City of the Wolves Colour Edit Mode Is Pretty Cool

About a month ago, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves (CotW) released. The game was only on the periphery of my radar because I’ve been trying to learn Guilty Gear Xrd in my spare time. I only have so much bandwidth for learning new fighting games, and Xrd has been…a lot to say the least.

Either way, a few of the stations at locals had CotW installed during the week of the game’s release. As such, I took the opportunity to play it with a few other folks who were mildly curious about the first new Fatal Fury game to release in 26 years.

Much to my surprise, CotW felt incredibly intuitive to play. That’s because SNK (Fatal Fury’s developer) are somewhat notorious for making fighting games that are widely considered challenging to get into. As such, my expectations for CotW were so low that you could slither over them. Hence the surprise when I picked up a controller, and started playing the game quite comfortably without any practice. I even managed to find a handful of combos without really understanding any of the game’s mechanics, nor its combo structure.

As such, I decided to pick up the game, and dabble with it on the side. However, for as fun as Fatal Fury has been, nothing could have prepared me for its most innovative feature: Colour Edit Mode.

Yes. Seriously. I’m being completely serious.

Consider that we live in an age of digital storefronts where additional purchases have become commonplace. I didn’t even realize it until I started writing, but almost every single game that I’ve played this year, regardless of size, has some kind of additional purchase available on Steam. It could be an original soundtrack, deluxe edition, new missions, a digital art-book, or even new cosmetic items. Basically anything that someone might be willing to pay a little extra scratch for is on the table.

Make no mistake, I don’t begrudge anyone for doing this. Call it a capitalist mindset, but if people are willing to pay extra for additional perks, and it helps to keep the lights on then I’m all for it.

Regardless, one of the most popular ways to add in-app purchases to your game is to sell new cosmetic items. A lot of people like to customize the appearance of their player character, so introducing new items can be a great way to give those players new ways to express themselves. It certainly doesn’t hurt that these sales can also help to cover ongoing development, and maintenance costs.

Heck, cosmetics are how League of Legends, and Overwatch, and Fortnite, and Genshin Impact have collectively made so much money. Frankly, you’d be insane to not follow the example laid by so many industry success stories, and charge players additional money to customize their in-game appearance.

And yet, here we are, in 2025 no less, and CotW has a mode that lets players customize every single aspect of their character’s appearance. I mean just look at it:

Isn’t this insane? You can even change the eye colour independently to give characters heterochromia if you want. That’s completely bonkers in the best of ways.

There’s also a variety of patterns that you can use when customizing each character’s clothing. By default, there are several to choose from, but you can also unlock additional patterns by playing through CotW’s single-player mode. Though, the unlocking requirements for those additional patterns are (apparently) very grindy, so I haven’t found any of them yet myself.

You know what the real sauce is though? These colour edits aren’t just available for you to see locally: your opponent can also see them too. Heck, I didn’t even realize Colour Edit was a thing until I ran into another Preecha player on ladder using a custom all-black skin. I’ve since run into several other players using Colour Edit skins, and I’ve even made my own Bubblegum themed skin.

Anyway, that’s the post. I just thought Colour Edit Mode was cool, and wanted to ramble about it. Thank you for indulging me, and I hope you enjoyed looking at my Preecha skin.

Actually, no. There’s 1 other thing I wanted to address here: City of the Wolves’ player count.

I’ve seen a couple articles going around suggesting that CotW is an abject failure, in part, due to its low player counts a month after release. That’s incredibly uninformed. I won’t dispute that the game was a financial blunder for SNK given how much money they spent on marketing it, but to suggest that the game has failed with numbers like these is a little hyperbolic.

I understand that probably won’t look like a lot of people, but it’s more than enough to sustain a 1 on 1 fighting game. Not accounting for rank, 588 people is enough for almost 300 matches. You’d need a player count in the several thousands to achieve the same thing in games with 2, or more teams. Ergo, a lower player count isn’t as detrimental as it might initially appear without any context.

Just as an example, here’s what Guilty Gear Xrd looks like:

And I can always find a match when I’m playing it.

Do you want another example? Here’s Guilty Gear Strive, a game where I spent 2.5 years playing with just PC players at around the same levels they sit at today. Basically anytime there wasn’t a new character, player counts hovered around 2000 daily, and that was totally fine.

Presenting City of the Wolves as a failure because it didn’t manage to deliver numbers like Street Fighter 6, or Tekken 8 is a little disingenuous. It was never going to be that big because Fatal Fury doesn’t have that kind of brand recognition. Hell, until Strive, Guilty Gear couldn’t even crack a million units. I don’t even think Xrd managed half a million across its entire lifetime.

It’s also worth mentioning that CotW has cross-play, so the PC player counts don’t paint the full picture of how many people are actually playing it at any given time. The cross-play also works, which is a far sight better than Strive where the online experience has degraded rapidly since the implementation of cross-play.

I guess that’s all a quick way of saying, if you’re interested in City of the Wolves then you should give it a try. Don’t be discouraged by the player counts – they’re really not indicative of the experience you’ll have while playing, despite the posturing from some news outlets. If nothing else, it’s 1 of few games that allows for an unprecedented level of character customization in a genre that otherwise charges for the privilege of such things, and I think that’s worth celebrating.

---

Did you enjoy what you read? Consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee over on Ko-fi.