. I don't think so. I don't think I ever saw it.

Sometimes I wonder, like, if the hyper Neo-Geo-604 is just like this inside joke that everyone keeps going along with. And they're just saying that it exists to mess with me because, like, I just, like, it's, it's all just a big conspiracy to just mess with me, Will Quavis in particular. I've never seen one of these. I don't just, I don't know. It's an urban legend like Polybius.

Yes, exactly. It's a Polybius. Does Galloping Ghost have one? I'm trying to, I don't think. I feel like they don't, which is kind of amazing. It's possible. Let's be honest, I was there last year, and like, they have, by my count, like, 17,000 arcade cabinets.

So it's like, maybe if I had camped out there and spent the night, I would have found it. Easy to miss one, yeah. I don't, strangely, I don't remember seeing it, though. I wonder if the guys at Save Point have one, Kevin. We should probably ask him about that. I was going to say, I remember Wizards Arcade in Detroit had a Hyper Neo Geo, and it was running Samurai Show on 642, and then I didn't see one again until I visited

Tokyo back in 2019 with you, Brian, and we saw a few set up. I don't think Hay had them. I think it was Hay, yeah. Running Sam Show 1. 64, 1, and 2, and Buriki 1, but not wild ambition. Buriki 1, I feel like, is the biggest use case for the hyper-neo-geo-604, strangely. Like, Mikado runs it, at least used to, all the time. It's very strange.

It's funny, because I've looked it up, and Wild Ambition is not an expensive board. If you have a Hyper Neo-Geo machine, it's like a couple hundred bucks. But I've never seen it outside of, like, some streams out of Japan. But there is a PS1 port. It's the only Hyper Neogeo game that got a home port. And as far as I can tell, it's pretty good. It might be a little slower in speed, but it has some fun little additions to it.

Like all the load screens have like this really cool pop art styling. Wow, the envision load screens are awesome. They look like they could be album covers. Yes. 100%. They are worth looking into. Find a gallery of them. It's worth like the 5, 10 minutes.

In fact, Street Fighter 6, one of the things I think the My season past can get you is a title bar for your name. That is her load screen picture, which is cute. Wow. Yeah, deep cut. Capcom really did a, I don't know who was more responsible for it, either Capcom or S&K, but like the amount of like attention to detail and love in like the deep cuts that they did for Terry and my, my especially. and Street Fighter 6 are just, like, phenomenal. Hats, hats off to whoever, like, really made sure all that happened. Because they could have really easily just thrown in me, like, okay, there's, you know,

there's Hatkin, and there's my half-fun. You know, but they really went above and beyond to make sure that S&K and its history is represented. So thank you for that. Whoever made that happen. This game, so this is sort of a retelling of the first Fatal Fury game. So accordingly, a lot of the character. characters are from the original Fatal Fury.

The arcade version had 10 characters plus two hidden ones. You could put in with the code and the PS1 port added in an additional two. So the arcade roster included Terry, Andy, Joe, and Mai, of course, Kim, Yamazaki, Billy, and Ryden. Plus two new characters, Toji Sakata, who's like an elderly Akito master with a grudge against geese. And Sugumi Sendo, who's like a high school wrestling girl. and she is so much fun to play. She's like that fast grappler archetype. Really good.

I feel like her and Riden are probably some of the best characters in this game, because Riden is shockingly strong. Who doesn't have a grudge against Geese Howard? It's true. Everyone does, except, I don't know, Yamazaki. Maybe someone's paying him to go after Geese. And then the two hidden characters are Geese himself and Shang Fei, who has like a weird stance change thing going on.

I couldn't quite figure her out. And then the home version adds in Duck King and Mr. Karate 2. Oh, man. Riyosakazaki. It's his Bariki one version. There it is again, just the sequel. Yeah. Wow.

Beriki won a version where he's like 10 years older than he was in Art of Fighting. So he's like in his 30s now. And he looks cool. He plays a little weird, but he looks cool. Again with the Bariki one, though. Yeah. S.K. really pushing that.

So it mostly plays out like a 2D game. You can use this axis shift to sort of shuffle to the left or right, sort of like a de facto lane thing. What really makes it weird as some of the other mechanics, like there's a funky combination, like push

block and adjust defend the functionality that gets expanded on in the next game in the series. If you block something just as it touches you, will cause you to take no damage whatsoever and push your opponent away. The real bout chain combos are back,

and they're really important to keep the pace up in this game, because otherwise it kind of takes forever to kill someone. It also has this heat gauge, and this is sort of like the weird mechanic in this, the meter mechanic, that apparently, according

to director Hayato Conya of City of the Wolves, was the inspiration for the rev gauge, which is kind of wild. Yeah. So the idea is this heat gauge starts at 50%. As you get hit, it drops lower down and then goes up as you attack. If you hit 100%, you get a full bar,

that'll let you do a heat blow unblockable that'll set up a free combo. Or you can do an overdrive power, which is like a very powerful super. And if you do either of these, it'll drain your bar basically to empty. If you take too many hits when the meter's drained, you're overheated and get stunned. So meter management is kind of a factor in here. And honestly, it's kind of hard to get a full bar against someone who really has figured out what they're doing with their character and has a good offense going. Not many people seem to have played this game. It doesn't really seem to be well remembered.

But now that PS1 emulation is so good, I mean, there's a Mr. Corpore. That's how I was bringing it around. So I definitely encourage you to check it out with. an open mind. Like, it's a very of its time fighting game, but I don't think it's too bad. And maybe one day Hyper NeoGeo-604 emulation will be in, like, a good state.

