Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves aims to revive fighting game royalty - and it's nailing it so far

In the pantheon of fighting games – a genre in which the community typically moves along once a new entry arrives – there are those specific games that stand above the others and maintain a legendary status. Games like Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, and Capcom Vs. SNK 2 have maintained huge communities in the 20-plus years since they launched and are held in high regard by the fighting game community to this day. There’s one more example with a particularly mythic status: SNK’s 1999 classic Garou: Mark of the Wolves, which was not only was a soft-reboot of the Fatal Fury series but also the last of that series to ever release, as SNK shifted focus onto The King of Fighters as its premiere fighting game franchise.

For years and years, I’ve been waiting on a follow-up to Mark of the Wolves – which was apparently nearly complete before SNK went bankrupt back in 2001. Every single time EVO would come around and SNK would hit the stage with a new announcement, only for it to be a new Samurai Shodown or King of Fighters (both of which were bangers, mind you), I’d be disappointed. SNK producer Yasuyuki Oda, who also led development on KOF and Samurai Shodown, has been vocal about wanting to return to the game, outright saying in 2022 that he “went back to SNK to complete Garou”. This finally came to pass at EVO later that year, when Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves was confirmed.

After a couple more trailers throughout 2023, and making its first playable appearance at EVO Japan earlier this year, City of the Wolves was confirmed for a Summer Game Fest appearance. So, after finding out I was going to the event this year, naturally the very first appointment I made was going to be the fighting game I’ve waited 25 years for (okay, I only played Garou for the first time like 6 years ago, but it’s far more dramatic to put it that way). And after getting to play the game, there’s no better way to describe it than hot damn, they nailed it.