The Art of Fighting game came out not too long after Fatal Fury. Like that one, it takes place in Southtown (albeit earlier than Fatal Fury) and features two playable characters, Ryo and Robert, who go through town fighting against gangsters and ruffians on the lookout for Ryo's kidnapped sister (Robert's girlfriend) Yuri. This makes it much more like Final Fight in terms of story, albeit more like Street Fighter or Fatal Fury in terms of gameplay. It turns out she's been kidnapped by Mr. Big, who looks kind of like a typical 70s pimp.
There's a secret boss after Mr. Big, though... Mr. Karate. He's a guy who wears a mask, and he's got Yuri kidnapped. And the then the game ends on a cliffhanger after you beat Mr. Karate, right after Yuri starts to tell you who this masked Mr. Karate really is.
And this is where the story really starts; in the first game, it's pretty straightforward and pretty much the same as Final Fight; just go through town beating up some bad guys and find the kidnapped girl, beat the final boss, and she's saved. Hurray. But what we find out when Art of Fighting 2 starts is that actually Geese Howard is the real culprit. He's killed Ryo's mother, and sent Takuma Sakazaki (Ryo and Yuri's father) into hiding. Mr. Karate is, himself, Takuma, playing some game where he's trying to protect his children by working with Mr. Big, yet also keeping Yuri in his pocket so Geese can't reach him. Anyway, whatever exactly the plot of gang activity was that was going on in the first game (it's never explained exactly what it is other than "gangsta stuff", basically) was foiled by Ryo and Robert, another tournament takes place in the second game. This time, you go fight "young Geese". When you beat him, he simply flees to Japan, plots the murder of Jeff Bogard, who's been poking around investigating him, and presumably he's been chased out of Southtown for the time being, only to reappear some ten years later during the Fatal Fury game.
Of course, when Ryo appears in Fatal Fury Special, he's not aged, and when both the Art of Fighting teams and Fatal Fury teams appear in King of Fighters, they're the same age that they are in their own respective titles. This is because the King of Fighters takes place in an alternate time line. While it makes off-hand references to the events of the series to which they come from, no timing of any kind of implied.
There's a final Art of Fighting game, and while it also features both Ryo and Robert, the protagonist of the story is now Robert rather than Ryo. He runs into a girl he knew as a child, who's father is missing, and he runs around in the Sonoran border region of Mexico looking for her, and fighting with bounty hunters, and others who are all in it for some alleged cash prize. Her father was kidnapped and killed by Wyler, who's a boss I'd like to see make a comeback sometime. Together they've developed some kind of flawed super soldier serum, who turns him into a Mr. Hyde monster.
Although Wyler is a bad guy who killed this girls father, at the end, his mind is broken and childlike, and she decides that she needs to stay and take care of him (I don't get it.) Robert shrugs and leaves, heading for the airport.
Curiously, alone in the world of fighting games, here we actually have the resolution of a romantic plotline. Yuri and Ryo come to see Robert off at the airport, and then after he exits stage right, Ryo pulls a ticket out of his pocket, gives it to Yuri, and tells her to go get him. Yuri then follows Robert into the sunset. Every other potential couple is locked in the indecisive phase.
I think this may be a feature of Japanese storytelling, though. Ranma ½, the only anime that I've ever liked, does this too. The entire 7 season run of the series is based on an "everyone knows that they're supposed to get together" (except for the rivals, of course) but they never really actually do. While it's not my favorite genre by a long shot, I have watched a number of rom-coms with my wife, and I actually do think Pride & Prejudice is a true classic of English literature that everyone of English heritage should read. It's hard to imagine any of them being satisfying if they spend all this time on set-up and then refuse to give you the payoff at the end.
Anyway, I don't know that the Art of Fighting series is worth checking out if you haven't already. The gameplay is generally much more primitive than even the earliest King of Fighters games. I will give Art of Fighting 3 generally some credit for having absolutely beautiful backgrounds and stages (although the zoom feature often makes them appear unattractively pixelated) and for having an interesting tangent story that does something different than all of the other SNK stories, really. Other than that, the story is only marginally more interesting than Fatal Fury, if it is indeed more interesting, and is notable only for the introduction of characters who were later real standards in the King of Fighters games. However, it's Terry, not Ryo, who became the de facto mascot of SNK, and while the conceit of King of Fighters was bringing together the heroes from a number of games in the same title in a crossover jamboree (the Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury teams being the most notable here), they also had their own protagonist(s) and villain(s) that were unique to King of Fighters. The Art of Fighting team, like the Fatal Fury team, ultimately end up becoming sidelined, and even come and go to some degree. (Although Terry and Ryo always make an appearance, at least. The rest of the cast sometimes rotates a bit.) Yuri makes an interesting pivot from being merely damsel in distress to being an active participant before it's all done.
But mostly the story offers little that can be useful. I think Final Fight's "go beat up bad guys and rescue the damsel in distress from gangsters" storyline is better, even though that's a beat-em up, not a fighter. The cliffhanger reveal that Mr. Karate is actually Takuma Sakazaki, Yuri and Ryo's own father, is more of a headscratcher than an interesting and compelling plot twist. It never really makes any sense why kidnapping Yuri is supposed to help with anything at all. Mostly, I think it's important to establish the relationship between the Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury characters, although given the time depth that's supposed to separate them, that becomes an interesting aside rather than something important.
In the KOF Maximum Impact line, Ryo is older and is now Mr. Karate instead of Takuma. At least in his alternate costume, although he does have a "classic" look too. This lends a little bit more credence to the idea that the Maximum Impact games are actually supposed to be a continuation of the Art of Fighting => Fatal Fury series, although since they go a completely different direction than the Mark of the Wolves game, I have no idea how that's supposed to work. Mark of the Wolves also features a character who's part of Ryo's karate tradition, and supposedly Ryo's protege, with the 70s blaxploitation look and bizarre name of Khushnood Butt (sometimes Marco Rodriquez), furthering the ties between the two series.
It'd really have been nice to see a bit more of the two series tied together in Mark of the Wolves 2, but after SNK went bankrupt and the new SNK Playmore had to reacquire their own I/P from Eolith, or whomever ended up with it, and the hardware underwent major revision, that game was shelved. It was (supposedly) about 70% done, but since it was going to go on the old MVS hardware, one can pretty confidently assume that it'll never be revisited again at this stage, unless someone else does it.
The artists who did the Streets of Rage 4 reboot asked fans what they'd like to see them do some fan art mockups for, and Mark of the Wolves 2 was what was picked, though, suggesting that there's still some demand out there for this stuff. They turned out a pretty nifty mock up (see below) which seems to open the possibility, no matter how remote, that maybe some continuation of the Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury stories will yet happen, through a revised Mark of the Wolves 2, or some such title.
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