I think there are some people working on it, but it's just kind of like slow progress. It's probably not one of the more popular things that people are kicking down the door to, uh, to create and improve. Every so many months, I see someone has updated the, uh, the main driver for Hyper NeoGeo. So someone is working on it

And probably their sole motivation is Breaky one, I'm sure of that. Or the racing games. Or that, like, the shooter game. I forget what it's called off the top of the head. Oh, yeah, there was a shooter on there. But here, we'll move on to the game. and everybody's really excited for

Garo Mark of the Wolves final game in the series until the one coming out this year released for the Neo Geo November 1999. Very much inspired by Street Fighter 3, I suspect, in terms of like the animation and the art style

and the mechanics and the roster. I would say it's much better than new generation or double impact. When I would show new players this game at locals and stuff, I'd kind of like, especially the kind of people who were like wary of who thought like K-O-F was like too complicated or too, too, too obtuse. I was like, well,

Grow is nice because it's, I always explained to them as like, it's the middle ground in terms of like neutral and mechanics between a third strike and then like a dyed in the wool, K-O-F. Like, like you still have some of the movement mechanics that are in K-O-F, like hops and stuff like that, but you don't have rolls. You don't have super jumps, you know, you, you know, It's one v1 instead of, you know, 3V3. You can kind of play the neutral similar to like you would play a streetfighter. So it's a great, it truly is like a great middle ground game if you want to break somebody into either, you know, a Capcom or, you know, or an S&K fighting game. Yeah, this feels like the most street fighter of all of these games.

And I think it's because they took out the lane system entirely and it has a more like standard meter system. and, like, you have the universal overheads, like, in Street Fighter 3. I have a universal anti-ear that's kind of new. Yeah, it's got, it's still got, like, fatal furiesms, like, you know, Just Defend. And then, of course, you know, there's the top system, which, you know, Kevin, if you want to go over that really quick. Sorry, I can't realize I'm cutting you, jumping the gun there. Yeah, so the Just Defends, in this case, if you block an attack right before it hits, you gain a bit of life back and reduce your block stud. And you could also guard cancel out of this if you either input the motion for your special move before blocking or if you're really, really fast, you can do it while you're in the middle of the animation.

Can I emphasize just the fact that just offend, again, this is going back to me in 1999, just offend to me made perfect sense. Like, oh, if I block it just the right time, I will literally just defend this move and I get a benefit. Whereas parrying was like, okay, push the joystick into the attack. And if you, if you screw this up, then you're eating, you're eating everything. So good luck, kid. Like, oh, Christ. So, like, I got way better at Just Offends than Perry's. I got way better Just Offends than Perry's.

Always. Well, because I mean, with one, like, you're probably, well, depending, like, you might just get a regular guard if your timing's off, right? But, like, Perry is sort of an all or nothing situation. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Pulling back the curtain a little bit on Just Defend, the window to get a Just Defend is actually. actually like pretty pretty wide it's uh it's like seven or eight frames depending on what you're doing

it's seven frames on the ground and then nine frames in the air which you know if you're a competitive player seven frames is in eternity so yeah and as you said like worst case scenario um if you miss your just defend window then you just it's just a regular guard the neat thing is they bounce it out by having a 10 frame cool down between just defend attempts so like if someone's giving you a lot of jab pressure and like you kind of like you just defend like say like the first one and then the second one but then the third one is a regular guard you're probably not going to be outside that 10 frame window to just you just defend anything after that it's it's a neat way that they they kept it balanced and like this game has very high damage so just defends are

a very good way to sort of try and keep the match a lot a lot of characters in this game are two touches a lot of characters in this game are two touches even without maximum resource That brings us to the top gauge, the TOP. So you get to designate a chunk of your life bar as top mode, where character will do more damage than usual. You have access to an additional top attack by pressing both of the heavy buttons together. Most of them are awful, but a few of them are pretty good. Yeah. And the damage boost, like...

It's 25%. Yeah, 25% can factor into a lot of your game plan. Some characters really like having that up front and using... that to sort of build an early lead. If you're feeling like your hot stuff, you can put it later in your life bar and use it for a comeback. There's also a health region factors to it. And the health region is pretty significant. Like, like Final Fantasy white may just wish that their region was that was that affected because it, like, if you don't, if your opponent's in top and you don't start pressuring them, like they're going to get their life back.

pretty quickly. It won't go past where, you know, top kind of ends, but like, it's still pretty significant. It's a great way to turtle. Yeah. You okay, Diamond? I just, I'm waiting because I just, I need to impart this, just in case someone out there is laughing hysterically. So, top is not a sex thing here, okay? Top, it's an acronym. I don't see everyone know that top is an acronym for tactical offense position. Yes. So you can stop giggling right now.

We talk about topping each other in your top mode and your top. It's all an acronym. Don't worry about it. Relax. I was so tired. I was thinking of Top, man. No. Well, that's another joke, but yes.

It's getting renamed in City to SPG and I do not remember for the life of me what it is and I don't care to learn it. I will continue to call a top for the remainder of my commentary career. They renamed Top for, what? Yeah, it's like SPG, something like, special something gear or whatever. I think people were making too many top jokes. So you just leaned

into it. You just justified their choice. Is there such a thing as too many top jokes? I don't think so. I mean, yeah. Well, there is that one Hotaru super in this game. That's true.

That's true. She does. She talked to. I guess it's worth noting that the home version and home versions also let you adjust to how big the top meter is and if it's smaller, you get...

You get up to 75% damage increase, but you might risk the chance of just blowing right past it. So that's not in the arcade, but it is something to keep in mind. It's an incredible risk-reward scenario, I got to say. It's just like, okay, I am so positive. I'm going to steamroll you in the first second of this game.

I'm going to put my top meter all the way in front, And as soon as it says, go, I'm just going to crush you. I've done that with the wrestling character, T-Zoc. I've done that and done his 360 command grab and did close to 50% off of that. It's a good feeling when you're on the side that's doing the damage. Yeah. Unfortunately, like Kevin said, a lot of the moves that are bestowed on a character when they are in top mode are not great. You mostly use top mode more for, like, the extra damage and the health region and that sort of thing.

