Fatal Fury released several months after Street Fighter II and SNK has been playing second fiddle ever since. There's a lot of irony to unpack that the father of Street Fighter left Capcom and went on to create this right as his former projection became a worldwide phenomenon, but that story has been told and retold countless times at this point.
Refocusing on the game itself, I think it's a decent fighting game, and certainly better than most that had come out by 1991, but it's impossible to evaluate this game without comparing it to its main competitor that had come out just months before. There are fewer characters, fewer combos, and the two track stage design really doesn't add anything to the gameplay here.
The draw of Fatal Fury was supposed to be a more complex narrative, but it's about as generic of a martial arts story as it gets.
Refocusing on the game itself, I think it's a decent fighting game, and certainly better than most that had come out by 1991, but it's impossible to evaluate this game without comparing it to its main competitor that had come out just months before. There are fewer characters, fewer combos, and the two track stage design really doesn't add anything to the gameplay here.
The draw of Fatal Fury was supposed to be a more complex narrative, but it's about as generic of a martial arts story as it gets.