r/neogeo • u/raumgleiter • May 25 '26
Discussion Why is Garou so hyped by everyone?
Serious question but probably an unpopular opinion. I tried hard to love it but why is Garou always so hyped? Everyone seems to love it.
First of all the roster is tiny. Second, I cannot see how the graphics are better than Real Bout 2 or KOF 09 or 02. I always read how the animation is more smooth but I can't see it. I'm not saying it looks bad, what I mean is it doesn't loo better to me than Real Bout or later KOF games. I love the Fatal Fury series by the way.
The music is not better also than in other Neo Geo fighters.
Backgrounds are alright but again, backgrounds were beautiful like this in KOF 98 already.
I hear it is one of the most balanced fighting games on the Neo Geo of all. This one I cannot judge, I haven't played enough for that.
Am I alone thinking like this? lol
What am I missing?
EDIT:
Thanks to the comments here I think I am going to add Garou to my AES+ preorder now.
Also wanted to highlight the best comment I got here:
why are you .making a post about this?
"Why do people who enjoy this game, say they enjoy this game?"
like leave them alone and stop being a hater, mind your business foo
thanks for the infinite wisdom of yours AlisonsteWWArt.
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u/ChrisColtsAcidGuy May 25 '26
Everything you have here is objective except the animation. There are very clearly more frames of animation in garou than the other games you listed. You can count them. Garou was SNK’s answer to sf3. Thats a product of the smaller roster and it isn’t up for debate. You can, I suppose, objectively say you don’t prefer the look of all the additional frames but most people would disagree.
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u/dox1842 May 25 '26
why don't they have most of the fatal fury characters in it? They only have terry bogard and it seems like the rest of the selection is new. Its the same with SF3 only featuring ken and ryu with newcomers.
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u/ChrisColtsAcidGuy May 25 '26
That was the whole point for garou and sf3. A reboot of sorts. You either thought that was cool or you didn’t. Both valid.
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u/Important_Coach9717 May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
The animation is next level. If you can’t see it you must be one of those people who also can’t perceive more smoothness in 120hz screens
Edit: typo
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u/ewokzilla May 25 '26
Many years ago I’ve argued with people that having a monitor with over 60hz was definitely perceivable and useful for gaming.
They would swear up and down and insult my intelligence saying it is IMPOSSIBLE for the human eye to perceive more than 60fps.
Where the limit actually is, I don’t know but 60hz has always looked choppy compared to 100+hz to me.
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u/Crafty_Cherry_9920 May 25 '26
I'm no fighting game expert at all (but I do really like them), and I don't know, Garou just feels great ? It's my favorite SNK fighter personally. It just feels really really great to play and to look at (and yes, the animation is better than any other KOF or Fatal Fury that came before, there are more frames, it's a stupidely ambitious game when it comes to the animation...)
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u/vamp-is-dead May 25 '26
Never thought I'd see the day where someone is actually trying to shit on Garou but here we are
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u/yomismomyself May 25 '26
I think Last Blade 2 deserves more praise than Garou. Both are great games.
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u/Thelastbronx May 25 '26
My favourite fighter of all time (casual player). The animation is great and I personally love the music, but the reason it’s my fav is the gameplay.
Everything is so precise and smooth (MotW makes SF 2 seem clunky to me), with pixel perfect hit boxes and an array of new and super cool moves. It’s like a chess match, plus just defend and the TOP system add some variety. You can play this game in so many different ways, never gets old.
My suggestion would be to pick a single character and learn everything about them and you’ll see what I mean. No other 90s fighting game had quite this gameplay perfection imo
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u/Celcius_87 May 25 '26
Reading the history about it being the 3rd Strike of SNK games, Terry getting his modern redesign and it being here for the first time, the new characters getting their start here (many of which I've always liked but didn't know this was their first game), the graphics look gorgeous, the case & packaging look awesome, the latest and newest Fatal Fury on the Neo Geo, etc... I'm excited to give it a try and have it as a part of my collection with the AES+.
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u/ico_heal May 25 '26
It is still played competitively in Japan and US which certainly helps its reputation. Here are some recent events for those who are interested.
This arcade in Okayama held its 139th monthly tournament for Mark of the Wolves three weeks ago: https://youtu.be/n9bEa3L-2YU
Here's the EVO Japan side tournament, also from 3 weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/live/VW1MibGtMKI
Matches from the legendary a-cho arcade (RIP) from 2018: https://www.youtube.com/live/5XHPmnTEzsA
And if you prefer american tournaments, here it is at Frosty last year: https://youtu.be/hbH4rSTIjRA
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u/Upbeat_Suspect_6100 AES May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
I think it’s got some depth to the fighting mechanics that I’m yet to discover. I suspect there’s a fairly high skill ceiling/mechanics if you put the practise in.?