A few characters have really good ones like Kane. Like, his is really good. And, yeah, I will go to my grave calling him Kane and not Kine. I don't care what S&K says. Please, please, Kevin, put some respect on his name. It is Kane R. Heinlein, because I guess somewhat S&K, maybe after they saw Starship Troopers, like, hey, that's a great name. It is a pretty good day I'm not going to lie

It's good Just a couple other mechanical things Before we get into the actual Like plot line here So I guess the guard cancels I forgot to mention this earlier But these got introduced in The Real Bout games as break shots

Which is something you could use some of your meter To do like a special move And here they don't take meter You just have to Time it really well During a Just Defend And this is a four button game I should also make that note

But they went back to the well of, like, Fatal Fury 2 and special. Well, again, they took out, they took out of the lanes. You know, they've gone from three to two to three to nothing. It's like, okay, well, then we have four buttons again. So two punches and two kicks, like, God intended. And they rework the super meter. It no longer drains out once it fills up. You just have, like, two bars.

First bar lets you do an S power, which is like a level one super. And a P power, you can do a level two. There's three characters who have hidden third supers that you need to use a P-power stocked to actually pull them off. Thank you. And, yeah, I guess that brings us to the actual, like, setting and everything. So this is like... Characters, yes, let's talk characters, please. And the characters.

So this is 10 years after Real Bout Fatal Fury took place. So it takes place around 2006. That's canon. There's no floating timeline in Fatal Fury. That's why the new one takes place in 08. This takes place in a newly developed part of Southtown called Second South. And accordingly, most of the roster is new. There's only one returning character.

and that's Terry Bogart, which, you know, with a very different look. Yes. Very different. He looks like a man in his mid-30s who has been living rough. He no longer has his hat. He no longer has his hat, but he has a cool jacket. He does. He has the bomber jacket.

And a haircut. Yes, and a haircut. He's got the trunk's haircut. Yeah. As was the style at the time. As was the style at the time, yes. Well, like he's, there's also, there's a lot of protegees for legacy characters. So if you're like me and you really like playing Andy Bogart and my, you've had options.

They're very different options, though. Yes. So you have two central protagonists, according to S&K staff who worked on this game. But I feel like only one is really recognized, and that's Rock Howard, Geese's son, who's now like a teenager. He has like a hybrid fighting style between Rock or between Terry and Geese. and the other central hero figure is Marco Rodriguez, the student of Rio Sakazaki, Kokoagin Master in Trading,

localized with the unfortunate name of Kushnud Butt. Oh, that's who, that's, you were saying Marco, and I was like, what the heck, you mean butt? You mean what? My buddy who used to run house sessions back in the day, he was so mad about this. He's like, look, they finally put a brother in a fighting game who's not like a stereotype or a boxer or whatever,

and they give him the name, but I am not accepting that. We're only playing the Japanese release in this house. It's Marco. Thankfully, thankfully they have reneged on this, and now I believe City of the Wolves and any other post games just call him Marco Rodriguez, right?

Yes. What was, I mean, is there an answer? I heard that maybe, I have looked. I've seen theories that it's like they were trying to like either pay homage to someone, who is a real person or like avoid referencing a real Marco Rodriguez

but there are better ways they could have done that nothing definitive but trust me that this is like this is like the Garo Mark of the Wolf's White Whale like why why did they do that now me personally I wish when they had canonized

them that they had split the difference and call him like Marco Cushnot or something you know just like split the difference I'm a big I'm a big fan of when they do that like they do with them Torneco and Dragon Quest 4. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he's like Brazilian, so it's even stranger because Kushnude Butt does not read

to me as like a Brazilian name. Not all, absolutely not. Where does Kushud? I mean, obviously, butt is butt, but where is Kushin from? I don't even know. Is that? I wanted to say I looked it up a while ago. I feel like it was like Central Asia,

but I'm not positive off the top of my head. So I'll hear looking that up. A couple of the other new characters, we have Hokitomai. who is Andy's protégé, he plays a little bit like Andy and very little bit like Vai. And given, I got to say, given this sort of legacy and the fact that we have other people on the roster who are clearly children of older characters, I was assumed that

Hoke Tomarro was supposed to be Andy and Mai's child, especially because on the stage, you know, the stage where you fight with him, it's like a Times Square-style stage. And there's a, there's like a banner in the background. With Andy and Mai, like holding hands. And I like to think, and I like to think Mai took that out. Mai paid for that banner? I think, I think Mai would have paid for that banner. Andy seems too, like, reserved to have done it, but my absolutely would have been like, look at this.

But yes, Kevin, in all... This could be us, but you're playing. In all something of material, and all, you know, Japanese, English, whatever you look up, it's very clear that Hok Tomarro is a protege, he's not an actual child of those two. So he just studied with them and learned their martial arts. but he is not blood relations. No. Yeah.

Who are blood relations, we have Jehoun and Dong Juan, who are Kim's sons. They showed up in some of his endings in the earlier Fatal Fury games, and here they are as a grown teens. I do like the canon that the mother and two children watching Kim in Fatal Fury 2 are supposed to be his wife and kids, even though one of them is wearing a dress, I just figure, you know, maybe one of them went through a time where they wore dresses. It's fine. You know, it's okay.

Dong Juan has like a, he seems like he's very fashionable. I could see him doing that. Yeah, he's, he's like the, like the cocky stereotype and like the serious stereotype. Yeah, the studious one. Yeah, S&K insists that Jehoun is supposed to be really popular and everybody likes him and I, I don't know, he seems too stuck up. He's not stuck, he's just, he's serious about his training and, you know, but he's not stuck up. He's not snooty about it. He's just no fun.

Yeah, you just kind of have to remind him to, like, loosen up a little bit. And then meanwhile, like, Dong just, like, has, like, the never-ending grin on his face. Yeah, he's having a great time. He has a taunt where he just waggles his foot at you and just like, okay. I do love that they, even though they both clearly are doing Taekwondo, they have different elemental powers. Yes. Like, one uses fire and one uses electricity. And do they both have a, there's a wind pose where Kim just appears?

