Story Summary: Fatal Fury series

I hadn't intended to start with Fatal Fury, or even do it at all, but given that Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting were the genesis in a way of the King of Fighters series, and also that their plots are pretty simple and straightforward, I thought it worth doing. The Fatal Fury series in particular is notable for having a number of "dream matches" that are just recreations of prior games, but have no canonical story implications; it's just "lets get all of the characters back together for a big fight, exactly like we already did, but let's tweak the gameplay and character selection."

The original plot is as simple as this: Terry and Andy are brothers, and their father (adoptive, I believe) was killed by a rival, Geese Howard, who's now a mafia-type crime boss in the American city of South Town (or Southtown sometimes). Howard stages a street-fighting martial arts tournament. Terry and Andy join, because at the end they'll be able to fight Geese and get their revenge. Their friend, Joe Higashi, who's a Muay Thai fighter (even though he's Japanese. Because SNK is a Japanese company and they always focused mostly on the Japanese market) joins too, although his story seems to be little more than he's the Bogard boys' friend, and he wants to be famous. 

Later more story developed to flesh out this plot, like Tung Fu Rue was Geese and Jeff (Daddy) Bogard's master, but he chose Jeff to teach his best techniques to, because Geese was a bad guy. This prompted Geese to kill Jeff. Tung Fu Rue was also Terry and Andy's master at some point. Of course, he's also one of the opponents you must face in the game's progression. A few more minor characters get a little bit of flavor backstory, but not much.

Anyway, supposedly Terry wins. Hilariously, in the cutscene animation, he seems to have forgotten all about getting revenge for his dad's murder, and just enjoys being the champion and partying with some women. And then, of course, Geese's thugs bring him to Geese's penthouse office suite, which is decorated in a bizarrely Japanese fashion, and they fight. Terry ends up knocking Geese over the edge, where he falls to his death Hans Gruber style... except that he doesn't die for several more games, and he keeps coming back even though he's supposedly dead even so.

For Fatal Fury 2, a German nobleman is curious as to the guys who were able to defeat Geese, so he hosts another tournament with the hopes of meeting them. This is Wolfgang Krauser (often pronounced and occasionally spelled Klauser, heh). We never really find out much about what Krauser's deal is, although we do find out that he's Geese's half brother, and some kind of really tough and brutal fighter. Other than that, we never actually find out about him actually doing anything villainous, in fact, the background material makes a bigger deal of his honor and sense of fair play, while also calling him "the Emperor of Darkness" and saying he's a villain. Show, don't tell! Anyway, we're told he's bad, so I suppose he must be, but I have no idea what he does that's so bad other than host a tournament so he can be the boss, and being related to Geese.

He does also have a progression of sub-bosses, almost exactly like M. Bison does. In fact, the similarities don't end there; we have a Spaniard matador (Vega clone) a new boxer (Balrog clone), and then Billy Kane. He's not exactly a Sagat clone by any means, but he's at least got connections to the first game as a sub boss there. Other than that, only one of the NPCs from the last game returns, albeit with a totally different name, and everyone else is new. But they have as much story and personality at this point, at most, as the characters from the very first Street Fighter 2 game, i.e., essentially none.

Anyway, Terry wins again, because he's the protagonist of the series and he always wins Fatal Fury games. Fatal Fury Special is the follow-up to this game. Although it's a bit difficult to tell, I don't believe it has a unique story; it's just a fleshed out and improved version of Fatal Fury 2. Kind of like how Super Street Fighter II was to Street Fighter II. Geese returns in this game although the mystery of his survival is never explained. It's also hinted here that Krauser had taken over Geese's empire during his absence, but given that Geese is a South Town local and Krauser is in a castle in Germany, that seems a bit unlikely.

Fatal Fury 3 is the next game, and curiously Geese, while in the game, is not the boss. Instead we have some really dumb blue- and red-haired kids (SNK have a bizarre fascination with little kid fighter characters, especially little girls. Really odd.) There are some ancient scrolls that have some kind of secret on them, and for some reason they're lost in South Town, even though they were made in China. Everybody wants them. Yamazaki makes his debut in this game, and he's the criminal everyone wants to stop, but Jin Chonshu and Chonrei, the dumb kids, are actually the bosses. Nobody's ever clear on exactly what the scrolls do, but the Jins seem to think that they confer immortality, and some characters, like Sokaku, seem to think that the Jins were delusional and corrupt. The scrolls remain a bit of a cypher and a MacGuffin, on which anything needed can be put as a plot device, I presume. According to some sources, but not in game ones, the Jins are posssessed by the spirits of their evil ancestors who want to resurrect themselves and conquer the world using the scrolls, although the idea that this would actually work is supposed to be the delusion. These ancestor spirits depart after the boys lose in Fatal Fury 3. It's implied in some dream match endings that they end up with Kim Kaphwan, training and being raised in his dojo along with his own kids, although for the most part, the twins are forgotten except as cameo characters after this.

