JAPAN GAMING & ENTERTAINMENT 
Mikey and Draken from the manga and anime Tokyo Revengers joined FATAL FURY: City of the Wolves on October 22. The catch is that neither character has a flashy special move in the source material. SNK’s development team said in an interview that they went through trial and error on how to present the pair’s attacks as fighting game specials. The game runs on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC (Steam and Epic Games Store).
Manjiro “Mikey” Sano is a speed type built around kicks, and Ken “Draken” Ryuguji is a power type. Mikey’s moves combine dust kicked up at his feet with red and black effects, while Draken’s use pink, his signature color in the source material. The English voices are Aleks Le for Mikey and Sean Chiplock for Draken. The team said it looked for candidates among manga and anime, and picked Tokyo Revengers to win new fans for the series.
Laocorn’s addition traces back to director Masami Obari taking on new Fatal Fury anime footage for Season 3. Obari has worked on Fatal Fury anime before, and Laocorn comes from the Fatal Fury theatrical film. The game design director believes fans who saw that film wanted to see Terry Bogard and Laocorn face off in a fighting game.
Characters the team wants to add down the line include Tsugumi Sendo, Li Xiangfei, and Ryuji Yamazaki. Rick Strowd and Duck King have devoted fans too, the team noted. And Iori Yagami? The team was careful, saying it could neither say there was a chance nor rule him out. The team’s general policy is not to add characters who fight with weapons.
The Switch 2 target was 60fps. During optimization, a Geese mirror match with REV Accel active could drop the frame rate to about 54fps, according to the lead programmer at HEXADRIVE, which handled the Switch 2 port. The fix was to reduce the polygon count of the characters shown as afterimages. The afterimages carry a blue filter, so the visual difference is hard to spot. The Switch 2 version’s director said the main goal was to bring in new players. The game design director said it plays almost the same as it does on other platforms.
With even the afterimages’ polygon count tuned, the Switch 2 version looks set to keep the mind games going with a feel close to the other versions, even when moves overlap.