Is that for both them or just don't? I know Dong does, where he's, like, glaring at him. Yeah. Kim disappears, and you're like, you know, I feel like, you know, in a better world, we would have gotten a Mark of the Wolf's tool where, like, old Kim showed up. Because, like, that one frame of old Kim was like, oh, hell. Oh, he's back. Oh, we messed up.

We do get Blue Mary's cousin, Kevin Ryan, who is a war criminal. Yeah. He's actually a cop, but, you know, if you've played this game, he's a war criminal. I have never seen such a blessed character in a fighting game. He's, he just, I'll put it through this way. He has everything but a fireball. He has a infinite block string that is really easy to do in a game that has no push block or like, you know, blowback or anything like that. It's, it's horrible.

It gets better because he also can build meter really fast at a game where everyone else builds meter kind of slowly. You give him like five seconds. he's got two super levels. He doesn't even need five seconds. It's incredible. He needs like one and a half and he's there. There's a few other characters that can build meter pretty fast, but not to the degree that Kevin can do it.

And like, I don't know what S&K's excuse is for this because, you know, Fatal Fury 3, they have the disastrous earthquake. And in this game, they just, just getting it out the door.

I presume because they were in financial straits. He was going to be worse, too, because they were going to, he was going to have like a knife mechanic that would just make him even better. Like, that didn't make it to the final, like, the game. It's like, thank God, because that

would have been a broken game at that point. Sorry. I'm sorry. A-Cab includes Kevin Rayne. It's true. We have a assassin Gato, who's looking for his dad to kill him. Very cool, like, martial, like, kung fu character. Yeah, he's more the arrogant kung fu character as opposed to, like, you know, Shang Faye's, like, kind of

like, loud, goofy. Yeah. He's a really cool character. Then you have his estranged sister, Hotaru, who is the, uh, sort of like, I don't know, she's the, The innocent girl martial arts stereotype. Sort of the quiet, peaceful one, the one who, like, you know, I feel like in a different century, she'd be like Nakoruru, like she'd probably live among, like, the ferrets and like the eagles or whatever. She has that pet.

She has her pet ferret. Yeah. That's true. Yeah, she's very much like the soft style, like more like a Tai Chi kind of kung fu versus like Gato's, like kind of like hard, like hitting like North style. So it's a good, and their siblings. So it's cool. Yeah. But then she has a super where she lands on top of you.

and basically, you know, has a quick, has a quick one. Just, oh. Yes. And I never hear the end of it. I never hear the end of it as a hotel room, maine. I never hear the end of it. Well, you know, S and K, they knew what they were getting into, I think. Because they kind of did the same thing with Sheiki when she showed up in SVC chaos.

Yeah, that's true. Sheik is much more blatant about it. Yeah. It's taking over the my role. We have Bijunet or Bonjunet. She's the, she's the, she's the, sexy lady who's a, like a pirate, literal pirate, as a ship, has a crew, where's a pirate flag?

The hard-drinking, hard-fighting pirate captain with a submarine. And, yeah, I feel like, I don't know, speaking personally, like, this was the immediate standout character for me, more than rock, you know, I think we all, you know, me and my friends, we played, you know, we got this cartridge as we could, we played this game a lot, but I feel like we all, I mean, like, oh, BGene is the one. BGene is the one. At my locals, BGNA was the character that, like, drew, like, turned a lot of heads and, like, attracted people to play.

Like, I'd say, like, at least 50% of, like, people of, like, the people that I introduced this game to were, like, they started with BGNA and stuck with her. Almost all of them started with BGNA, and then some moved up, but most stayed on, on Jenae. And that was also, like, the fact of what attracted them to, like, K-Weth. 15 as well. Yeah. And it's probably going to be their excuse to play city.

And we talk about hidden supers. B. Jenae. Yes, the chuncla. B. Jenae has a hidden super in this game that can only be executed on block, right? You have to just defend and use this as a guard cancel. You have to block and guard cancel and do a super motion. And never in my life have I pulled it off without like, you know, somehow say, like an emulator, like saving the input or something. But the animation is she takes up her shoe and just beats you over the head with her shoe.

No, no, no, no, not her shoe. Her high heel. Yes, high heel. High heel. Because that's a much more deadly shoe. That's true. Yeah, she's really great. Not quite as deadly as the chancla, but close enough.

You know, if maybe they'll save, maybe they're saving that for the next game. All, they'll, all costume. They'll bring us a Latina princess who has the chancla. So, rounding out the roster, we have a serial killer named Freeman, who Kevin Ryan is hunting down. He looks a lot cooler than he has actually fun to play. Unfortunately, he's an incomplete character, so he's dead last on the tier list. Yeah, I've never seen a soul play him, I don't say. I know what person he does.

Who? There's a guy at our local who's like a diehard Freeman believer who tries his absolute hardest. I've seen the Garrow community, the online community, there's like two guys who will sometimes play Freeman in brackets just to kind of flex. And they do a pretty good job of it. But, yeah, he, unfortunately, he's literally incomplete character. He's missing a few things that, you know, should be standard to any Garrow character. For me, for me personally, I put Freeman in the same box as Remy from Street Fighter 3. And just like, these guys want to beat Ioriogami so bad.

And I do not, I do not fuck with them. I'm sorry. No. My heart belongs to Yori. You guys, you know, you can have like a shag off somewhere with your, with your hair in front of your face and your sloppy clothes. I don't care about you. Go away. Yeah, yeah.

And then here's my character who I really liked in this game, and he sucks terribly, is T-Zoc, also known as Griffin Mask, depending on your region. He's a pro wrestler. He's a face. He's got, like, the Griffin mask going on. He fights for the children. He poses for the children. He just does not use the systems in this game very well. And also, there's some bugs with how grabs work, which is really bad because he's a grappler.

