Fatal Fury 3: Road to the Final Victory

Review Introduction:

Story: 📖

Gameplay: 🕹️

Fatal Fury 3 plays spectacularly. You can tell the team working on the game really wanted to make huge improvements on all of the game systems. This entry is full of new ideas and refined game mechanics. FF3 FEELS great to play and the series can not be called a Street Fighter clone at this point.

Oh you want HOPS? FF3 has hops. Air blocking? Yeah buddy, we got air blocking too. Combos? Yeah there are real combos now – known as “combination arts” for some odd reason. I'm still using the same exact 3 hit combos I learned in 1992 so the new combo system was a little awkward for me to learn at first. Each character has very specific normals that can combo into each other just like the traditional chain combos seen in games like Street Fighter Alpha. In my opinion, the combo system in the Real Bout series is much more forgiving and feels so much better for a scrub like me, but this is definitely good.

Fatal Fury 3 introduces a new ranking system which gives you a letter grade based on your performance, and may be the first example of this idea in a fighting game. The score determines which bosses you face at the end of the game. If you score poorly, you may only fight Geese Howard and Ryuji but if you're strong enough you can also face both of the twins and receive the true ending. Andy and myself are consistently B students so we don't always make it to the end, which is fine because we both just pretend we're winners.

The lane system has been replaced with what they call the “over-sway system”. While the lane switching from the previous games gave the series a little bit of it's own identity, I never felt like SNK implemented the system in a way that was necessary or fun. Yeah it was actually annoying half the time. The new over-sway system really adds a lot of movement to the traditional game-play and you can now sidestep into a plane and dash behind an opponent – delivering devastating punishment to someone who just haphazardly threw out a fireball.

You can now dash backwards and forwards in all planes which is really nice. The sway system isn't as precise as I would like and it's not as responsive as the King of Fighters dodge mechanic. Once you get accommodated to the over-sway system, it feels less clunky but you have to learn how to read the opponent and add plane swapping to your mix-up strategies.

As a little bonus, the AES version does have unlock-able bosses. As much as I hate his pajamas, Jin Chonrei is actually really fun to play. His game-play feels a little like Jubei so I can't complain too much, but he has the personality of unflavored oatmeal.

Fans of the previous games will be relieved to learn that the AI is finally NORMAL. After some practice the it isn't too difficult to beat the game. Sure you'll get your butt whooped by the bosses but it's not impossible like Fatal Fury Special. The difficulty is far more satisfying when you don't have to rely on cheap tactics.

In the end everything feels really good in Fatal Fury 3 but it also feels like the game is struggling to find an identity. There is so much good stuff going on here and the game is absolutely ahead of it's time compared to many of the contenders from the same year. The game-play is both deep and unrefined which is acceptable, because there really wasn't any one game out there that had combined all of these ideas together yet.

Graphics: 👾

SNK obviously put a lot of effort into redrawing the sprites and adding tons of animation to this release. The graphics are leaps and bounds ahead of the previous entry and most of the characters look amazing. The sprite-work is on the same level as Capcom's Xmen: Children of the Atom, which released months prior.

The overall presentation is great with large detailed character portraits and the coolest map screen, which has little chibi versions of the characters traversing between locations. The animated intro on the demo is one of the best you can find on the Neo Geo and it is easily on the same level as Pulstar's intro.

The quality of the backgrounds vary, but most of them are great and up to the usual SNK quality. Joe's training grounds take place in a swamp with a Geese Howard training dummy ominously hanging from a tree. Terry's fight takes place dockside and the colors really pop with his pet monkey literally hitting the play button on a boombox at the start of the match. Oh, Terry has a pet monkey now - as was the style in America at the time. I swear we had an absurd amount of ape companions in all media for a few years. Even Clint Eastwood had one!

Of course one out of five battles MUST take place at the train tracks in an SNK game. Ryuji's level has a giant train speeding by in the background as you battle! One of my absolute favorite levels in the game.

Overall everything looks great but I feel like Blue Mary and Geese Howard don't look nearly as good as some of the other characters, but everything here is still an improvement.

Sound: 🔊

This is definitely one of my favorite soundtracks on the Neo Geo and it THUMPS HARD, much like the Art of Fighting 2 soundtrack. Trust me, if you pulled up to a red light and there was a carload of gang members next to you, they wouldn't even make eye contact if you were blasting the Franco Bash theme. My own family won't even look at me when I jam out to Joe Higashi's theme – it's that badass.

Franco Bash's theme (South Town Air port) is the most punchy (HA, I kill me!), as it was made by the same person who wrote much of the Art of fighting 2 music. It's hard hitting with a lot of synth and it's reminiscent of Mickey's AOF2 theme. Sokaku's theme is just sublime and you have absolutely never heard a flute rock so hard in your life.

Every theme matches the personality of character perfectly and there really isn't a bad track in the entire game.

The sound design itself is crisp and beefy with clean and legible speech. Terry can finally speak English and never says anything unintelligible like “ground wheat” or “rising taco” for once in his life. The announcer never gets on my nerves like the dork in Real Bout Special either.

All of the sound is great and I'd say it is a shining example of prefect sound design.

Fun Factor: ✨

Fatal Fury 3 is a blast to play. Now that the oppressive AI is toned down compared to other SNK games we are left with a much more enjoyable experience. The rank system gives you a reason to improve your skills so you can see the real endings and fight all of the bosses.

The presentation is great and the game has more of a fun and silly atmosphere compared to other franchises. The game controls well and it's fast paced. Even though I love Fatal Fury Special, this game sure is a hell of a lot more fun with one or two players.

I'm sorry Fatal Fury Special, I have just found someone younger and flashier and she has big ol COMBINATION ARTS.

Conclusion: 📊

Despite receiving a decent amount of praise by Japanese reviews and also initially performing rather well in the arcades, it seems that Fatal Fury 3 just got buried in an avalanche of much more graphically impressive games. American gamers only received a Windows 95 port of the game for some reason, dooming the game to obscurity on this side of the globe until other ports appeared years too late.

In my opinion, Fatal Fury 3 is an absolute underappreciated gem. It is also completely understandable that the game has been lost in the mix with so many flashier 3d titles and top tier games being released during the mid to late nineties. Heck, I still had a hard time getting around to playing Fatal Fury 3 because I'm still playing some of the other games that released the same year!

Although the Real Bout games refine the concepts presented here, I do believe Fatal Fury 3 is worth checking out. It's a little rough of course but once you get used to the game-play it definitely stands on it's own compared to many other titles of the time. Really, the only reason I can't give the game a higher score is due to all of the other perfect fighting games available on the system.