Southtown: A Brief Geography, part I

Part II
Part III

The SNK games in particular make a lot of mention of the city of Southtown. It's the fictional setting for two of the three Art of Fighting titles, three of the Fatal Fury games (and still features as a location even in the more "global" titles) and features prominently in several King of Fighters titles as well. Capcom has the less well developed but overall relatively similar Metro City--it's easy as pie to combine them. Because Southtown is more developed, with more stages, more history, and more detail all around, for my purposes the two towns will be collapsed into a single one, and for the most part, it defaults to the SNK version of Southtown. About the only thing that needs taking from Metro City is that Mike Haggar is the mayor, and that Mad Gear Gang has been making inroads into the town while Geese was absent following his first defeat by Terry Bogard.

Although fictional, Southtown has been confirmed to have been loosely based on the real city of Miami. The little icon from Fatal Fury 2 confirms that it's in the far southeast. Although here it looks like it's up in the panhandle of Florida instead of on the tip, that's not meant to be taken too literally; the icon is a large bit of graphics that's only supposed to be vaguely related to an actual spot on the vague outline of the lower 48 states.  If you look at the other image above, though, you will see a skyline that looks nothing like the Miami skyline.  Where do all of these green mountains come from?  And where's all of the Cuban and Caribbean influence, rather than Asian influence which is shown repeatedly in the games?  I've decided that I believe the most likely source of this is that the Japanese developers say that it's based on Miami, but in reality it's based on the only US city that most Japanese tourists are likely to be very familiar with: Honolulu.  Hawaii has a huge ethnic Japanese component (as well as Chinese and other Asian elements).  It also has a military and industrial port (an important component of Southtown) and lots of Asian-themed architecture.  It's as if the developers wanted it to be Miami, but since Honolulu was the only city in the US that they really knew very well, they imagined that Miami must be just like Honolulu.  In any case, simply imagine that a city very much like Honolulu, including the mountain/jungle topography all around it, were somehow transported in toto to the tip of the Florida peninsula, and you basically have Southtown as it is presented to us in the games.

This series of posts, then, discusses more of the details of the geography of Southtown rather than this big picture view.  While SNK have indeed given us lots of detail about Southtown, the problem is that the detail doesn't always match from one title to another. Most of the geographical information comes from the first two Art of Fighting games, Fatal Fury 1 and Fatal Fury 3, with a major add-on in the form of the Second South sister city that was the setting for Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves. Let's start with what each game gives us, in order of release.

Fatal Fury - The first Fatal Fury game was released late in 1991, and is the first appearance (I believe) of Southtown as a setting. The setting for Southtown in this game was meant to be more or less "now", i.e., in the early 90s when the game was released. The geography is very constrained; there's a kidney bean shaped city surrounded by water with only a thin connection to a mainland beyond (bridge, probably, although not clear) and there's another bridge that connects this island to another island to the right, which appears to be east southeast. The images from the stages in game as well as pre-game demos and other images here and there clearly show a very large suspension bridge, that connects these two islands to each other. They also show a dynamic skyline full of skyscrapers. There is a subway, which is perhaps a bit odd in a place like Miami where the water table is high and the city is traditionally lashed by hurricanes, but hey, I said it was only loosely based on Miami, right? There's a big amusement park, the famous Pao Pao Cafe (which appears over and over again in SNK games) and a beach with pretty good waves that are apparently good enough to surf in, and a Japanese temple and garden. The town also seems to be surrounded by low mountains. At one point we see Terry on a high, craggy rock looking out at the town, and we can see the mountains surrounding the town. In fact, looking back at that list of characteristics, its clear that although Southtown is supposedly set in Florida, clearly the point of reference, and the real American city that it most closely resembles, is Honolulu. Considering how many people of Japanese ethnicity live in Hawaii, and how many actual Japanese people visit the islands for vacation, maybe that's not surprising for a game made by Japanese. Besides movies and soldiers on the bases in Okinawa and whatnot, that's probably the most likely frame of reference the Japanese have of America.  The screenshot of a map above seems to indicate that what we see is the majority of the town, but as we'll see shortly, that quickly changed, as every other game had the original Fatal Fury part of Southtown as merely "East Island"--SNK's version of Manhattan to the greater New York City on the mainland.