Yeah. My finest moment. I'm sorry, just I don't remember we did. It is funny that in a game where we have Marco Rodriguez, regular human name, and Kushnud, but, absurd, never should have been applied localization name. You get another character that basically is two cool god-name, like Tezuck is cool, and Griffin Mask is cool. They're both cool. How do they get two good ones on one character and one terrible one on another character? Wasn't there a thing where they thought that he was king of dinosaur?

and K-O-F-14. He is, King of Dinos. There are a lot of similarities. Is that, like, official? If you look at the movesets, you can see a lot of similarities between King of Dinosaur and T-Zoc-Griffon-Mask. King of Dinosk. King of Dinosk, but he's in his heel phase.

I see. Yeah. Yes. Like, so, yeah, T-Zoc is like the face, and then King of Dinosaurs is the heel. Okay, okay. But it's the same man. My finest moment in this game, other than, like, I got seventh place at combo breaker, which is pretty cool.

But my other favorite moment in this game, possibly my most favorite, was my first trip to Japan back in 2005. I stopped in at an arcade in, I think it was Kyoto, and I was playing this game with Teazok, and someone sat down and challenged me, and I beat their ass so bad with this character that they got up and stomped off. And I'm like, wow, that's the only time this ever happened in any of my Japan trips that I've beaten someone local in this, in one of these games. He was such a low tier. He's like bottom five. And listeners, listeners, that man was Shigero Miyamoto. Oh, no. And then finally, there's two bosses.

You can play them freely on the home version, or you can put in a button code on the arcade game. And that's the final boss, Kane, who is Geese's brother-in-law. And his bodyguard, Grant, who is dying of some injury. He had a, he, he, he, he, it's a bullet wound that the bullet is like super close to us, very, very Iron Man-esque. So he basically fights as like every day is going to be his last. And it is because he dies in the ending of the game. He canonically dies in every ending in the game. Can we talk about Kane's shrine?

He built a shrine to his dead sister. The last stage, the last stage you fight Kane and it's like this open plaza and it's just almost like a, like an archeryon, there's a giant picture. inside of a blonde lady and just like it's yeah yeah does the game explain this or did i read this somewhere in a magazine i don't know if i i don't know if it's necessarily a shrine i think it might just be like the family home and then there's like just a big portrait of you know you know his his wife rock's mother um well his sister rocks mother yeah oh yeah yeah he and sister in rocks ending uh he he tells him that his mother is still alive and that he can arrange to like have the two of them meet, which, wow, that has to suck for her to know that her kid was adopted

by a hobo when she reasonably should have been the next in line. Yeah, as he was falling, geese never thought, you know, like, maybe her. Just like, just let the hobo or Andy do it. Let Andy do it, you know, not the hobo. The love of God, not the hobo. And not my wife either. Okay, sure. That's why he came back as nightmare geese because Terry was the one who got him.

Yeah, he has this whole weird plot where he wants Second South to secede from the United States, but he needs Rock's family connections to make this happen. And for the life of me, I'm not really, like, sure how this, like, scheme plays out, possibly because the sequel didn't come out like it was supposed to. But I guess maybe we'll see what's going on there. Yeah, I feel like Mark of the Wolves is a fantastic artistic achievement. it's a very good video game. It's full of wonderful reasons to play it again and again. But I feel like in general, the character backgrounds and the story stuff is pretty... It's not there.

It's thin. Yeah. Pretty like... But again, if it's late 1999, S&K is like, how many more months do we have before, like, our lease runs out? Like, they're in trouble. It's a small roster of characters, which is, you know, typical for Fatal Fury. but like literally like no one in that roster really matters except for rock and cane like yeah grant is like you know kind of like the the mini boss but you know he's he's not terribly important

he's basically just cane's bodyguard he you know again he canonically dies and terry he's there but he's kind of hitting his midlife crisis you know like i mean his whole life has been a crisis but you know now he's in his midlife crisis and you know and he's just like he's reflecting like, you know, what have I done for South Town? What was the point of any of it if we are still here doing this, doing the stuff that we're doing? It's really all just about rock and like literally kind of nobody else matters. The story is really thin. That being said, you know, as Diamond said, it's an absolutely beautiful game, beautifully animated,

like just a real like capstone for like everything S&K has learned in terms of like Sprite work and all that stuff. I started on Gato and I actually switched to Hotaru simply because I just loved seeing her animations like in her like her wind pose where she like twirls around on one foot. It's so smooth. There's so many frames of animation. The backgrounds are just absolutely gorgeous, highly detailed. So many like little things like like on Gatto stage. If rock wins, you know, he does his typical jacket throw off. But Gato stage takes place in a in a running stream of water.

the jacket will fall eventually drift down and land on the ground but if you're in gato stage it lands on the water and drifts away with the water and then he inexplicably has it back in the next round but it's just to run after it yeah same that terry runs after his hat uh the first uh every stage every round the stage changes some stages is really significant in other stages and you know it's a little more minor uh but like in terry stage like it's a total scene show change going from round one to round two to round three. And in round one, a whole ass sunrise is animated. You know, it takes about 20 seconds to play on.

It's just like stuff like this. It's like, you didn't have to do this, but you did. And the game is absolutely beautiful for it. And a lot of the stages have like special little animations that'll play out of one of the characters down to a taunt, which is really cool. There's a lot going on the background of Jayhoun's stage. And also when you, uh, when you, uh, when you, you win around, you get access to like two special extra taunts that are usually like really

cute animations, uh, like Hotaru calling her a ferret down to like drop on her opponent and runoff or, uh, T-Zoc doing some weird wrestling poses. Oh, Tzac. Or cutting a promo. Yeah. It's, it's, this game had a lot of work put into it. Uh, this, and I think because it, it did get a home port and it did come out in North America, too, to the Dreamcast.

of all systems. It's not a great port, but the fact that it had a port was better than nothing. Interestingly, I feel this, weirdly enough, this is like the way I played this game the most, because Kevin our crew, uh, back in

Michigan, I remember being in a friend's basement playing so much of this port of the game. Uh, so yeah, it's like, it's strangely my memory is most associated to that Dreamcast port. It's fairly straight, right? Because a lot of the Neo-Geo

ports that came to Dreamcast were like tweaked a little bit. Like they would have either they do the 3D background thing or they would add like extra like, you know, strikers or whatever or some kind of like, you know. This is just straight forward, right? Yeah. Is it, I think it's also on the PS2, but it's horrible on that one. Yes. Came out on PS2.

