YMMV / Garou: Mark of the Wolves

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Gato really that much of an asshole, or is he deliberately trying to push Hotaru away to keep her out of danger?
• Character Tiers: It's generally agreed upon that Kevin, B. Jenet, Gato, Kain, and Grant are all top tier, Dong Hwan and Jae Hoon are high tier, Khushnood, Hokutomaru, Hotaru, and Terry are low tier, and Tizoc, Rock, and Freeman are bottom tier.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Kevin is ridiculously broken via glitches, making him the logical choice for easy wins.
• Crazy Is Cool: Khushnood Butt trains with a karate bear. A KARATE BEAR.
• Cult Classic: Garou is often regarded as not only the best Fatal Fury game, but one of SNK's best works. That's high praise, and it's earned it. Its extremely limited run of its North American release in 1999 practically doomed it to obscurity, but its rerelease on modern consoles has garnered a whole new audience.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • The identity of the Gym Buster is mentioned in Khushnood's ending. Most fans believe it to be Yamazaki, as he always had a well-established reputation for violence. All Word of God has stated is that they were noted to be wearing a Chinese outfit.
  • In addition to this, it just gives for more speculations on what the heck is the goal of Gato and Hotaru's father. He's implied to have murdered their mother, but for what purpose, we do not know. The Chinese outfit as mentioned above might imply that he could have been the Gym Buster. Additionally, Word of God implies that in the past, he trashed Tizoc so badly that it became an impetus into thinking that he's been a wash-out (though thankfully not to the point of a Face–Heel Turn like in The King of Fighters XIV). And of course, he helped out Kain.
• Even Better Sequel: Not that the previous games were terrible, but Garou vastly improved everything, like the character sprites, combo mechanics, and the Just Defense System, all while getting rid of the old line system and stage hazard gimmicks. The result is a fast-paced, spectacular, and technically demanding fighter.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: You really wouldn't believe how much people preferred to pair Rock with Hotaru. Never mind that both of them have completely different missions and Rock is stated to be 'not good with women', although the most common justification is Rock's win quote against Hotaru, where he offered to help her look for her brother, so she is most likely one of the few female characters he could be more comfortable with. The King of Fighters Maximum Impact series mudded things further with how Rock is somehow paired with Jenet, which opens another can of fire, though many can imply that Jenet was just teasing Rock being uneasy with mature women and some of her quotes imply that she held some fire towards Terry.
• Friendly Fandoms: One of the great debates of the fighting game genre: Which is better: Garou or 3rd Strike? It's been over 20 years, and debate still goes on. But it's all positive; the respective fans are quick to acknowledge the quality and fun of the other.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Kevin's Rotor Dance, which allows him to start up a special move, cancel it, and loop it back into itself multiple times. He looks pretty silly due to him spinning around and there's Some Dexterity Required, but it allows him to build up meter much, much faster than any other character. Combined with his already overpowered combos and specials, this glitch makes Kevin the most broken playable character.
  • Gato's Stomp Cancel, which allows you to perform the early animation of his stomp combo, but cancel it before he jumps up and finishes the rest of the attack. This allows him to build meter very quickly, and can throw off inexperienced opponents.
  • If your T.O.P is active or you have enough meter for a super, inputting a super or T.O.P Attack during the recovery of another move will make you immune to all throws until the recovery ends.
• Harsher in Hindsight: This game introduces us to Second Southtown, which despite suffering from its criminal underworld, has a far more prosperous and lighthearted setting than how the original Southtown used to be. Less than a year after this game takes place, Southtown will be obliterated by a Kill Sat in the finale of The King of Fighters 2000, and it'll take a long time to rebuild from the ruins. While this is technically in a different continuity, you've got to wonder how many Southtown residents seen in this game survived.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Kevin. Chances are you may not be looked upon fondly by other players if you pick him due to his wild versatility thanks to his special moves, with the three most notorious of them being his Hell Arrest, which is widely considered the best command grab in the game due to the speed at which it comes out, his Hell Rotor, which is used for his Rotor Dance glitch, which allows him to build meter at an absurd rate of speed, and finally, his Hell Trap, which, while less obviously overpowered than the others, is the only low hitting break move in the game. These three special moves, combined with him having some of the best combos in the game, make him blatantly unfair to fight against.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Rock himself tends to be ranked near the bottom of tier lists mainly due to his combos and his specials providing weak damage output. Meaning that to get the best out of Rock, He has to rely on his poking game to build up his PR meter, but even then these abilities can be easily avoided by a moderately experienced player. Overall, anything Rock can do, most of the cast can do better.
