Fatal Fury

FATAL FURY

Original Release: SNK, 1991, Arcade/NeoGeo

Other Releases: SNES (1992), Genesis/Sharp X68000 (1993), NeoGeo CD (1994), PC/Wii (2008), PS3/PSP (2010), Switch/PS4/Xbox (2017), Android/iOS (2022)

Fatal Fury (Arcade, SNK, 1991)

Where to Buy: eBay

How to Emulate: Arcade Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

We looked at Art of Fighting recently, and Gaming Conventional Wisdom seems to have it that that game is the junky one while this one is pretty good. Personally, I would reverse those two positions. I think Art of Fighting is deeply flawed but still kind of fun, whereas Fatal Fury is the stinkbomb of the bunch. Well, not as much of a stinkbomb as World Heroes, but it's still down there in that neighborhood.

Two things - it's too damn slow, and it doesn't have the graphical style that Art of Fighting does. It's all small smushy character sprites moving at speeds that make the original release of Street Fighter 2 look like Hyper Fighting.

The hit detection is actually pretty solid and it's about as workable as any other Street Fighter clone of the time (though "clone" may not be fair as this was reportedly in development at the same time, headed up by the original Street Fighter developer who had jumped ship to SNK). It's mostly the really anemic pace. It also has a lame central gimmick - the jumping back and forth from the background to the foreground. At least AOF's gimmicky scaling was nice to look at, if it didn't actually add much to the gameplay at all. With Fatal Fury, you can occasionally launch an ambush jumpkick from the background, but that rarely actually works because you have to telegraph it so much. What it mostly devolves into is just people flipping back and forth between planes and wasting time.

So anyway, these two fools Terry and Andy Bogard along with their random buddy Joe decide to take on Geese Howard by brawling through his King of Fighters tournament. As with Art of Fighting, in the one-player mode you can only use these three characters, but for two-player battles you can fight as any of the enemies. The minor ongoing story delivers some charm with the usual funny SNK Engrish lines.

The characters may be no great shakes in this one but the backgrounds are pretty nice, and the music is actually really good. I particularly like Richard Meyer's random chanting (which I always assumed was Hindi but turns out to be a Japanese guy really having a hard time with Brazilian Portuguese?). You know, it was so easy to miss the good tunes in these games in the arcade, where ambient noise always drowned out the music. One cool thing about plowing through all these old Neo Geo games for this site is playing with a good quality pair of headphones on and checking out all these neat soundtracks SNK cooked up for these games.