Art of Fighting - 1992's Art of Fighting was a significant departure and significant addition to the canon of Southtown related details. For one thing, it completely ignores the East Island altogether, and develops part of the "mainland" area of town that's west and north of East Island. Because of this complete lack of overlap, all of the locations that it shows are completely new. This game also takes place during the heyday of Hong Kong theater, i.e. in the 70s. This is problematic in some ways. Because the Art of Fighting games take place in the same continuity as the Fatal Fury games, but a good fifteen to twenty years earlier, the characters from one can't really appear in the same games as the characters from the other without being aged. That never stopped SNK, though--Ryo showed up in Fatal Fury Special, and of course, all kinds of characters from both series appeared in all of the King of Fighters games. Arguably, it was the concept of combining the Art of Fighting characters with the Fatal Fury characters that led to the genesis of the King of Fighters series in the first place. "Officially" the King of Fighters continuity is different from that of Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury, which is how they can all exist at the same time without Ryo being old enough to have his own kids fighting in Fatal Fury. 

The first Art of Fighting game establishes that an industrial port district is located on the western tip of the city, including a Navy base of some kind sufficient to berth an aircraft carrier. This was on another smaller island. The "mainland" has several seedy downtown slums, Mac's Bar, a run-down biker bar, a Chinatown district, the restaurant King works at, L'Amor (in later games, particularly in King of Fighters, she actually seems to own these restaurants) and last but not least, another different Japanese temple and garden spot. Overall, the place seems to be a rough town without a lot of social graces. Gangs are (as in Fatal Fury the year before) shown to be probably the most important player in the city, and poverty and crime are shown in stark relief. Is this because that's the focus of the games, and not necessarily indicative of the city overall? Yeah, probably, but still... it's clearly a major facet of Southtown still. Also, as you can see, the nature of the new locations further the resemblance to Honolulu rather than to Miami, and the gangs specifically make it feel like a Hawaii 5-0 rip-off in a way.

Art of Fighting 2 - In 1994, Art of Fighting had a sequel. In this game, for the first time, the parts of Southtown from the two series are merged into a map that shows them both, in context with each other, and which also show some of the more far-flung suburbs and regions just outside of town, including the airport, a national park, and the ritzy neighborhoods with expansive grounds where Robert Garcia's manor is, for instance. It shows a river running through the eastern edge of town, and even has a number of streets named. A few locations, like the horse barn of "National Park" and Crawley's Air Field actually seem to be almost rural in nature, but they're far to the northeast of the downtown area. Chinatown looks more like downtown Hong Kong than it does an American city with a Chinatown, which is actually kinda nifty. And of course, many locations are the kinds of things that you'd expect to see in most large cities, especially with an Asian minority population--martial arts dojos, fitness clubs, and places like that.