• Memetic Molester: Hotaru Futaba, thanks to her Tenshou Ranki super, which is more infamously known as the Flying Queen of Chaos. She kicks her opponent up into the air, jumps up and straddles them on the way back down, slides and pins them to the ground, and drains their health while arching her back... all while letting out a rather dramatic yell, and ending it with a weary sigh. It's just as bad as it sounds, and must be seen to be believed. The fact that the training mode display shows the strong version of the super does 69 (nice) basic damage if it fully connects makes it so much worse and/or hilarious.
• Moe: Hotaru. She's a sweet girl who just wants to reunite with her family after her mother was murdered. But her father is long gone, and the man she thinks is (and is heavily implied to be) her long-lost brother not only vehemently denies it, but regards her with sheer contempt and threatens to kill her if they meet again. It also helps her Moe credentials that her first voice actress (Yuki Horie) provided the most cute voice she can muster for her (without going too overboard). According to Word of God, this was entirely intentional. When she reappears in the sequel, her second voice actress (Manaka Iwami) is able to keep Hotaru's cute voice intact and she also gets an English dub actress who's very good at making her sound cute in English (Suzie Yeung).
• Narm: Grant is supposed to be intimidating. But demonic powers and difficulty aside, he just looks like some half-naked middle-aged guy who put on a mask and cape and started calling himself "The Martyr of Might." Even with the first glimpse we get of him, his back is heaving, and he lets out a hilarious, "Oh Gaaaaaaaawd!" While this is supposed to be his body being taken over by the demon, it's easy to imagine him reacting to stubbing his toe, or perhaps with a Valley Girl accent.
  • Any intimidation he once had is completely ruined by his post-fight dialogue, where he is on the fast track to succumbing from his wounds. Not only does he talk rather casually to most of his opponent as he's dying, but his final words take the cake. They range from the slightly cliched ("Goodbye, cruel world...") to the goofy (using silly nicknames such as "toots", "Wrestler-guy", and "Karate-guy"), to the completely undignified ("What a pity! ...Oooohgyaaaaaaaah!").
• Newer Than They Think: The Buster Wolf is Terry's most iconic - if not memetic - move. It'd be easy to assume he'd had it all along, but it debuted in Garou. It didn't even appear in The King of Fighters until KOF 2003, because Terry used his Garou design in that game. Quite notably, the first time Terry ever used Buster Wolf while sporting his classic design was in the Capcom-developed Capcom vs. SNK (released in 2000, just a year after Garou), as well as the sequel in 2001. However, as far as SNK-developed games go since the release of Garou, he'd have it again in SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos (while in his classic design), released about 5 months prior to KOF 2003.
• Popular with Furries: Despite not being an actual anthropomorphic animal, Tizoc has a notable furry fanbase due to his barechestedness and musculature.
• Retroactive Recognition: Junko Takeuchi has been doing the 'hyperactive kid ninja' thing with Hokutomaru earlier before she did the same with the much more widespread Naruto.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The power-down pickups in Survival Mode. They're easy to avoid during normal gameplay, but the CPU is usually too smart to walk right into them. But what's especially frustrating is ending a match with a multi-hit combo, and then accidentally catching power-downs when you don't have control of your character. If you're really unlucky, you might get stuck with multiple health or time-down items, effectively ruining your run in a matter of seconds.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: The T.O.P. System allows you to choose where on the health bar you want to activate a character's specific move, get an attack boost, and regain health. Normally, you can set it at the beginning, middle, or end, thus changing the strategies necessary to use it. The home console versions take it a step further by shortening the length of the T.O.P. meter; it can be short, medium, or long, and will give you a bigger attack boost the shorter it is.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Part of Spread the Wings borrows its melody from Robert Miles's Children, with the composer claiming to be a fan of the artist. It's possible Rock's appearances in the King of Fighters series doesn't include a remix of this theme due to potential legal issues.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Garou runs on the Neo Geo hardware. That's right, these gorgeously animated sprites and fluid attack animations came from the same system that ran the very first Fatal Fury game back in 1991. This game pushed the Neo Geo to its limits, and it shows. The fact that it directly competes with Capcom's upgraded CPS 3 system board speaks volumes of console's quality.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Kain spends a lot of time talking about how decadent society has gotten, and won't appreciate their lives or strive for more unless they struggle to become stronger. A few characters admit that he's not entirely wrong, but all of them point out how crazy his philosophy is. Terry of all people ends up being rattled by Kain's words, and spends his ending pondering over how Southtown is changing. He hears a couple of women nonchalantly dismissing the possibility of Southtown seceding from America, and brag about their jewelry instead. The bag one of the women is carrying even has "liberalism" printed on it, and they're standing under a small sign depicting the name "Andy". It's clearly indicative of how Terry thinks Southtown is changing in terms politics, wealth, and prosperity, but forgetting about the sacrifices he, Andy, and the rest of the crew made to get it into such a prosperous state in the first place all those years ago.