FATAL FURY: City of the Wolves review – There are two wolves inside you

In 1991, the first FATAL FURY was released. It was considered a landmark title that followed Terry and Andy Bogard, and a few other cast members. Now, I didn’t play the original; my favorite fighting games tend to be Mortal Kombat, Tekken, and Street Fighter, with a few other titles sprinkled in the mix. What I do know is that Fatal Fury has a legacy that can not ignore.

FATAL FURY: City of the Wolves introduces REV Arts, REV Accel, REV Blows, and a lot more as your REV Meter overheats. This new REV System sees you fighting at full throttle the whole match, and it’s a lot of fun to use. FATAL FURY: City of the Wolves is a lot of fun, but it feels like things are missing. Don’t worry, though, it’s not the roster size! While I tend to prefer a bigger roster at launch, the 17 characters are enough to have some fun with.

Tutorial 

Kicking things off, you’re given the option to jump right into the tutorial, where you can choose between Arcade Style, which is a more traditional command approach to a fighting game, and Smart Style, which allows you to have your combos locked to buttons. Personally, I like Arcade Style just fine for playing through any of the single player modes, but I would switch for multiplayer when I get a chance to try it. Having the combos locked to one button is cool, but it lacks the precision I like to have in my fighting games. The tutorials themselves are well laid out, so I have no complaints here. 

Sticking with Arcade Style, you’ve got four combo buttons, two punches and two kicks, and a special button for REV Guard. As is typical for the genre, you can input various directions in sequence then press a combination of buttons for additional moves. Most games have moved towards just quarter circles for these, but City of the Wolves includes some more complicated motions, making Smart Style and its auto combos a bit more tempting. It may take a lot of practice to learn just one character in Arcade Style, but Smart Style is handy for getting their basic kit down before really locking in. 

Your preferences may change depending on what mode you’re in. Most will probably gravitate towards Arcade Style for things like Online matches or Arcade Mode, while the more RPG-like story mode, Episodes of South Town, could see players testing out various characters with Smart Style. 

Episodes of South Town

As we dive into South Town, more of the options at the bottom of the screen will unlock. For now, let’s pick our character and get started. You can select any character to play through South Town with, and each character has a level attached to them. Levels are character-specific and are not shared across other characters, but you can change your character at any time. 

Now, I am not familiar with this roster, so I picked Mai Shiranui to start with. I was absolutely shocked to find that there is no voice acting here? The characters can talk because they will do it throughout the game at various points, like for win quotes or supers. Having no voice acting carries over into the story introduction and mission select. I find this jarring and don’t understand the decision to have these things feel so lifeless. Even the beginning of South Town has no animations for Mai; it is simply a static screen with words at the bottom. This is meant to be a replacement for a typical Story Mode, so I was unimpressed with this decision. It makes the mode feel very cheap, as opposed to arcade mode where this type of presentation is more expected for its minimalist storytelling.

The dialogue also feels random at times. I mean, seriously? Why is “Whew! Thanks for the great fight, Mai!” met with her scolding him about what he eats? I can only assume he either smells like grease or there is some history here that I am missing. Something could have been lost in translation, but this oddness persists and doesn’t exactly make me eager to see the next story scene. 

More importantly, the game part of EoST sees you wandering around South Town, getting into matches at specific locations to level up and continue the story at the next marker. You don’t actually get to walk around town though. Iit’s all done through the map screen, which is admittedly stylish in its own way.  It doesn’t exactly follow the comic book aesthetic of the rest of the game, but it’s still cool nonetheless and I love the primary color being yellow. 

Anyway, this structure makes the mode feel less like taking on opponents to become better at the game and more like grinding in an RPG. Each destination has a recommended level, and while you can go in whenever you want unless you’re a fighting game master and can block or avoid every hit you’ll probably get thrashed. It takes what should be skill based and makes it number based. In a fighting game, you should be able to learn from every loss, see what you did wrong, and practice to improve from there. In Episodes of South Town, our response to a loss was just “well, better grind some more”.

Arcade and other modes 

Okay, so there is voice acting in the Arcade Mode, and the moment the game started speaking to me, I was very confused. Why does this game mode have narration, but the Episodes of South Town doesn’tt? Well, it’s simple, Arcade is better. Story modes are always hit or miss in fighting games, and the RPG elements of EoST just don’t mesh well with what Fatal Fury is doing here. 

As is standard, Arcade Mode has you choose a character, then go through a small story with them mostly consisting of fights with a random selection of characters ending with the final boss. Arcade Mode is a lot shorter than EoST, but it’s also a lot more fun. We didn’t have access to the online features in time for this review, so this is where we spent most of our time.  City of the Wolves is a difficult game to learn, let alone master, and building up skill is better served in standard matches than ones determined by stats.

There is one thing stat-wise that applies to every mode, and that’s the S.P.G. or Selective Potential Gear. Players can choose to set which portion of their health bar activates S.P.G., either at the beginning, middle, or end. Entering that portion of the bar will activate S.P.G., allowing you to perform REV Blows and gain an increase in attack strength. REV Blows are special moves only accessible during S.P.G. and activated by pressing Triangle and Circle simultaneously in Arcade Style or just R2 in Smart Style. 

It’s an interesting idea, letting players come out of the gate guns blazing or using it as a last-minute desperation or somewhere in between, but it feels overly complicated in practice. There’s really no reason to put your S.P.G. anywhere but the start of your health bar because these moves can deal a ton of damage and ideally you’ll be blocking incoming attacks with Just Defended, a special block that applies if you just barely hit the button in time. You do get some small bonuses with the section placed lower, but in our eyes that doesn’t justify needing to be near death to get them. We don’t want fighters to be less complex, just more accessible to more people, and while the tutorial mode does a good job of explaining the basics, it still feels like it needed a bit more in this aspect. 

A note from David Flynn 

I love fighting games, but not every game can really click with every person. Unfortunately, City of the Wolves is one of those games. I found the game to feel very clunky, even after finding a character I enjoyed playing (at least more than the others). I just wasn’t having a good time. It all just feels very stiff, especially coming from faster and more fluid games like Skullgirls or Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising. Add on top the controversial choice of DLC characters including a real life man accused of rape, and I doubt I’ll be returning to South Town.