Fatal Fury 3 - The next year, 1995, had the release of Fatal Fury 3. After jumping across the globe for Fatal Fury 2 and Fatal Fury Special, we return to Southtown, a more contained story, Geese as the villain, and we get another view of the town. This time, the geography is more consistent with that of Art of Fighting 2, although naturally it showcases some different locations. There's a mainland East Side park, with a large aquarium. This can also be seen in the distance from Hon Fu's stage, which is an open air construction elevator in the far western port town part of the city. East Side park also has a large ferris wheel, for instance, and a zoo, as well as a Disney-esque castle. There's also a rocky hill or small mountain near the park. From the top of the elevator, you can see out over the water. There's a small island in the bay that has a building or monument of some kind built on it. We also see that there's a second Pao Pao Cafe on the mainland, making that a small chain rather than simply a stand-alone place. There's a large cathedral in Pioneer Plaza, and the National Park is shown here to be a tropical swamp complete with alligators and weird carved tiki heads or some other kind of idol. And Dream Amusement Park looks less like an amusement park and more like an actual cowboy town stuck in the middle of the city--although in the first daylight version of the park, you can barely see the skyscrapers through the haze; it's only for the sunset and afterwards stages that the skyline is clearly defined. And near the run-down industrial district of port town is a train station, South Station, which oddly enough seems to sport a lot of steam engine traffic. I think that has more to do with the designers at SNK (and at Capcom, for that matter) being obvious railfans than anything else--there's a surprising amount of train featuring stages in games from both companies. Sound Beach is clearly not all just sandy breakers, as wharves and other more built up areas are shown. We see Delta Park, yet another area with Chinese style statues. And finally, we also see that there's a big airplane manufacturing facility at or near the airport.

Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves - The final Art of Fighting game leaves Southtown behind and explores Mexico of the 1970s. Fatal Fury Real Bout doesn't give us new locations, although it does show us a few surprising sides to the locations we already know. We see more of Sound Beach again, looking less like a beach and more like an entertainment district waterfront. East Side Park has a weird indoor greenhouse/garden/shopping mall with a gigantic Easter Island-esque head. Terry, the most famous native of Southtown, appears to spend some time in the American southwest, at a lonely gas station on a wide stretch of road, with buttes and mesas in the background. Of course, it's always possible that the designers didn't think that that would be far away from southern Florida too and just aren't very familiar with American geography.  Or, they simply didn't care very much.  Neither would be surprising. 

We get slightly different views of Sound Beach again in Real Bout Special. It's really not until Real Bout as a subseries is over and the Mark of the Wolves game is released that we get a major new take on Southtown, though. Here we're treated to an all new geography that seems completely unfamiliar, as well as all new locations. The latter isn't too weird, given that another generation (about) is supposed to have passed between the mainline Fatal Fury games and this last chapter in the series, but the former is harder to explain. Careful examination, however, shows that these new locations are all located just to the east of the other Fatal Fury locations, and the tip of East Island, and Geese Tower's little island can just be seen on the western edge of the map. This Southtown is actually supposed to be an all new city, and given the rural areas located in the land between them, it looks like they must be twin cities that are located very close to each other, like Dallas and Fort Worth, but all part of a single expanded metro area. Second South, as the new city is called, has many features in common with the original Southtown, including having a concentrated, highly urbanized island connected by bridges to the mainland, Asian ethnic neighborhoods, a harbor, train station, slums, a pro wrestling arena, a large church, and it even has the Sarah Forest and Barbaroi Falls, which are near the National Park area shown in earlier games. Maybe the falls indicate a rapidly changing elevation, which would be consistent with some of the stuff shown in some games that has the town nestled amidst some low mountains. It would also go a long way towards explaining how more temperate forests can be in the same place as a tropical, swampy rainforest.

King of Fighters - NESTS - Southtown featured prominently in the NESTS saga too; notably in that the finals for King of Fighters 2000 were supposed to take place there, and at the end of the game, Southtown is destroyed by the space-based Zero Cannon! Oddly, that is hardly mentioned again, and not long afterwards, it seems to be thriving again. I think it more likely that there was an attack on the city, which did cause some destruction, but that it wasn't as extensive as all that after all. A few buildings downtown were destroyed, people were killed, the nation was shocked, etc. but life went on, most of the city remained intact, and within a few months life went to to something not too unlike normal. Curiously, although the King of Fighters series, like the Street Fighter series, sent fighters all over the globe to fight, the locations in '99 and '00 are not identifiable as belonging to a specific country. In fact, it's possible that they are all located in Southtown (with the exception of the flying rocket ship and the satellite, of course, from King of Fighters 2000)--the only one that is problematic is the Korea stage from '00. Which could possibly indicate a Koreantown neighborhood. Since one shows up in Second South in Mark of the Wolves that's not even a difficult bridge to cross. The "Egypt stage" from '00 was even labeled as a Dream Amusement Park locale in at least one source I've seen before which, if true, would strengthen the notion that almost all the stages from both games actually represent Southtown localities. It doesn't really add significantly to the canon of what is available in Southtown either--it postulates that Krizalid's secret base was underneath Southtown somewhere. Since the Zero Cannon attacked Southtown in an effort to destroy the NESTS base, that's not even new news. A natural history museum, complete with dinosaur skeletons, and an Egyptian themed part of Dream Amusement Park, complete with lots of sand and pyramids, are the only significant adds in terms of what the stages show--we already had an aquarium, factories, various parks and urban areas, an airport, and a Chinatown.

