Story Summary: Art of Fighting series

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.

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.

New tag: story summaries

Like I referred to off-handedly in my last post, I'm going to do some story summary posts, mostly for reference. I don't want to have to watch a twenty minute YouTube video narrated by a guy with a really strong accent, or read a wiki entry that is borderline incoherent either to understand the major storylines in the various series. I've created a new tag, and this post is the first to sport it, called STORY SUMMARIES where I'll summarize the storylines from the games. The reality is that although it's a little hard to perceive them sometimes, most of these games have crazy-insane comic book-like stories with genuine supervillains, super-technology, superheroes and more either trying to take over the world or stop someone else from taking over the world.

I've got high priority and low priority posts to make; the low priority ones might or might not actually get made. Also, I'll split both high and low priority lists into an SNK and a Capcom list. 

I should point out, although maybe I already have, that my definition of karate supers is a bit less anime, and certainly is weaponless (with the exception of a few people who do have weapons occasionally, like Billy Kane or Rolento.) I've never really gotten into Samurai Shodown, for instance, because it's historical and uses weapons. I've never gotten into Guilty Gear or Blazblue or any of those kinds of games, because they're way too whack and anime to have universal appeal, and they also often use weapons. There's been a lot of attempts to cross properties, but I'll reiterate here again, that I'm only considering "in scope" games from the following series: Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, and Darkstalkers. I'd actually be OK including the Marvel Crossover games too, except that I don't really want to try and use Marvel characters here. The Capcom vs SNK games (and SNK vs Capcom: Chaos) mostly count too, although a few characters here and there stand out as not fitting very well, in my opinion. I'm not sure what order I'll do these in, but certainly the high priority ones will all be done before I worry about the low priority ones.

HIGH PRIORITY

Capcom

• Street Fighter II: while the story line here is actually fairly simplistic in most senses, this is kind of where it starts. The story started to develop as the series developed, mostly through character endings. It was obviously pretty simplistic in the first iteration, but as more iterations and more characters were added, it developed a bit more depth than you'd think. SF1 didn't really have any story at all, but it was kind of retroactively added by Street Fighter II. However, because of the bizarre time-hopping nature of the series, I'll do this out of order; Street Fighter II will be the second Street Fighter summary I attempt. 
• Street Fighter Alpha: Alpha 1 and Alpha 2 don't have separate stories; Alpha 2 is basically considered a refined and upgraded version of Alpha 1. However, Alpha 3 has a separate story that takes place after Alpha 2. Because the Alpha games came out after Street Fighter II, but take place before them, I'll actually start here. I'll just add a brief summary of Street Fighter I's story here to set the scene for Alpha. However, regardless of when the stories take place, the order in which they were created matters, and of course, when these stories came out, Street Fighter II was already long finished. 
• Street Fighter III: Another one that I'll probably do last of the higher priority ones. While this is still one of the earlier titles, in terms of release, it is the last one in terms of when it takes place. Sigh. It's also one of the most confusing of the titles. Exactly what the story is and what supposedly is the "canonical" version of what happened is hard to figure out. 
• Street Fighter IV: We go back in time again, to about a year or so at most after Street Fighter 2 takes place. While some characters get relegated to just being silly, for the most part, Street Fighter IV is a pretty decent game storywise, with plenty going on, and it's less confusing than some. Partly this is because of how much it rehashes the plot of the Alpha and II games rather than because it's necessarily told so much better, admittedly.
• Street Fighter V: Now we're a few years after Street Fighter IV yet still before Street Fighter III. This one has the easiest story to follow of any Street Fighter title, because of... the story mode, which is optimized for attempting to tell stories! Each character has a little backstory vignette, and then the General Story mode, of course, actually tells the full story of the game.

SNK

• The Orochi Saga, which makes up the first several King of Fighters titles. 94, the first game, was kind of retroactively fit into this greater saga which otherwise takes place in games 95-97. 98 is the "dream match" capper to the series, which is all about gameplay.
• The NESTS saga, which makes up the next chunk of King of Fighters games: 99-01. 02 is the capper.
• The Ash Crimson saga, which is makes up the last phase of the King of Fighters storyline, including 2003-XIII (minus XII.) Yeah, yeah—I know that a fourth saga has started, but with only one game (of presumably three) released yet, it seems premature to attempt to summarize the story at all.

LOW PRIORITY

Capcom

• Darkstalkers (all three.) While I see cameos or even major uses of a few Darkstalkers characters as part of my own Capcom-SNK crossover symbiosis, I don't think that summarizing the story of the series overall is nearly as important. But I'd like to get to it eventually.

SNK

• Fatal Fury. To be honest, the storyline for Fatal Fury isn't really all that complex, even if you get into the Real Bout games and the scrolls of immortality, or whatever exactly they were called. Besides, half of the games in the series are dream matches without an official story, and several of those that remain basically tell the exact same story, just with a slightly rotating cast of supporting characters. This becomes a bit of backstory for some of the King of Fighters characters, and to be honest, they're not the most important King of Fighters characters anyway, especially in terms of KOF story.
• Art of Fighting. Whatever is true for Fatal Fury is, if anything, even more true for Art of Fighting. Technically, Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury take place in the same timeline/continuity, while the King of Fighters games take place in an alternate continuity that just happened to have a lot of the same backstory beats, albeit compressed in time. If you imagine the situation similar to what Marvel was doing in the 00s, then the Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury timeline could be seen as the "normal" lines of comic strips, while the King of Fighters was the Ultimate Imprint; same characters and basically the same stories, but retold in an updated and different fashion. Except while in Marvel's case the most recent Secret Wars ends the Ultimate Universe and folds some of its characters into the "main" universe, in SNK's case, the opposite happened, and the KOF timeline is the only one that's still active. This was largely, but not entirely, true even before SNK's bankruptcy. Of the original timeline, only the occasional Fatal Fury title still limped along next to the KOF timeline.