Well, it's not awful on PS2. That came out in 2005 when S&K was putting out all of their like NeoGeo reissues, like the Fatal Fury collections and all that fun stuff. So that's only in Japan. That version did get ported to the Xbox 360 in 2009, which added some online play, which I guess technically the Japanese PS2 one had to, but it's not like we could use it. Most recently it came out to Steam and to PS4 by Code Mystics, which has really, really, really good rollback net code. Absolutely.

It came out in 2016. Oh, it's also on arcade archives, like all of these other NeoGeo games were. So this is probably the most accessible of all of these kids now. Extremely accessible, both in terms of being able to play it, but also, like, again, that transition between, like, either going from S&K to Capcom or vice versa. The Dreamcast version has an arranged soundtrack, too, which is pretty nice to hear. Like, like, Rock's theme, like, really, is it?

Rock has a really good theme. Just ripped off completely from a actual song. Yes, I was like, should I mention that? like, would that get us in trouble? But yes, there's a part of Rock's theme that's just a straight rip off of children, which is a song you hear on Spotify. But it sounds really good. It sounds great on its own, but the arranged version is even better.

Yeah, that is true. It did have an arranged mode. I don't think we used it very much when we were playing it. Yeah, I don't think so either. That was an option. Also, like, I'll go ahead. Some, I would just point, we talked about the characters and their legacies, if you will. Some of these characters did eventually show up.

think, what, K-OF 2003? Yes. I remember TZoc showed up at O3. Gato. Gato's in 11. Terry, Terry changed from regular Kof-Terry to sort of, you know, Gero Terry. Yeah, for O3 and 11. Yeah, he's kind of been Gero-Terry since with, like, the trunk's hair and the brown

bomber jacket. Yeah, they rolled it back for, like, KOF 12 and 13 because they were playing it extremely safe with everything on those games. But, like, yeah, since then. I would guess a large part of that reasoning was just, hey, those sprites we made for Mark of the Wolves was really great. We're not going to make into the Fatal Fury game. Let's use them in K-O-F, you know, and just pick, I guess, pick our favorite characters, you know. And I think as sprites go, like, Gato and TZoc are really cool looking sprites.

So, you know. Like, even amongst that good cast, like, if you look at K-O-F, like, who can we plug into K-O-F here? Well, we already have Kim, so we don't have Kim's sons. But, yeah, giant wrestle with a bird mask, sure. Badass Kung Fu guy with his clothes, like, flop when it is his moves. Yeah, yeah, sure. Do that. Yeah.

Eventually, Rock shows up in K-O-F, too. First, it's like a little kid and then as an actual, like, playable teenage character. You know, timelines don't matter in K-O-F, so he's whatever age they need him to be. Especially now that time travel is on the table for K-O-F. Yeah. Um, I don't know if we have too much else to say about Mark of the Wolves, but I do want to touch on the unreleased sequel for the NeoGeo that never came out If we're all good.

Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. So this was in development at S&K, never finished before they went bankrupt. They did not pick it back up during the S&K Playmore era in the early 2000s before they dropped the NeoGeo hardware entirely in 2004. Falcun, one of S&K's artist, he had a 2005 interview where he said that it was about 70% of the way to being finished when it was canned. S&K was very interested in bringing this back in like, finishing it. In 2006, there was an interview with a staff who really talked about how they want to do it with modern high-resolution graphics, but they didn't really, it wasn't like a high priority. It was sort of backburnered. And it wasn't until Evo 2022, where they finally

announced, yes, we're finally making this game in the City of the Wolves. Back in 2016, S&K showed off some of the character sprites that they developed for it. And a Japanese collector, was on Twitter call with the username 2021K Duck. I don't know if he's even still on there. But he got a hold of some development disks for this and released like animation frames, alternate colors and other graphical assets that were completed along with like character names. This was back in like 2022.

This was a huge drop when this happened. This, this, you know, this is like, you know, the S&K equivalent of like finding like the Dead Sea Scrolls or something, you know. Same guy also. found, like, S&K versus Capcom 2 for the NeoGeo Pocket and, like, was releasing bits of that as well. So he hit the mother load, really. So everyone had some new moves, and there were also a couple new characters.

The only one that really seemed to have a name of any note was Joe's protege, who he didn't have one in Bark of the Wolves, and that was a woman named Kouan, who was a concept. They seem to have reworked that for City of the Wolves. They have a character named Precha, who is now Joe's. protege. But in their Evo 2024 panel about the game, they talked about how Kuan still exists in the Fatal Fury canon. They're like,

she's a separate character, so I don't know, maybe they'll put her in as a DLC or something sometime. I just can't get over that, you know, if we talk about the new moves, I can't get over the fact that Terry has a 45 degree angle, rising tackle, I think he has like an air rising

tackle too. It's just it's like, you look at some of the stuff that these characters, I was like, man, this would have been a goofy game. And I mean that in a good way if it had had come out. And I guess technically it is now, but it's not, you know, they dialed back some of the, the craziness. They did put some of these moves in City of the Wolves. I did see Terry has his 45 degree rising tackle in it. Yes, you does have that. Hey. This was always something I was very interested in, like,

what, what happened to this and how far long it got. It's been very nice to see all this information eventually drop about it. It is really, it is, it is honestly super cool that, you know, we, we got that, you know. Yeah. And, you know, before we wrap entirely, I want to point out Garo Memory of Stray Wolves, which is like this 20-minute motion comic produced for Fatal Fury's 15th anniversary box set. So it had like CDs of the full series of OSTs, a DVD that had this video, originally showed off at the 2006 Tokyo Game.

