There’s a lot of money on the line this weekend with the Esports World Cup 2025 kicking off its fighting game leg for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves.
Now that the top 8 finalists have been decided, we’ve gone through and gathered up the character stats for the big tournament thus far.
Fatal Fury’s EWC run began with 16 of the best players in the world, which showcased some of the character diversity issues the game has been having since launch.
Early on, Hotaru and Kain were the biggest threats on the block, but that seems to have shifted slightly now.
We only ended up seeing seven different characters across the 16 competitors with Billy and Kain being the most popular of the bunch with five players maining them each.
Hokutomaru was the only other fighter to have multiple representatives while Hotaru, Terry and Gato only had one each.
And then ONIC|NYChrisG busted out the surprise Salvatore Gannaci pick to try and advance, but it didn’t work out in the end.
• Billy – 5 (1)
• Kain – 5
• Hokutomaru – 3 (1)
• Hotaru – 1
• Terry – 1
• Gato – 1
• Salvatore – 0 (1)
After the second day of action, they’ve now whittled down the competition to the final top 8 featuring KSG|Xiaohai, Yesports|RB, CAG|Fenrich, Navi|DarkAngel, DFM|Go1, Falcons|E.T., Falcons|Mok and Falcons|Xyzzy.
Unsurprisingly, it’s looking like Billy and Kain are again going to be the most represented characters with three players each moving on to the big stage tomorrow.
We also have one Hokutomaru main left in Mok, and DarkAngel is currently the dark horse holding down the fort as the lone Terry.
There is a chance we could see some more surprise picks for the finals, but this is the way things are shaping up now.
You can’t really blame the players for going with who they feel the best characters are when there’s a whopping $300,000 grand prize on the line though it of course would have been cooler to see a wider spread of fighters here at the end.
So hopefully SNK can work to rebalance the game some more in the near future to freshen up the competition a bit at the highest levels.
You can check out the top 8 character usage stats for Fatal Fury thus far at EWC ahead of tomorrow’s finals.
• Billy – 3
• Kain – 3
• Hokutomaru – 1 (1)
• Terry – 1
Note: Numbers in parenthesis represent secondary / side character choices.