Garou: Mark of the Wolves Review

Just Defend is the mechanic everyone remembers and it earns the reputation: block at the last possible frame and you recover a sliver of health, gain guard cancel options and turn defence into offence without spending a meter. Around it sits the T.O.P. system, a slice of your life bar you assign before the match that grants extra damage, regeneration and a unique attack once you drop into it, so a losing round always carries a threat.

Garou threw out nearly the entire Fatal Fury roster to do this, keeping Terry alone and building the rest from scratch, and the new cast is startlingly good: Rock Howard fighting with his father's moves and hating that he knows them, B. Jenet's pirate footsies, Kevin Rian's police tackles. The animation is the finest SNK ever produced, with idle frames and clothing that move like the artists were given time, and Southtown's rain soaked backgrounds still read better than most modern 2D. The story mode is thin, a tournament ladder with a paragraph of ending text per fighter, and SNK's collapse meant the sequel it obviously wanted never arrived. People still run it at tournaments twenty five years on, which settles most of the argument.