Game #896: Garou - Mark of the Wolves

  The true king of fighters.

 Lemme tell you a little secret.... Garou: Mark of the Wolves is one of my favorite fighting games of all time. I've longed to own a legit version of the game, so I'm really glad Limited Run Games decided to release this one.

 Look, I don't think Fatal Fury is one of SNK's best IPs. I grew up with a bootleg Famicom version of Fatal Fury 2, which I'd play alongside bootleg Famicom versions of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. But as iconic as even this Chinese cheap 8-bit renditions of MK and SFII were... FF had no staying power, with me anyways. Cheng, the fat guy, was memorable because of how tough and cheap he was, and I sorta liked using Kim and his bicycle kicks, but that's about it. What's more, I never got to play Fatal Fury on the Arcades. Regardless, eventually I got into Emulation and discovered the SNES/Genesis ports of the first couple of games, before graduating to the big Arcade releases. I think the first time I really liked Fatal Fury was with Real Bout 2. The game looked amazing, and both Rick Strout and Li Xianfei were brilliant designs. It wasn't enough for Fatal Fury to make it into my favorites, however. And then.... I came across this weird game called Garou: Mark of the Wolves.

 It was love at first sight, as this game has some of the best character designs in the series. Not all characters are winners, I'm biased against kid characters, so I hate Hokutomaru, Freeman looks like Benimaru with his hair down and while Kevin is supposed to be Blue Mary's counterpart, he looks like another take on Terry, with his huge confident smile and his blonde American looks. Those characters aside, everyone else is a winner. I love the fact that Terry grew up, and he looks the best he has ever looked. I loved having successors to the characters from Fatal Fury(And Ryo, from Art of Fighting) as to let the plot move forward, but above all, Rock Howard is my favorite fighting game character EVER. EVER. He is EVERYTHING I look for in a fighting game character. And the animation? It's some of the best SNK had ever made by the time.

 Thankfully, my love for the game isn't just skin deep. I love the T.O.P. system, basically, you pick one third of your life gauge, be it its beginning, the middle or the final third, and once your health drops into that third you enter T.O.P.(Unless it's the first third, in which case you already start in T.O.P.). As long as your health remains inside this third, you get health regeneration as well as access to a powerful T.O.P. move that differs between characters, so it's sort of like a come back mechanic, but not busted. That aside, the game system is pretty fast, which I really like, and it added things like 'Just Guarding' and 'Guard Crush' to the series. If anything, I'm disappointed this re-release has no tutorial or manual to let players learn how to play the game and about its original systems, like T.O.P.

 While it's more or less a straight NeoGeo home console port, it does have a few neat extras, like a few art pieces, a few bonus modes like Survival and VS, as well as making the two boss characters, Kain and Grant, playable from the start. It's not much, but hey, it's nice. They also retain SNK's delicious original wonky translation.

 So far, so good. Great game, plays well, a bunch of extras... But no matter how you slice it, this is a 50mb rom inside a 50GB blu-ray disc. It's pretty darn egregious how Limited Run Games are releasing these roms by themselves. They could've easily made a 'SNK Fighters compilation', heck, I'd take even a Fatal Fury only rerelease. Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that I finally get to own this game, but it feels sorta underwhelming.

 9.0