If there’s one thing oozing from the aesthetics and direction of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves it’s the 1990s vibe it brings with it. For someone like myself who grew up during this time, it has a pleasant and nostalgic effect and featuring Street Fighter guests Ken and Chun-Li in the roster only helped to enhance that feeling.
Now that we have some very heavy teasing of Fist of the North Star’s Kenshiro joining the game’s roster, it made me think of other characters which heavily exemplify the 1990s which would be cool to add to the game, which led to me writing this piece.
After much contemplation, I narrowed it down to six characters from different mediums, though the heavy emphasis was of course on video games, but anything that entered the cultural zeitgeist around the late 1980s or general 1990s was in consideration during my decision-making.
I would like to give a special shoutout to two areas which I ended up not including in the list.
One of them was Power Rangers, which would’ve been a great pick but due to licensing and rights issues with the whole IP itself since it’s based on Japanese Sentai series would make it completely unfeasible to realistically include even if they wanted to.
The second one is pro wrestling, which would be an amazing fit when you’re thinking of popular ’90s things, but after the backlash SNK faced when including real-life people Cristiano Ronaldo and Salvatore Ganacci, it just doesn’t feel like a road worth going down (I was thinking of including The Undertaker in the list, for the record).
Now, onto the actual list itself and what ’90s goodness I thought would be a fun fit for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves alongside the likely, but not officially confirmed, Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star.
Although it actually never even released in Japan, Mortal Kombat was huge in the west during the ’90s and would be a really fun property to cross over with, especially given their shared fighting game history around the same time while being from completely different parts of the world.
Of course, a large part of the appeal of Mortal Kombat is just how gory and violent it is, but I do think that a select few characters such as Sub-Zero could probably be done decently without having to lean in to the excessive violence, partly due to ice powers letting you get creative with violence without showing its full graphic nature.
This is probably a completely impossible pick given that Mortal Kombat is just about entirely unknown in Japan and SNK are a Japanese company, but looking at it from a purely 1990s lens this actually would be a real cool addition.
Even moreso considering it’s usually NetherRealm who put other crossovers in their games all the time. It’d be fun to see someone else bring their characters in for once.
Now, granted, this was already done by the aforementioned NetherRealm in Injustice 2, but the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are just way too iconic of a ’90s staple to pass up.
Similar to Mortal Kombat, they weren’t necessarily a huge deal in Japan so their likelihood is pretty limited, but especially if you look at the cartoon versions which popularized them back in the day, their colorful nature and personalities would fit perfectly for a place like South Town.
One potential drawback of picking them would be that you’d probably have to put extra development time in to make them all part of the roster, or incorporate them as some kind of multi-character moveset deal since only including one of them would be a huge shame.
Injustice 2 managed this well and did a great job with the character, but the question is if it’d really be worth the extra time in development for SNK if they chose to look in their direction.
When it comes to this pick, though, I’m actually not sure if the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ever really took off in Japan at all.
They’d certainly be more known than Mortal Kombat is, but I wager this is probably a bit too much of a western pick to really have any chance, unfortunately.
In the ’90s, superheroes were seeing a major resurgence in popularity largely thanks to cartoons and one of the very biggest characters around for it was Marvel Comics’ most famous character, your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
It didn’t hurt either that one of the most famous antagonists to Spider-Man, Venom, came around just at the end of the ’80s meaning that he had his limelight through much of the ’90s as well.
The comics had their ups and downs during this period (Clone Saga, anyone?), but Spider-Man was very much a cultural juggernaut and for a game which leans so heavily into ’90s style and pizzazz, he’d be a great fit.
Now, I get that superheroes aren’t exactly an instant fit for Fatal Fury’s world, but comic books sure as hell are so you could easily make the story into the characters imagining they’re fighting their favorite hero or some similar nonsense to make it decently believable.
Considering both Capcom and Arc System Works have now had their hand at making Spider-Man in a fighting game, it’d be extra fun to see SNK give their own spin on the character, too.
Also, despite very much being a western character, Spider-Man actually enjoys considerable popularity in Japan as well, so it would be a pretty good pick from an international perspective too.