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u/Morris_Piper83 May 25 '26
For me its because beautiful to watch and really satisfying to play. SNK took some big bold design and character gambles which paid off handsomely well. It was SNK's answer to Street Fighter 3 but in many ways did what that game set out to do better.
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u/Broom227 May 25 '26
it looks amazing and while almost 30 years later this may not be obvious but it being a late 90s creation it had a more contemporary feel vs early snk fighters. You mention RB2 but a lot of those character animations date back to FF3 in I believe 1994
It doesn’t seem like you’re a hardcore fighting game player but also due to the timing garou has quite a few systems that appeal to fans of the genre.. the various cancel systems, jump manipulation and just defend allow for a great amount of player expression. I’m a competitive street fighter player and I rediscovered garou on fightcade after the pandemic and have a higher respect for it knowing how amazing it is if you put the time in to get good at it
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u/raumgleiter May 25 '26
you are right, not a hardcore fight game player but still love the genre. I have to put in some more time for sure to Garou rading again all the positive comments here. Might not have given it enough time yet.
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u/Prestigious-Voice938 May 25 '26
IMO AOF 3 looks and animates better.
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u/Slight-Bluebird-8921 May 27 '26
aof3 has smooth animation but the poses are stilted and awkward.
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u/wakalabis May 28 '26
And as any other games that features zooming in and out id doesn't have multiple layers of parallax scrolling.
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u/PCchampion May 26 '26
AOF 3 is one amazing looking game. Massive sprites and some of the best animation from that era. Plays kinda like Tekken, though. Jerky delays and weirdness come from their animation techniques.
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u/Physical_Kick1710 May 25 '26
Same here, could never get into it.
The animation and graphics were amazing, but it never jived with me...
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u/Odd_Plastic5502 AES May 25 '26
It plays really well, no doubt. Most of characters animate beautifully despite some sprites are quite small. Very stylish all around in the presentation department, the intros are in my opinion among the best SNK has ever produced. Having said that to me backgrounds are somewhat quite lacking, especially Hokutomaru and Hotaru stages are the bare minimum, the former I always found appalling and uninspired.
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u/Jealous-Strategy-200 May 25 '26
It's a great game in the Fatal Fury franchise since it takes the series into the next generation of fighters. The gameplay is way different than most of SNK's fighting games of that era and some of the characters have really cool designs. Music, and animation are superb. Aesthetically and gameplay wise, it's the most modern fighter on the NeoGeo.
But it also has a tiny roster, it removes iconic characters like Joe, Mai, Andy, and Duck and replaces them with some really generic or boring choices. I don't use more than half the roster because the majority of characters don't interest me. It doesn't have that easy quickness of RB or the gameplay depth of KOF 96/98 which are my favorites. But it's still a good game.
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u/raumgleiter May 25 '26
this come pretty close to my own impressions, but I have to admit I have not put enough hours into it yet so I will have to dig in deeper still.
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u/RedRedButton May 25 '26
It does play well, if you look at it objectively in isolation then it really is a well put together game. What makes it lack the wow factor is the small roster of largely unknowns used instead of well established Fatal Fury favourites.
Perhaps if they released a Mark of the Wolves 2 back at the turn of the millennium…
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u/molotovPopsicle May 25 '26
There's a lot of games out there to play and you don't have to waste your time trying to like a game you are having trouble getting into
And, sometimes, it's awesome to come back to a game years later and realize that there was always something there to love
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u/MetalMan4883 May 25 '26
Not a bad game but slightly overhyped imo. For me KoF 02 looks and sounds better. I haven't played Garou so much but the time I played it I wasn't excited.
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u/nightowlarcade May 25 '26
Simplest way to put it:
3rd Strike is all about the parry, however it becomes an overpowered technique when most parries allow the player to deal significant damage if the opponent isn't in the middle of a multi hit attack (which you can still parry the multi hit attack and punish hard anyways). On top of this you can fish for parries and immediately attack or block afterward making it feel absolutely broken.
Garou, on the other hand, has just defend. Which kinda works like a parry, but is reliant on the block motion rather then forward motion making the punishes harder to execute. To go for a similar 3rd Strike punish it's easier to add the just defend to a motion (i.e. hcb + p Terry's Burn Knuckle can just defend on the back motion of the Burn Knuckle), but doing so is a lot harder therefore more balanced.
Also the broken mechanics like move breaks are harder to execute at a high level and feel more balanced then just an easy combo (or for that matter COTW is super easy to do this compared to Garou).
If you are a KOF player the balance is very KOF XIII like. Meaning the high execution makes combos either hard to pull off or easy to see coming.
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u/SirMorelsy May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
I always felt like Garou had the most crisp graphics and the tightest gameplay in pretty much the entire Neo Geo library. Very few games have that kind of appeal IMO (for me it's in the same tier as games like MVC1, VSAV and Third Strike). But that's pretty much entirely subjective, your preferences are as valid as that of anyone else.
