Art of Fighting

Art of Fighting is a fighting game series created by SNK. It is one of the many SNK series that ties into The King of Fighters. Art of Fighting was SNK's second fighting game franchise; Fatal Fury was the company's first.

Art of Fighting was the first fighting game with a "super bar", and introduced the "spirit gauge" and "desperation move" (the equivalent of super moves, often used with SNK fighting games) into the fighting game vernacular. A spirit gauge is a manually charged super combo gauge where all special moves will utilize and drain, with greater amounts of power dealing greater amounts of damage. The game also introduced camera zooming into a fighting game, so as the characters move away from each other, the camera will zoom out to keep both players on the screen. This affected the gameplay because the left and right side of the screen does not act as moving invisible boundaries anymore (as in Street Fighter II); the stages' boundaries are the only boundaries in the game. Art of Fighting also used a gimmick where characters sprites become more bruised and cut as the fight progresses.

The games follow the struggles of the students of the Kyokugenryu Karate Dojo, Ryo Sakazaki, and Robert Garcia, in what appears to be the late seventies. Ryo is the son of the Kyokugenryu Karate discipline’s creator, Takuma Sakazaki, and Robert is the wayward son of a billionaire family from Italy. The initial two titles are set in Southtown, a common location in SNK games that is also the setting for the Fatal Fury series, while the third appears to take place in a fictitious area of Mexico.

The plot of Art of Fighting alludes to Fatal Fury. Art of Fighting 2, for instance, documents the rise of Geese Howard, a character in Fatal Fury, from corrupt police commissioner to crime lord of Southtown. Takuma is said to be a contemporary of Jeff Bogard, father of Fatal Fury's main hero, Terry Bogard; Jeff Bogard's murder at the hands of Geese Howard triggers the events of the Fatal Fury series.
Continuity changes between AoF and King of Fighters

The Art of Fighting series seems to take place in the late 1970s, judging by the birth dates of its characters (Ryo's AoF year of birth is 1957). When SNK brought the characters from its many games together for the King of Fighters series, they deliberately left out the birth dates of the Art of Fighting characters to have the characters interact with each other without having to redesign the characters to account for age. However, their histories remained the same and the events of at least Art of Fighting and Art of Fighting 3 seemed to have remained canon for The King of Fighters series, this has caused some confusion.

Art Of Fighting appears to have taken place before the events of King Of Fighters '94 and could have taken place before that of Fatal Fury, the difference is that the gap has been closed by over a decade, King of Fighters '96 is the first game to tie into Art of Fighting 3, Robert Garcia appears in his costume from that series and Kasumi Todoh is added to the Women's Fighters team apparently around the same age she was in AoF 3 giving the appearance that the story takes place in 1995/1996 in the King of Fighters time-line and after the events of Fatal Fury 1 & 2.

The biggest problem in terms of Art of Fighting events tying into King of Fighters is Art of Fighting 2, which theoretically cannot have happened due to the role of Geese Howard, and if it did, it could not have happened after Art of Fighting.

The involvement of King of Fighters: Maximum Impact further confused the continuity of the three series as it appeared to tie into the events of Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury instead of King of Fighters, it has been suggested that fans view the time-lines as separate universes with Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury and Garou (and possibly Maximum Impact) taking place in one, and King Of Fighters taking place in the other.

However, to accommodate the cast of Garou: Mark of the Wolves characters such as Terry Bogard are being aged to match the supposed timeframe of the Mark of the Wolves games (which is said to take place in the year 2006) and so for The King of Fighters series, a lot of the Art of Fighting characters are being slowly aged to match how they would look had the Art of Fighting timeline not been altered. An example of this is Ryo in Buriki One and him and Robert in Neo Geo Battle Coliseum (but both games' ties to the KOF cannon is questionable).