SNK Announces Fatal Fury: CotW Season 2 With AI Slop Trailer

Following the recent leak, SNK themselves have now announced the upcoming Season 2 for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. This quick announcement makes it more likely that the previous leak was simply a result of an article being released slightly ahead of time.

In terms of purely game-related changes, there is a lot for SNK fans to be happy about. There will be six characters: Kim Jae Hoon, Nightmare Geese, Blue Mary, Wolfgang Krauser, and two secret slots. One new character will release every month, from January to July.

The game balance is also undergoing major changes with the start of season two, with changes for every character on top of wider system adjustments.

Sadly, the news is also offset by the way SNK chose to announce this. Their big new trailer for Season 2 is, well... it's just obvious AI slop.

While the trailer shows glimpses of gameplay for all the new characters, it is intercut with AI generated "live-action" shots. The whole thing stinks of those early videos where every other media was "reimagined" as some sort of 80s dark fantasy or action movie.

The visuals also bear a very strong resemblance to a recent fan-made Tekken AI video that Harada lambasted in one of his responses on Twitter. One of their recent shorts faced very similar allegations, but it was harder to tell if that video was outright AI generated, or simply AI upscaled, which was a thing well before the GenAI boom.

It is frankly embarrassing to see this type of marketing from a company that has a history of very talented and rather prolific artists. The history of King of Fighters, Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, and other SNK fighters is strongly tied to great visuals and their in-house talent. Hell, they literally had Masami Obari, the legendary animator, working on the recent teasers. How did we go from that to lazy AI garbage?

While YouTube no longer shows the dislike ratios, the unofficial browser extension that attempts to restore the functionality is showing a ratio of 9.4k likes versus 14k dislikes. Even if it's off, it's obvious that a lot of people are not happy about this.

Scotia even made an edit that you can watch without being stared at by hyperrealistic AI Terry Bogard.

SNK might release a statement given such an overtly negative response, but it's going to have a hard time trying to salvage the company's reputation. It's genuinely depressing, because City of the Wolves at its core is a well-made fighting game. 

But it's also a fighting game owned by people who murder dissenters and use slave labor. It's a fighting game that features a football player with a history of sexual assault allegations, who likely only made it in alongside the "funny DJ man" thanks to the Saudi royal family connections. Now it's also a fighting game that uses shitty AI generated videos to represent what is meant to be a love letter to Fatal Fury.

Regardless of how good it is, SNK is not making it easier for people to play City of the Wolves when they can also pick good fighting games that aren't saddled with a lot of ethical concerns.