Even before its release in 2025, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves has faced controversy. The revival of the long-dormant Fatal Fury series came after publisher SNK was purchased by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, and it\u2019s suffered from accusations of sportswashing ever since. Now, SNK and CotW are getting called out for releasing a trailer full of alleged AI slop.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, SNK released a trailer for Fatal Fury: CotW\u2019s upcoming second season, which launches on January 22. The trailer promises a pretty robust release schedule for the game\u2019s anniversary with monthly character drops over a six-month period. Returning characters Kim Jae Hoon, Nightmare Geese, Blue Mary, and Wolfgang Krauser are slated to join the game\u2019s roster, too. However, the excitement of fan-favorites returning has been almost entirely overshadowed by the game\u2019s latest trailer incorporating apparent AI-generated clips.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m stepping down after this trailer, I\u2019m thankful for what you guys did for us and all but this is too much for me to deal with, this is against what I stand for,\u201d a moderator wrote in their parting message to the official Discord server<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to see why. The AI stuff is just really, really ugly. The shots of cities feature skyscrapers with the most inconsistent windows I\u2019ve ever seen, and something about the character introduction clips just looks\u2026very off. (It\u2019s almost like SNK knew the clips looked bad because half of them are overlaid with big walls of text and graffiti-like flourishes.)<\/p>\n i was a SNK moderator for 6 years and official Cotw Discord for a year, this trailer made me step down after all those years, i don’t \/ i can’t promote a product that i don’t support,thanks for all of those years friends, it was fun \ud83e\udee1 bsky.app\/profile\/wari\u2026<\/p>\n \u2014 Spicy Sauce (@spicysauce.bsky.social)<\/a> 2026-01-15T16:11:59.809Z<\/a><\/p>\n It also just seems wildly inconsistent with the game itself. CotW has a pretty vibrant cel-shaded art style, and the trailer\u2019s AI shots ignore that entirely for a false sense of edginess that looks pretty corny when juxtaposed with clips of colorful, cartoonish gameplay. The studio didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n SNK was purchased by the Saudi Public Investment Fund in 2022<\/a>. Despite promises that the ownership change would have no impact<\/a>, CotW doesn\u2019t seem to have been exempt from the effects of this. The country\u2019s sovereign wealth fund also owns Al-Nassr FC, and its soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo<\/a> was later added to CotW as a playable character. It\u2019s a shame because the game itself is decent.\u00a0 It even took home the Best Fighting Game award<\/a> at this year\u2019s Game Awards.<\/p>\n SNK\u2019s problematic ties to Saudi Arabia aren\u2019t going anywhere in the future, but it could avoid making things worse by not piling gen AI junk on top of them. This also doesn\u2019t bode well for Saudi Arabia\u2019s other massive game purchase. It\u2019s currently on track to own Electronic Arts by the end of the summer<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even before its release in 2025, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves has faced controversy. The revival of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":410229,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,143930,131,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-410228","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-fatal-fury","12":"tag-saudi-arabia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/410229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}