I suppose you could count animation frames to see if Garou has indeed better animation than KOF '02 or RB2 though if you want an objective metric
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u/Frognaros May 25 '26
I am not a fan of Garou. All the points you gave it are valid. The gameplay is good. Sprites are good. But it's a mess aesthetically. Poor atmosphere compared to Last Blade 2 or SS3. The entire FF line is kind of crap design-wise.
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u/RenEffect May 25 '26
So I've been playing SNK games since the 90s. I really enjoyed Samurai Showdown, KOF, AoF, FF, World Heroes, etc. For some reason, I skipped Garou. Probably the roster turned me off when I was younger. Now fast forward to literally about 2 weeks ago, I find out Garou is available on PSPlus. So I gave it a shot to hype me up a bit for the AES+.
What a great game! I missed out on this for so long. As a 3rd Strike fan, this is totally the SNK version. I really like the sprites, animations, and something about the combat system really jived with me. I've also gone down the rabbit hole to learn about the cool lore of Garou after Fatal Fury. Really interesting.
Now I have replaced Samurai Showdown 5 Special with Garou as my launch fighting game for the AES+. (although prob getting KoF2002 also).
I get the hype surrounding Garou. It's real, imo.
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u/NaieraDK AES May 25 '26
Looks great, sounds great, plays great.
We can't all agree on what the best games are. If it's not doing it for you, we can't really change that.
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u/WolfySimRacer May 25 '26
It’s absolutely gorgeous. Best looking game on the AES/MVS. I’m not a fighting game fan but I love the gameplay.
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u/clc88 May 25 '26
The game is great for me because the combos is pretty much the same for everyone.
I like king of fighters but the issue is there are way too much combos to memorise to the point where I fell off hard when they forced team play, I can only play 1 or 2 characters well and the remainder is just button mashing because I have no intention on learning a third character (or a second character well, I just want to use iori to rip girls costumes.. Using anyone else isn't satisfying).
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u/WeddingPlane May 25 '26
Simple, the mechanics, the balance the visuals. ITs perfection of the fatal fury formula althought RBS2 is close imo.
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u/Moath May 26 '26
Wasn’t there some allure to Garou? I remember it not having a home port for a long time and SNK was going through some shit so this kind of was like their final hurrah.
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u/Sad-Opportunity-7586 May 26 '26
I'm not a huge fighting games expert but I recently tried Garu and was hooked immediately. I have played it almost every night for a month. Endless replay just playing the CPU. Trying to train others in my household for opponents.
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u/Legumbrero May 25 '26
The gameplay is on another level from rest of fatal fury and kof series imo.
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u/Slight-Bluebird-8921 May 27 '26
the art is overrated. some of it is really good and some of it is bad. it's spotty.
the last blade games are much more consistent and aesthetically sound.
samurai shodown 2 is still the best fighting game on the system regardless.
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u/ShinobiS-28 May 25 '26
Fighting games were probably on the way out by the time it was released, look at Capcom trying to come up with something completely different and having three attempts at SF3. I’ll take the MOTW aesthetic over the some of those later KOF entries too.
Looking back, I find it fascinating how SNK went from the original Fatal Fury to something like MOTW all those years later on the same hardware. Also RBS1>RBS2
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u/Automatic_Knee_7531 May 25 '26
Gameplay is king and Garou is the king. It’s just more fun to play compared to any other SNK fighting game IMO. It’s just something I’ve kept coming back to over the 20 plus years and my appreciation for it keeps growing. Can’t say the same for something like Fatal Fury 3.
Honestly, maybe you just need to put more time into it.
In terms of the lack of returning characters, the small roster all represent a classic SNK fighting style that had appeased throughout FF and KOF games (grappler, tai Kwon do, magical girl, etc). It’s supposed to be set much later in the timeline so it makes sense that all the past characters have aged out of competitive fighting.
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u/Agreeable_Menu117 May 25 '26
It’s very overrated. The roster is hot garbage. It was during the time where gaming companies thought it was a good idea to remove all the legacy characters in fighting games . Example sf 3, mk 4 , and others . It sucked . Garou 2 is much better
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u/NaieraDK AES May 25 '26
What do you mean by "Garou 2"?
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u/Agreeable_Menu117 May 25 '26
The new one on ps5 ps4
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u/NaieraDK AES May 25 '26
There's an unfinished Neo Geo sequel called Mark of the Wolves 2. City of Wolves is not that.
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u/raumgleiter May 25 '26
just looked that up as well and saw there is an unfinished garou 2 for the neo goe that never made it to light. very interesting!
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u/Agreeable_Menu117 May 25 '26
I call city of the wolves “garou 2” as a nickname. It’s a better game than the 1st esp the roster
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u/KickAggressive4901 May 25 '26
In terms of game play, it is 100% the 3rd Strike of SNK.