Ronaldo seems to be a new playable character in the newest entry of the Fatal Fury series. If I was telling this to someone way back then in the 90s, I would have been put in a straitjacket and sent to the nearest madhouse. This is reality now, we live in a Capitalistic world that only cares about generating revenue from people who do not care about the legacy of franchises. SNK isn’t the only company doing ridiculous things such as this, Wizards of the Coast are busy making Cloud Strife tap for mana and hit Peter Parker in the next Magic: The Gathering expansions too. The Fortnitefication and enshittification of the medium continues as normies keep invading.
Ronaldo is a big problem long term
Like it or not, the normies that will jump into the game to play Ronaldo, will just get hooked due to that. Once the licensing deal ends, everything will collapse, SNK would be lucky to have those same players playing for more than a week. Crossovers like this not only are risky, but they kill brand recognition, when your game is everything and has everything, then its a meaningless pile of slop.
The worse part of this situation, was that the new Fatal Fury was awesome, had they kept going their own way instead of chasing dumb trends, they would have been the best fighting game. Nothing good lasts forever, and things slowly enshittifiy until you can’t recognize them anymore, this is the sad reality of gaming now.
Thankfully, older Fighting games and indie ones have a robust and solid competitive scene. After all these decades, people are still playing 3rd Strike en masse at a competitive level, and its not grassroots tournament, they are huge events happening every year. Older games will carry the future of gaming forward, Ronaldo will just sink them.