show. So it's set during the events of Mark of the Wolves and recaps the events of the Canon Fatal Fury games as framed by like Terry telling Rock about these things at the Pow Pow Cafe. And then the perspective then shifts over to Rock near the end of

the game, Mark of the Wolves, and his own thoughts about like his father, geese. So there's cameo appearances by Richard Meyer, Duck King, and Blue Mary. They all have updated appearances to reflect the fact it's been 10 years. and it ends like very shortly after Rock's ending in Mark of the Wolves

as Terry and Blue Mary sort of talking about, you know, rock leaving with Kane and Terry's viewpoint on all this. So it's on YouTube. You can look it up. If you're a lore nerd, you probably get a lot out of it. Just be clear. Is this at the Pow Pow Cafe one or two? Ooh, good question.

I'm not sure that they specify. It's been years. It could be three. Yeah. Or the Pow Pow Pow Roobout. I'm waiting for Pow Pow HD director's cut

Oh man But I think it is worth looking into this Because like like as we said like Giro is like Mark of the Wolves is so thin On lore that like memory of stray wolves gives it some much needed like filler And I don't mean feel it because it's quality It's like flushing it out It's flushing it it gives it the flushing out that it that it kind of really needs You know even if again they're still hovering specifically on just like

rock. But it, like, you know, Mark of the Wolf needs whatever it can get. So that brings us to our wrap-up, you know. How does everyone feel about these games? What are your final thoughts about Fatal Fury and these particular line of games that we chatted about? We'll start with Brian, because you're top of the picture for me here. Sure. I think I mentioned in our first episode that my big takeaway,

especially from the earlier ones, was just the kind of world building, the really interesting world building in the scope of a fighting game story that those games did and I think ultimately they continued that for the most part. We talked about a few which were pretty story light

but like this section of games that we covered today I feel like finally ended up being more than that. It was like okay it's to me anyway really sort of hard to recommend some of those other ones because they're interesting curios but ultimately they're not

really that fun in your hands and I think only with like the real bouts do we really get into games that are like yeah these are great games mechanically real bouts and garro of course it's like they're really great games to play mechanically they rival anything else you could have played at the time

so it like finally you know closed its circle on being like a complete fighting game series but for me I think the thing that sticks with me is just how cool the story is like it's not as outlandish as maybe some fighting games are

but just to have it be so localized and, like, what great villains they created and, you know, geese and Yamazaki and whatnot are, I think that's, it's biggest selling point. Diamond, go ahead. I mean, it's hard to talk about Fidofir without sort of getting lost in the KOFness because essentially, essentially Fatal Fure gave us King of Fighters. Like, you can't, you can't ignore that branching path. and I feel like once K-O-F took off, the Fatal Fury series just kind of fell into the background. And I was aware of these games. I'd see them sometimes,

but it was still like the K-O-F was the annual event. Like, oh, man, new K-O-F, what's happening? And Fidel Ferry just for a couple years there, I was like, you know, like I said, I can never remember which one is the real bout. It's real-bought, and then RealBaut's special than Re-Baut. Like, I always forget because at that point, I was like, I was kind of checked out.

But, you know, K-F-96, K-Kept-97, K-K-K-N-98. I know where those are those. I know the order. It's easy to remember. But Mark are the Wolves, I would say Mark of the Wolves and Last Play 2 were like the two sort of like, those are like the sendoff Neo Geo games in my head. I mean, K.F 2000 is good too, but like Last Blade 2 and Mark of the Wolves are just kind of like, oh my God, look at these games. Look at the, look at the talent they had and, you know, how we basically, we kind of got robbed. We kind of got robbed by their financial situation.

You know, they should have just kept going, but they couldn't, unfortunately. unfortunately. But I think it's great. I think it's great that, you know, S&K is essentially back and I'm really happy that we're getting a new Fatal Fury game for so many years. I'm very curious, you know, I know they already announced some kind of art of fighting game. I'm curious what the hell that's going to be. You know, how do you keep these series going? Because there is, yeah. We still have new KOF. Now we've got a new Fidel Fury. We might get a new art of fighting. I'd love to see what happens with all these and how it progresses because it's great. They do have this long. legacy, they have a ton of characters that they could bring back. And I feel like, all these games, of course, have a long history now. Like, you could make, if you made Street Fighter 6 and you brought back a weird character, oh yeah, this guy, he was in the background, a Street Fighter 1. It's like, okay, that's cool. But in the case of Fitifur, you actually have these characters who have, like, real movesets. And, you know, we talked to this last time, like, first and last names and personalities. And I feel like there is more, there's more

depth there, and it's more, I get more appreciative when I see hints of old characters coming back on, you know, Kevin, you mentioned the fact that apparently they were going to have a character based on Joe, but now they have Precha, but like, no, no, don't worry about Pre. That's the other character. Might come back still, okay, I believe you. I honestly believe you. You might do that, you know? Yeah.

