Some info on Art of Fighting
Submitted by Gaming Briefs and Nostalgia Bits
Here’s a special post about another notable series of fighting games SNK made, that was meant to take place in South Town a couple years prior to Fatal Fury. It began with the game in the following recording:
The story is about Ryo Sakazaki’s teen sister, Yuri, being kidnapped and his and her boyfriend Robert Garcia’s quest to find her around South Town. Though not officially revealed here, as it turned out in the sequel, the mysterious Mr. Karate, hidden behind the odd mask, is really Ryo and Yuri’s father, Takuma. The only character here who did not make another appearance in the sequels was Todo, probably because the designers didn’t really come up with anything really special for him.
The second game was made about 15 months after this, and here’s a recording:
And click here and here for the endings to all characters. Now, it’s an all out tournament, as 12 fighters are presented here, including Yuri herself, who’s now taken to learning what they call Kyokugenryu karate. And Takuma was officially revealed here as the man behind the mask. What exactly happened was that yes, Mr. Big did kidnap her and tie her up in a warehouse where she luckily escaped from, and came back to the karate gym to tell her father, who, at the time, was working for the mob but wanted to back out, the reason why they were targeting him. Now, Ryo is a hero, and his sister is becoming a rising star as well.
It was in this game where it was established more clearly that this story concept took place a couple years before Fatal Fury’s stars came into the spotlight, and Terry Bogard can be seen in Temjin’s ending when he’s a youngster. But what really takes the cake is having Geese Howard here as a boss who can be reached by winning without losing a single round against other opponents. As you can see if you’ve reached him, he’s younger, and has a different fighting style than what you’d see in the Fatal Fury games. There’s an ending for him as well where you see that he’s giving the order to wipe out Rance Bogard, the father of Terry and Andy, thus leading to the Bogards search to avenge his death years later.
An interesting fact: this game led to a minor controversy between SNK and Capcom, as the latter argued that it was a ripoff of Final Fight! That was apparently why SNK changed most of the cast in the third game, which can be seen here:
And click here to view the endings for the cast. This time, the tournament is supposed to be set around Mexico, as several characters compete for championship. Most interesting thing here is the addition of Kasumi Todo, the daughter of the guy named Todo from the first game, to the cast here.
After this, though the dispute between SNK and Capcom had died down, no more games in this series were really made, though some of the leading stars did become members of the King of Fighters series, where timeline for Art of Fighting to Fatal Fury was ignored, all for the sake of it. That’s something I’ll try and get around to posting about later on.
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