I would wager that Spider-Man is probably the most expensive character to get any rights to on this list so that alone makes him unlikely, but this is pretty much just a dream pick scenario.
The ’90s were the dawn of not just fighting games, but 3D fighting games and largely 3D gaming as a whole. Even though Virtua Fighter was first, Tekken really exploded onto the market, especially with Tekken 3.
Given that Tekken 3 in particular was such a huge hit, it felt only fitting to opt for Jin rather than Kazuya in my mind, and although we have seen Jin fight in 2D fighters before in Street Fighter X Tekken, this is another case where seeing SNK take a crack at the character would be super interesting.
It’s also worth noting that Tekken and Fatal Fury are both 4-button fighters as far as normals go, though with very different purposes since in Tekken each button corresponds to a specific limb while in Fatal Fury, you have weak and strong attacks for both punches and kicks.
Seeing how they’d navigate this when crafting a moveset would be super interesting and given that they already have Street Fighter characters in the roster, it’d be expanding the roster into a bigger general fighting game crossover, kind of like Super Smash Bros. has.
While Fist of the North Star took the late ’80s and early ’90s by storm in Japan with some of the manliest content ever imagined, Sailor Moon was on the other side of the aisle focusing more heavily on appealing to girly sensibilities instead — but make no mistake, they were both gigantic.
Since we’re likely getting Kenshiro in Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, what better fit as another guest than Sailor Moon herself, probably the most famous woman in all of Japanese animation?
She’s most definitely a staple of the ’90s, she comes from a series which is centered on battling and fighting and for an even more fun connection, much like Fist of the North Star does, Sailor Moon also has an old fighting game which still sees tournament play today with Sailor Moon Super S.
Out of every character I’ve put on the list, this bizarrely might be the most likely one since it’s a globally recognizable and famous character which had a massive presence in its native Japan, meaning that the developers are much more aware of her cultural significance.
Honestly, a fighting game where you can pit Kenshiro and Sailor Moon against each other sounds like such a slam dunk I’m surprised it hasn’t been done before.
Though, maybe we’d have to make sure Kenshiro can’t make her explode and instead just defeat her normally if he wins. Which, honestly, if Kenshiro is the mystery character joining Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves’ second season as he’s been hinted to be, is probably going to be the case for when he fights the current cast anyway.
Okay, I know this pick is pretty off-the-wall in a lot of ways, but when I was trying to figure out picks for this list, this is the character that kept crawling into my brain and it’s really for one simple reason. There is no character that is more quintessentially ’90s than Sonic the Hedgehog. There just isn’t.
Obviously, if you were thinking of a Sega character for SNK to try to get into Fatal Fury, almost anyone would be looking at a Virtua Fighter character and honestly, those make way more sense for a variety of reasons. But in this list of mine which is going purely on “how ’90s is it”, Sonic is just impossible to ignore.
Given Sonic’s size and his general move pool, he’d probably be absolute hell to make work in a traditional fighting game, especially matched against characters who are sized like normal humans, but goddamn if it wouldn’t be absolutely radical if they did end up doing it.
Sonic may not be as much of a juggernaut in Japan as he has been worldwide, but he is most definitely known and is still once of Sega’s core mascots. With Sega making an active effort to increase their presence in the gaming space again, largely by bringing back older IPs, as well as their intent on getting back into the fighting game market with Virtua Fighter, this would actually be a great pick just to solidify their position.
Again, we all know that a Virtua Fighter pick would make more sense for business purposes and general fanbase alignment with fighting games as a whole. But Sonic would be a lot more appealing to 10-year old me, and that’s who this list is catering to, at the end of the day.
What it all comes down to is that I just wanted to see what kind of stuff that really shaped my childhood in the 1990s (without going too extreme in their power sets — hence why no Dragon Ball on the list) could feasibly be put into a game like Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves which is essentially pure distilled 1990s in video game form, now that Kenshiro seems to be on the table.
Do you agree with any of the picks on my list? Have any particular 1990s nostalgia wishes of your own? Sound off in the comments.