Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is an exciting release for many reasons, though it’s mainly because this is the first new Fatal Fury series entry in over 20 years.
As such, it’s one of SNK’s most highly anticipated releases, and it showed during Tokyo Game Show 2024 as City of the Wolves had a big booth where attendees got to try the game out.
During the event, we got a chance to sit down with the minds behind Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves from SNK’s Software Development Division 1. These include Yasuyuki Oda (Division Manager), Joshua Weatherford (Expert/Game Design), and Jonathan Campana (Game Designer) who also helped translate for Oda-san.
The City of the Wolves booth at TGS 2024.
In our discussion, Oda and Weatherford explained how they felt about returning to the series after so long, and shared some interesting tidbits about the game’s ongoing development.
What was it like to return to the series with a main entry after decades?
YO: This is a really big relief. Finally, you know, after so many years, we’ve been able to return to the series and have a new game.
JW: It really blows my mind that, you know, I was a teenager when the original came out, and now I’m writing the title of the new game. It’s amazing. Still blows my mind when I think about it, and how lucky I am to work on something like this.
YO: I was asked at a booth when talking about King of Fighters 14 some years ago “Oh, when are you going to make the next Mark of the Wolves? I thought that I’d do it, even if I had to die. And now I’m glad that it’s actually coming out and I don’t have to die now. It’s already worked itself out, but it’s been a long time in the making, for sure.
What new fighting game features or elements did you focus on for this new title?
YO: Naturally, when comparing to the old Neo Geo system that we had 20 years ago, comparing it nowadays with computers, online systems, and multi-platforms, players can join at any time. You know, it’s natural that the game and the environment itself have these changes. The game has to change with that as well, for sure.
It’s a bit early to talk about future collabs in the game, though I’d like to know what your approach is when it comes to collabs.
YO: That’s a good question. It’s a difficult one to answer for sure. How do we approach anything? But marketing helps out.
JW: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot. We have a very long history of doing collabs, ever since I came to the company, especially a lot of like putting our characters in other games. I mean, there’s so many, there’s Terry in Fighting EX Layer. There’s Geese in Tekken. There’s Terry in Smash. There’s Iori in Million Arthur: Arcana Blood.
So, we’ve done a lot of collabs, so it’s a lot of work, having to make sure that you’re following the guidelines correctly, having the other company check. But it’s always very fun. It’s a nice challenge that our team likes to do.
YO: During one of our meetings, I said I wanted to add Michael Jackson to the game. During a chat, I typed that I’d like to add Michael Jackson. And then no one responded. No one gave it a thumbs up and I felt really dejected. They were like, “Oh, there he goes again, talking about crazy stuff.”
JW: Even when we were doing the Samurai Shodown media tour, the director and art director, every time they would get asked, What character do you want to collab with? “Give me Tom Cruise, the last camera” they always said. But it’s a good answer, and maybe one day it will happen.
Given that we’re in Tokyo Game Show, what are the differences between Japanese and international players?
YO: So, one thing for sure is that there are different tastes for how the characters look. In Japan, players really like characters like B. Jenet to have more of a cutesy style to them, not as sexy as what players in the West, really like. So, what they what we have right now, there’s kind of a bit of contention [with her design].
JW: She’s actually a French noble, so this time, we gave her kind of a very European model. But a lot of the Japanese fans, when you look at the comments, they want more of the classic anime faces. That’s not what we’re making.
JC: [What we have] is closer to the artwork of the original games.
What are the biggest challenges you have faced so far?
JW: This is the first time that we’re doing English voiceovers for the characters. Not the first time, technically, but the first time for modern SNK, I guess I should say. So, that was a new challenge. It wasn’t that hard at the end of the day, but some things were difficult.
For example, in SNK games, there are a lot of moves that have Japanese titles or Japanese names, and we don’t want to just translate them into gibberish English. So, we had to have the English voice actors pronounce moves, and it was a little bit difficult to coach them through stuff like that, but they did a great job in the end.
Everybody has been very happy with the English Voiceover so far. It was a fun but interesting challenge.
JC: Unexpected though as I didn’t really think about it until we saw the actual script and thought about it.
Can you talk about the process of creating the game’s art style?
YO: Even the early Fatal Fury games were heavily inspired by American comic books, so we wanted to bring those visuals over into modern 3D. There was definitely a lot of decision-making done to get that comic book style to pop out.
Also, we had to make the backgrounds detailed, so that when you’re running around, nothing gets kind of lost in the vision and that everything really pops out. There was a lot of trial and error, going back and forth and kind of seeing what works. But we finally decided on a style that we feel works well for the game.
What are you most proud of regarding Fatal Fury City of Wolves?
YO: The biggest one of course is that after 26 years, we’ve been actually able to make a sequel [to Fatal Fury]. That’s something I am really proud of.
JW: Mine’s probably the subtitle City of the Wolves [which I thought of]. Everybody else loves it and I’m very happy with that.
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves will be released on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on April 24, 2025.