In the past, I’ve written about Southtown and its geography. According to many sources, notably the location on the little in-game map in some of the games, it appears to be in Florida, and perhaps loosely modeled after Miami. There are, however, numerous challenges to this assertion, most notably the fact that in Fatal Fury and other games show it surrounded by mountains draped in tropical rain forest.
The high degree of Asian culture and architecture also seems excessive for a place like Miami, which is more defined by its proximity to Cuba (and high minority population of Cubans and other Hispanic immigrants.) Miami is also the cruise ship capital of the world, whereas the port of Southtown seems much more focused on industrial and even military applications.
Despite the fact that SNK does claim that a vague Floridian inspiration for Southtown, it’s extremely difficult to see anything like Florida in their depiction of Southtown. There is, however, one American city that very closely resembles Southtown in a lot of particulars. It is surrounded by rain-forest draped mountains. It does have an extremely high concentration of people of Asian ethnicities. It does have a lot of Japanese specific architecture here and there scattered throughout the city (not unlike Howard Arena.) It also has a famously important Navy base, an industrial side to its port, and world-class beaches (like Sound Beach?) It’s also rather infamous as a playground for organized crime, at least on TV if not necessarily in reality. And, this city is a major vacation destination for Japanese tourists, making it likely one of the few American cities that the Japanese development team, even at a working level, might well have been familiar with.
This city is not in Florida, however. This city is Honolulu. If you can imagine Honolulu—as well as maybe some of the “backcountry” of O’ahu somehow stuck on the Floridian peninsula—then you’d have Southtown, pretty much as is.
Connecting these dots, and seeing Southtown as a geographically transplanted Honolulu, rather than trying to figure out exactly how it could manage to be a seriously warped and strange version of Miami, makes a lot of sense. I should have seen it earlier, but it took until I played Fatal Fury (the original one) through this weekend for it to click, for some reason.