Although not strictly necessary, other location stages here and there from King of Fighters titles might represent localities in Southtown. Notably, the Sound Beach stage in King of Fighters XI most certainly does. The sunset over an industrial landscape which is the "USA Stage" from King of Fighters '95 would be consistent with a Southtown location, as would several stages from King of Fighters '96 including the docks of the Yagami team stage, the waterfront of the New Ikari stage, and the restaurant of the New Women Fighters stage. And the two USA stages from King of Fighters '98 could easily fit here too; the basketball stage at the base of a large suspension bridge (which is a remake of a very similar stage from King of Fighters '94) looks like a slightly different angle of the bridge seen in Fatal Fury and Real Bout Fatal Fury, and the train yard, like Southtown's trains, features a surprising amount of steam still in use. And finally, the ultra non-canonical King of Fighters Neowave has unidentified locations, almost all of which could be reasonably placed in Southtown as well, including the interior of yet another factory, more urban suspension bridges, another view of a train yard, another view of a working dock, the interior of a large clock tower (possibly the same clock tower we see the exterior of in the Dreamcast version of King of Fighters '99?), and the interior of what could possibly be the Howard Arena temple grounds!

While there's no really compelling reason to place any of these locations in Southtown really, except for the destruction of Southtown as part of the NESTS story, which hints at a NESTS base being underground in Southtown somewhere, there's also no reason not to place these other stages from various KoF titles, especially 99, 2000 and Neowave, within Southtown itself. With few exceptions, all it does is add another view to locations that we already knew Southtown had, or could reasonably presume that a city like Southtown would have anyway.

Of course, as has been said before, the Fatal Fury and the King of Fighters continuities are not supposed to overlap. For my purposes, this is immaterial--I'm not only collapsing the continuities (or more likely, utilizing the King of Fighters continuity, adapted, since it already adapts the Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury continuities itself.) In somewhat brief and genericized terms, that means that we know a little bit about Southtown, where it came from, and how it got to be the way it is when we first encounter it. Made up of the same ethnic mix that populates most of the US, Southtown also has a stronger than normal Asian influence on some of its architecture, some of its neighborhoods, monuments and decorations at various parks and other places around town, and in its restaurants. Organized crime has always been a major problem in Southtown; both Italian mafia as well as Asian groups--Yakuza and Triads--have worked over the city. Geese Howard's Howard Connection, a much more organized outfit with a legitimate face, clamped down on most of the organized crime in Southtown, incorporated the best and brightest of its former rivals (Mr. Big), and marginalized or eliminated the rest. Unknown to Geese, however, a major international syndicate set up shop here. They perhaps flew under his radar because they didn't dabble as much in the "day to day" crime of smuggling, racketeering, and whatnot, and instead focused on high tech illegal experimentation with human cloning, AI, and the creation of super-powered human beings.  This new gang is NESTS, an international conglomerate originally birthed in the Yakuza, but now multi-ethnic and multi-headed.  NESTS itself stands for Nipponese Expatriate Shadow Trading Syndicate, and is sometimes nicknamed the Shadow Law, or Shadaloo.