"Fatal Fury, your time has come."

Fatal Fury was SNK's original fighting game for the Neo Geo. FF featured striking characters and an interesting story, along with great music, but it's gameplay was a very sketchy and cheap attempt to copy the then up and coming Capcom fighters.

SNK stuck with Fatal Fury though, regularly upgrading and updating the game. Each chapter slowly improved gameplay as well as graphics, but somehow FF always lagged behind SNK's premiere series, such as The King of Fighters. Fatal Fury finally started to shape up with Real Bout 2, the first game to (partially) do away with the infamous Sway Line game system that allowed characters to jump in and out of two planes in the background. RB2 refined FF's charactes, graphics, and gameplay to a decent point, and remains a truly great fighting game... but still didn't have quite the hard, intense and balanced edge that the superior fighters have.

Now SNK has put Garou: Mark of the Wolves on the table, and Fatal Fury has jumped to the forefront, pushing all other NeoGeo fighting games behind itself.

Mark of the Wolves is set years after the original Fatal Fury. In the opening cinema, we see Terry Bogard attempt to save Geese Howard as he plummets over the roof of the building where final battle with Terry took place in the original FF. Unable to save Geese (due to Geese himself letting go) Terry is regretful. Upon discovering Geese has a young son, Rock, Terry takes the boy under his wing to raise him, and try to keep him from the path of evil his father took.

Now years later as Garou begins, we have a new generation of South Town fighters, some of whom are decendants of the original cast - such as the sons of Kim Kaphwan. The new cast totals 14 characters including playable bosses. SNK has put their full effort into Garou, lavashing detail on every element of the game, and making sure ALL characters have their own unique stage and theme music - something that has been neglected in fighting games in general in recent years.

The breakdown:

Graphics 10 - This is as good as the NeoGeo and SNK's legendary artists get. The animation in Garou IS Street Fighter III quality, and in my opinion, the character design and attention to detail is superior. Special F/X abound, many of which would have been thought impossible on the aging NeoGeo hardware.

The stages are swamped in animation and detail as well, though most of them do not have parallax scrolling. The stages that do however are spectacular, the best of which is Terry's stage that takes place on a moving train and changes no less than 3 times between rounds. Every element of the visual presentation is ''perfect''. No rough edges, no technical flaws, no slowdown. Only Last Blade 2 rivals Garou on the NeoGeo.

Gameplay - Garou adopts the King of Fighters control scheme of four attack buttons, for weak and strong punch and kick. The fighting engine itself feels more like KoF now, though is not a true copy. If anything, it feels more like Street Fighter III, right down to the meaty impact that a knockout hit has on your opponent. The engine is toned down from past FFs, with no chain combos, and is a lot more strategic. It's debatable if Garou is ''deeper'' than Street Fighter III, but I believe it is comparable.

Control is much tighter than previous FFs, and perhaps than any other SNK fighter save Last Blade. Amazingly, the fighting styles of the characters are new and unique, showing there is room for inovation yet in 2D fighters. The super meter system has been simplified to charge up two times and carry over between rounds. A super performed at level one takes the whole bar, and at level two, you can opt to perform a more powerful version of the super and use the whole meter, or just do the standard version and drop the bar back to level 1. The Sway Line system is nowhere to be found, much to the cheering of a great many fans (and the disapointment of a few others).

The new ''system'' in Garou is the TOP system. Basically, the TOP system is a ''zone'' of your energy bar, 1/3 of the total bar in size. When your health falls into the TOP zone, your health slowly recharages to try and keep the TOP zone full, and you have access to a special TOP attack (CD for all characters). When selecting your character, you can specify if you want the TOP zone at the beginning or end of the bar, or smack in the middle. The TOP system is far from useless, and while it doesn't had a whole lot to the gameplay, is still a nice tactical detail that lets you create a fine tuned strategy for how you want to fight. And some characters definetly have different strengths in their plan of attack depending on where the TOP zone is placed.

Sound 9 - Fatal Fury has always had good sound and catchy music, but has never quite achieved the level of artistry of SNK's best. Garou is the best in the series however. Character voices are great, carrying lots of personality. The sound effects are especially detailed, with unqiue sounds for the many ''supernatural'' aspects of special attacks and special f/x.

Music is a touchy subject, as musical tastes vary dramatically. I've heard some people say the Garou soundtrack is the worst of the series, others praise it. I fall into the latter catagory. The Garou tunes are excellent, fitting each fighter to a T, and pushing the NeoGeo's hard trucking sound hardware to it's limit. Rock's theme is one of the best, and has the surprising bonus of having Robert Miles' Children woven into it - and it fits Rock like a glove.

Overall 10 - Garou gets a 10 as SNK's ''send off'' fighting game for the venerable NeoGeo system. They obviously went all out, producing a title that isn't just ''cool'', is not merely a great game, but has real class and style. Garou is the sort of game that becomes a classic that people are still talking about, playing, and using as the yardsstick, years later.

OK!!!

-- Kai

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 03/09/00, Updated 03/09/00