It was only a few weeks ago that DFM|Go1 won Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves at Combo Breaker 2025 against AG|Reynald in one of the most dominant grand finals performance we’ve ever seen.
The victory was earned while playing as Marco Rodrigues, a character Go1 has become known for in the game since its release and while nobody considers the character weak, he hasn’t seen as much representation as the main top tiers such as Hotaru, Kain and Hokutomaru. As it turns out, that representation is about to shrink even further as Go1 himself announced he will be dropping the character.
The other day, we received the latest Fatal Fury patch 1.1.7 which had some character changes in it, though none of them aimed at Marco specifically.
Despite this, Go1 declared on X that he will be dropping the character. You see, one big change that happened thanks to the new patch is that the PlayStation 5 version, which is tournament standard, now has less input delay — and as it turns out, this is the sticking point for Go1.
You can see his original post below, followed by translations to English by me.
PS5めちゃくちゃ軽くなったおかげでマルコの中下段が見てからガード可能になった・・・ｗ
ゲームとしては最高なことなので良いことやね！！
キャラはカイン一本でいきます。マルコいままでありがとう・・・。
— DFM/PWS / GO1 (@GO13151) June 3, 2025
“The PS5 version became much smoother, so now you can block Marco’s overhead on reaction…” the champion begins. Not surprising that this massively hurts the character’s chances, despite not being a character specific change.
Go1 follows up by saying “This is a good thing, because it’s for the best for the game itself!” showing that he believes it’s overall a positive despite affecting his chosen character negatively.
To the likely disappointment of any Kyokugenryu followers, he then adds “From now on, I will be playing only Kain. Marco, thank you for everything up until now…”
Although it’s still very early in the life of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, the meta has been viewed as fairly stagnant with certain top tier characters dominating the high level matches.
Both Evo Japan 2025 and the online leaderboard have been predominately led by Hotaru, Hokutomaru and Kain and while the former two received a few nerfs in the latest patch, they’re still looking to stay quite strong.
That said, last weekend we saw one major tournament for the game won by a completely different character — Headstomper 2025 in Malmö, Sweden was won by Navi|DarkAngel’s Terry and while Battle Arena Melbourne 15 in Melbourne, Australia saw T1|ZJZ’s Hotaru take home the victory, the other finalist WBG|Poongko put up a very good fight with Gato as well.
As the game goes on we’ll hopefully see more and more character representation, but now that Go1 has gotten off of the Marco train we’ll simply have to hope that someone else decides to pick up where he left off — despite the now reactable overhead.