It’s been a little more than a month now since SNK shocked the fighting game community when they announced a brand new and long awaited entry in the Fatal Fury/Garou series. We learned bit more about the upcoming title a few weeks after, but now it looks like we’re going to get a whole lot more information in regard to this fighting game. In an interview with Video Game Chronicles, SNK Director and Producer Yasuyuki Oda unveiled a bevy of information about the next Fatal Fury/Garou game, as well as his own personal perspective on how the company reshaped itself prior to his return.
Perhaps one of the biggest questions about this new entry is the actual name. Oda states in the interview that this game will not be called Garou 2, and that it will instead be more akin to the original Fatal Fury titles from the old school Neo Geo systems. There are also more than 10 of the original developers who worked on Garou: Mark of the Wolves that are working on this project. Oda also touches on the original leaked documents of Garou 2 before it was scrapped altogether, possibly insinuating that those features might be added into the project.
Oda also mentions that the game will have a brand new and fully 3D art style render instead of a retro look. Oda briefly goes into this and points to his work on the newer King of Fighters as a point of reference, ” It’s just a natural part of development that you kind of have to evolve along with the platform.” As for the main roster of fighters, Oda is staying tight lipped for now, but when asked about guest fighters from other franchises being added to the project his response was “I would say the possibility is definitely there.” Even if that’s not a confirmation, it’s still an exciting prospect to imagine that other well known fighters outside of the Fatal Fury universe could be playable in the game.
Oda states that ever since he returned to the company in 2014, his main goal has been to bring the series back into the fighting game community consciousness. “When I re-joined SNK back in 2014, I’d been trying for a while to convince management… everything from putting up my own design documents for a new game!” Oda said. Oda also stated that it took a while due to the majority of the upper management unsure of the “golden era of fighting games” and if they would be readily accepted. Thankfully the announcement at EVO was a resounding success and now every fighting game fan’s 20-plus-year-old dream is going to come true.