SNK’s long-running crossover fighter franchise The King of Fighters returns in the first major fighting game of the year, The King of Fighter XV. Bringing together the rosters of Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury for three-on-three team battles, The King of Fighters has already announced DLC characters, one of the most eagerly anticipated teams being from the 1999 Neo Geo game Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Garou itself holds a particularly important place in The King of Fighters mythos, as the ninth and final game in the Fatal Fury series.
Garou is set approximately a decade after the events of 1995’s Real Bout Fatal Fury, which saw Fatal Fury‘s popular protagonist Terry Bogard kill South Town’s powerful crime lord Geese Howard and finally avenge his adoptive father. Terry adopts Geese’s young son Rock Howard to take on as his own martial arts protege, Rock serving as the protagonist in Garou. Wearing a similar outfit as his mentor and surrogate father, Rock boasts a martial arts style combining those of Geese’s and Terry’s. Terry himself, though, is the only returning playable character from the Fatal Fury series — an older Terry sporting a slightly different move set than he had in past Fatal Fury titles.
Garou saw a new high-stakes martial arts tournament take place in South Town, run by Rock’s evil uncle Kain R. Heinlein and his loyal lackey Abel Cameron. It featured a whole host of new fighters from around the world with their own unique fighting styles. The developers actively sought to differentiate Garou from Fatal Fury, with an added emphasis on balancing the roster and fighting system, including gameplay mechanics that allowed players to counteract or perform special attacks when their health meters had decreased to a certain point. While Garou was widely acclaimed, it was only released in North America for the Dreamcast until it was included on an SNK compilation in 2007.
The Garou DLC pack in The King of Fighters XV features a team consisting of Rock, Gato and Bonne Jenet joining in on the crossover fighting action. Gato is the older brother of fellow Garou playable character Hotaru Futuba, with Gato constantly searching for stronger opponents, not unlike not unlike Street Fighter‘s Ryu. Jenet is an English pirate that has come to South Town in search of treasure and employs projectile attacks to keep her opponents at bay. Rock’s playable appearance in a main King of Fighters title was The King of Fighters XIV as a DLC character — with the events of the game non-canonical with the wider Fatal Fury storyline — though Rock has also appeared as a guest fighter in other SNK crossover titles.
In the intervening 20 years since the launch of Garou, there has been fan and developer interest in continuing the fighting game’s story, including that of longtime SNK director Nobuyuki Kuroki, who created the character of Rock Howard. In the interim, Rock has appeared in various animated adaptations of the Fatal Fury and The King of Fighters franchises while SNK has continued its fighting game development on The King of Fighters crossover series rather than its individual properties. If there was ever a Fatal Fury revival to take place, Rock and the storyline established in Garou serves as a prime place for the franchise to return to.
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