Apparently, as we find out from material related to the next game, Real Bout Fatal Fury (Real Bout was an alternate title that was tossed around in development, but ultimately abandoned before the first game was released. Someone obviously liked it well enough to revive it as a subseries subtitle), Geese won the scrolls, or at least ended up with them somehow. But he didn't want to use them, either because he feared them, or just because he only wanted them to prove something in the first place. And he goes about reestablishing himself after his "resurrection" as the crime lord of South Town again. It's not clear if we're to interpret resurrection as in he literally died and somehow came back to life, or resurrection in that he was presumed dead but wasn't actually. Anyway, he holds another tournament in South Town, pretty much the same as the first game, except that some of the participants have changed. Terry wins again, and faces Geese on his tower... again. Somehow Geese's penthouse office catches fire during the fight, and Geese is knocked off of the tower... again. Terry tries to catch him, but Geese doesn't let him, falling to his death once again. At some point here, Terry ends up with Rock Howard, Geese's son, who's a little boy at this point. I doubt Geese left Rock's custody up to Terry in his will, but hey—laws and whatnot don't seem to matter much in these games.

There are two more games that follow which are both dream matches; Real Bout Fatal Fury Special and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2. But because they are "dream matches" they have no story implication; it's just an excuse to put all of the fighters back together again, in a much prettier setting this time. I actually really quite like these two games, and consider them among the best of the Fatal Fury games, even though there aren't any real stories to speak of.

The final game in the series is Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves (admittedly, only the Dreamcast release calls it Fatal Fury, but it's clear that it's a continuation of the same series. I think this was just a botched localization effort; it was always meant to be called Fatal Fury outside of Japan.) This is an interesting addition to the canon, as it takes place ten years later than the other games. Rock is now grown up, as are some other little kid cameo characters, like Kim Kaphwan's two boys. Terry is the only returning character, and he's been redesigned (for the better.) They start a whole new storyline, which takes place in South Town's neighboring city, Second South, just to the east. Someone named Kain R. Heinlein is hosting the tournament, and he supposedly is, again, a crime lord, although from the look of him, he's a weird costume party tuxedo caricature-wearing aesthete. Japan. Weirdos. 

Anyway, it turns out that Kain is Rock's uncle; the brother of Rock's mother, Marie Heinlein Howard, whom Geese kept hidden so that she wouldn't be targeted by his rivals, or some such. Marie and Kain were raised on the streets under the eye of Abel Cameron. When Marie went off to marry Geese, Abel eventually became Grant, Kain's right hand enforcer man, who learned some kind of "dark karate" in the basement, where he still is when you face him. Kain has some kind of bizarro social Darwinism philosophy to make people happier by killing them if they can't fight, or some baloney like that, although this isn't explored too closely. Marie supposedly died of sadness because Geese was bad and didn't love her, or something like that.

In fact, a lot of stuff isn't explored very closely, because following SNK's bankruptcy, the in-development sequel never was released, leaving a number of cliff-hangers in the story. Rock seems to have gone off with Kain, but did he become a villain himself? There's hints that his mother actually didn't die after all, but went even deeper into hiding or seclusion, although that's unknown and why she would do that is completely unexplained. In any case, Rock is the protagonist, not Terry, this time around, and he is the one who won the tournament in a canonical sense, I think it's clear. Rock has made a few appearances here and there, but usually as either cameos or dream match type scenarios. There's a lot of demand to have him added permanently to the roster of King of Fighters, but reportedly the staff at SNK are resistant to this idea, because they want to save him for a potential Fatal Fury relaunch. That seems like a pipe dream to me; after over twenty years the series is going to get another entry? This leaves Rock and his story; the first really interesting one for the Fatal Fury games, in a kind of limbo. 

The exception here is the King of Fighters Tekken-clone PS2 era Maximum Impact spin-off. It's not clear if SNK takes these seriously in any way, although clearly the storylines and characters that they contain are not part of the mainline KOF story. In fact, there are hints that it was a what if contination of sorts of the Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting storylines, although if so, it starts all over with some kind of weird alien villains that we haven't seen before or since in any SNK game. Maybe I'll cover these in a later post... maybe. I think that they're best seen as their own odd little mini-continuity, although they do seem to have more in common in most respects with the Fatal Fury stories than the King of Fighters stories, and they do contain more Rock Howard appearances, and take place in and around Southtown specifically. It does also contain not only Terry Bogard, but also "Wild Wolf", the Mark of the Wolves era Terry, with a slightly different moveset, and the Mark of the Wolves look (at least as his default.)

While the Fatal Fury storylines don't offer a whole lot, they did bring us many memorable characters, particularly the main hero and villains themselves; Terry and Geese. Rock's story was a potentially interesting one too; events in his life curiously mirroring that of Geese himself when he was younger. However, because he had a Terry-figure in his life, he has a chance to reject the dark side of the force and not become Darth Vader... er, I mean another Geese, but rather a slightly darker version of Terry himself; a hero with an edge, if you will. Whether that storyline will ever materialize isn't likely, in my opinion, but we'll see. And, of course, the setting of South Town is integral to all kinds of SNK goings-on following this game.

The Jin scrolls as a potential plot device are kind of nifty too. Although the Jin twins as interesting characters are not.

But this is OK. While I do that games such as the King of Fighters series and the Street Fighter Alpha series had complicated plots that are difficult to unravel, or that Street Fighter V had a whole General Story mode that told an anime-like story in most respects, sometimes a simple yet compelling plot without lots of complications, and a simple yet compelling antagonist are all that's needed to be memorable. The more complicated plots often trip over themselves as often as they do something interesting, or get really silly and dumb (I'll conquer the world by using your fighting power as a battery seems to get used more than once, for instance) Geese is a pretty compelling antagonist. Maybe not quite M. Bison or even Rugal Bernstein level compelling, but much moreso than Chris as Orochi, or Gill, etc.