Maybe, maybe let's do Hua Jai again, and you'll put Preachia with a different head. Like, oh, that's Kwan, yeah, new head. But if you don't, I, I'm still impressed. We'll see Go ahead We'll see Kuan and City of the Wolf special You know

In like Two come before special Or a special come before two I don't I don't know Well we'll find out like 2028 or whenever That happens I mean Brian

Basically what Brian said Is like the More or less the exact same thing That I was going to say It had a rocky start In terms of like Being a video game But like it's really cool

because it's it's a gritty crime fighting like story like it's very of its era where it was like you know it's just gritty and martial arts and like organized crime and all that stuff it's very popular at this time you know it took a couple of games for it to hit it to really kind of as Brian said close that circle um and unfortunately it's like just as that circle closed like diamond said you know the economy kind of put a halt to fatal theories um you know momentum it kind of like obligated S&K to focus on only one thing, which was K-O-F, but without Fatal Fury, they probably wouldn't be K-O-F. So like, but like now we have another circle that's kind of closing on stuff because now we're

back here in 2025 where we're going to get a new Fatal Fury game in the future is looking really good for, for at least City of the Wolves. S&K is absolutely gunning to make this game successful. They have put a lot of effort into the creation of the game, the advertising of the game. We got Ronaldo to sign off as, you know, to sign off on this game, which is the craziest, you know, endorsement that I've ever seen. That's a Saudi money right there. Yeah. Well, speaking of, it was announced this morning that City of the Wolves is going to be one of the games.

at the East Sports World Cup in Riyadh in summer 2025, to my knowledge, K-OF-15 was not in that. The only fighting game so far that's ever been in the East Sports World Cup is Street Fighter 6, you know, because Capcom's got Capcom money. So to see... And the Saudis are also, you know, invested in Capcom as well. Yes. So to see City of the Wolves make it into the East Burles World Cup, its first year, you know, things are looking really, really good.

And I hope that, you know, S&K, the City of the Wolf is able to ride that wave. I hope that S&K is able to ride that wave because they got a lot of big projects in the works. I really just kind of want them to make, really make their comeback to where they, you know, the art of fighting. There's also the Samurai Showdown, RPG, you know, like KW15 is not that old of a game. It's only three years old. It's got, you know, another two years left in it, you know, like this really could be S&K's comeback. And I really hope that they're able to pull it off. you know, best of luck to those guys.

Mm-hmm. My feeling is that, like, all of the games we've talked about are pretty interesting. You know, Mark of the Wolves, very playable. The Real Bouts are very playable today. Even weirder stuff like Fatal Fury 3 and Wild Ambition, dominated mind. They're interesting. They're worth checking out if you like fighting games. For me, Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting, all these things,

they were great as sort of a feeder system into the King of Fighters, and they made those crossovers feel them a little more special because you had all these characters from these other series and they're constantly introducing new cast members and those characters are showing up in K-O-F and, oh, hey, that's cool. That really reflects that K-O-F supposed to be a crossover. And without Fatal Fury the past 20-odd years,

that has really worked against K-O-F. I feel like it's gotten a little, not quite stale, but it hasn't quite felt the same. It hasn't had quite the same celebratory. atmosphere to it. So I'm really excited that Fatal Fury is picking back up, and these other franchises are getting another look and another push. Because I think whenever they do finally come back around K-OF-16, they can really take

advantage of all of this work that they've put forth and really make it something special again. And, you know, even outside of K-O-F, again, these games are all great. Fatal Fury is super cool, super interesting plot lines for a fighting game. And, yeah, play it's the most movie worthy out of, uh, as in K's, uh, franchises. Which of course was why we got a K-O-F movie and we don't speak of that. Or its appearances by Terry and I. Yeah.

We'll save that for another podcast. Yeah. So this has been a Retronauts episode where a Patreon-supported show. You can support us at patreon.com slash retronauts at a $3 level. You can get each episode one week early, higher bit rate. Very nice audio quality there. If you follow us at the $5 level, you also get access to our Friday bonus episodes. We do a couple times a month.

Diamond, you write weekly columns that people can check out. And there's a, it's also a monthly community podcast that you often do as well. We also have a Retronauts Discord server, which is always a lot of fun and a good chatter in there. So thank you very much for supporting us. If you already do, and if not, please consider it. And we'll go through everyone's plugs here. Will, where can folks find you? You can find me on Twitch.tv slash Bulletwill, where I do a lot of retro games,

but I will be obviously playing a lot of Garrow in the lead-up to city. And then once City drops, I'll be playing a lot of City of the Wolves. Hopefully you'll see me in some commentary spots at major events. And then if you just want to see pictures of my cats or hear me ramble about, you know, all these games I love, you can find me on Blue Sky, also as Super Bullet Will. Diamond, how about you? Well, you can find me on the internet by looking for Fight Club, F-E-I-T, my last name, C-L-U-B, English word you know. I have website, FightClub. dot me, ME, or the various social services, social services? Social networks. Sorry. No, do not call

social services. I am a good parent, unlike Terry. I'm looking for Diamond Flight. No. Okay. And Brian. You can find me on Blue SkySB Clark OMP. I run One Million Power.com, a site where you can read translations of game-related articles and interviews that are a little bit more obscure and often arcade-focused. There's fighting game stuff on there, too. I also have a YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash B-Clark-O-M-P. The channel is called One Million Power, where I cover a lot of things, but right now it's primarily beat-em-ups in chronological order for a series called scrolling down the belt. We just reached the end of the 80s there, and a video on Final Fight came out last week, so that's pretty cool. And if you like what you see there, there's a Patreon for $1 million power in general as well at patreon.com slash one million power for early access and exclusive videos and all that good stuff.

Looking forward to your video on Burning Fight. Surely you'll be burning fight. It's common. It'll come. Burning Fight's going to be on there. Excellent. And you could find me on Blue Sky at Atari Archive.org, which is my website and my video series on YouTube, Atari Archive, where I'm going through the early history of video games. chronological order. As of this recording, I just released one about Donkey Kong for the Atari

2600 and the Klico Vision and all that fun stuff. It's a good one. Sorry, Kevin, did you say Donkey Kong? Yeah, Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong. So it's a donkey and a monkey? Are you sure about that? Explain. I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't think I have enough time to explain it.

Watch the video. Sounds weird. I'm going to say, it's a 30-minute video, so. But, yeah, so that's also Patreon-supported under Atari Archive. And, uh, yeah, that's me. So thank you all for listening and, uh, be kind to your ferrets. I shall return. Thank you. Thank you.