Adaptation Displacement: Terry's Cartwright Curse in the anime trilogy, bordering highly on Never Live It Down; when people think of his love life they often think of his dead love interests in the anime a lot more than Blue Mary, his perfectly alive one in the games. (Though the fact that SNK has been doing little Ship Tease between them, if any, in the The King of Fighters doesn't help.) While Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture was not a bad movie, things like this are one of the reasons why it's a shame that Fatal Fury 3 didn't get an animated adaptation. Of course, if Blue Mary was ever in a 90s Fatal Fury anime, it would get folks to wonder if that would've averted this once and for all or made things a whole lot worse.
Best Known for the Fanservice: Mai Shiranui is more well known for her sexy ninja outfit than anything about her character or gameplay. And Mai Shiranui is more well known than anything else about the series.
The Real Bout games versus the mainline titles. The first entry was by all means an Updated Re-release of Fatal Fury 3, but Real Bout Special and especially 2: The Newcomers are found by some fans to not be as "pure" as the original games that set the series' legacy to begin with, while others think their looser gameplay, more freeform combos and specials, and overhauled difficulty make them far more approachable. The Art Shift to a more distinct anime style with Special also turned some heads different ways, and set the stage for Garou: Mark of the Wolves.
For fans of the Real Bout subseries, there are also debates on which is the superior game; Special or 2: The Newcomers. It mostly boils down to whether one prefer the two lane fighting system and unlockable EX characters of Special, or the added new characters and one lane fighting system of 2, where the second lane is used for evasion only.
Cult Classic: Garou: Mark of the Wolves. The fact that it's widely considered to be not only the best of this series, but SNK itself should tell you something.
The Pretzel for Gesse's Raging Storm super, so named because the motion (1632143 or db,hcb,df) resembles a pretzel. Like most supers in the early games, it was made with an absurdly difficult input command. Unlike most supers in the early games, it kept the motion for most of the games for the sake of nostalgia.
His Real Bout Special form's name of "Nightmare Geese" started out as this as well. The King of Fighters Maximum Impact 2canonized it.
Terry's voice lines, combined with his voice actor's charming Engrish accent. In fact, you'll be hard-pressed to find a meme that isn't about him saying something.
Geese is equally memetic, whether it is his equally iconic Engrish accent, his name, or his habit of falling from towers.
Franco Bash might be a little more forgotten amongst fighting game characters, but he's also made of memes, starting from his (ironically) good English, super loud "OH MY GOOOODDD!!!" or the fact that aside of looking like Freddie Mercury, he might also look like an oversized and hatless Mario (and it also helps that in 3, he had an assistant that would look pretty similar to either Luigi or Waluigi).
Good Bad Bugs: Aerial Canceling, where you could cancel a jump into a special move, was already known to the developers but left in the game because an SNK higher-up thought it made the fighting look more frantic. This technique would be tweaked a bit and appear as part of the mechanics in The King of Fighters.
He's Just Hiding: Kim has apparently gone missing. He shows up to berate his son Dong Hwan in one of his winposes.
Love to Hate: Geese has done terrible things over the course of the series but is beloved by the fandom (not unlike Rugal), cementing him as one of the premier SNK villains (and a more notable fighting game villain from the 90s in general). Geese can do no wrong because the fandom worships the ground he walks on. It doesn't hurt that he's charismatic, has a sense of style, and despite his wicked deeds, never quite crosses theMoral Event Horizon. Oh, and he's an uncontested badass.
Magnificent Bastard: Geese Howard is the infamous crime boss of Southtown and the most prolific villain in the SNK library. Desiring power at a young age, Geese trained at the Hakkyokuseiken school of martial arts, while steadily developing connections to Southtown's mafia through bribery and intimidation tactics, culminating in him overthrowing reigning kingpin Mr. Big and becoming the police chief of the city, with every cop and politician in his pocket. He then began hosting the King of Fighters tournament series to find worthy henchmen, strong-armed renowned martial artist Takuma Sakazaki into working for him, and vengefully murdered his rival Jeff Bogard. Despite suffering setbacks due to defeats at the hands of Ryo Sakazaki and Terry Bogard, Geese always recovers, and when Terry finally beats him for good and tries to save him from plummeting to his death, Geese chooses to fall as a final act of spite, laughing all the way down. For all his misdeeds, Geese never loses his trademark swagger, and so great is his popularity that in an alternate timeline, he survives and continues to plot behind the scenes.
Memetic Badass: This applies more to KOF than anything, but some fans see Yamazaki as the SNK equivalent to Chuck Norris.
Memetic Molester: Hotaru Futaba, thanks to one of her supers, Flying Queen of Chaos, wherein she kicks you upward, rides you to the ground and.... uh... seems to press your chest, draining your health and chi as she lets out a yell. Of course the animation makes it more look like she's RAPING you. Now it's hard to look at that move as anything OTHER than full-bore molestation. Not to mention Hotaru's animations after the chi burst resemble something akin to post-orgasm bliss.
The Japanese fandom has their own Geese meme in the form of "許るさん" ("Yururusan", an obvious typo of 許さん, meaning "Yurusan". Said line originated in the first game's story scenes, with the humour obviously coming form SNK's future big badass flubbing a line and throwing a rather uncharacteristic tantrum that's largely incongruous with how cool headed he is later. Its to the point where there's t-shirts of said moment too.
Mis-blamed: Many seem to think Mai's attire has always been skimpy since her debut, but her original design was actually modest. All that could be seen were her legs and a bit of cleavage. And from Fatal Fury 3 to the Real Bout series, she wore a red shirt under her top; making it her most conservative design. It was the anime adaptations and the latter parts of King of Fighters series that flanderized her, by steadily increasing her breast size, while making her attire more revealing.
Moe: Hotaru. Dear God, Hotaru. It doesn't hurt that she's also theWoobie of the series.
Come on, the anime movies are full of this. From Terry's ridiculously exaggerated Heroic BSoD and resulting alcoholism because Krauser nearly kills him during their first encounter in OVA 2, to the indescribably cheesy ending music in the third one.
Also the "SNKgrish" present throughout the series. It's not so much the spelling or grammar as it's the utter weirdness of some quotes, some of which even sound out-of-place for some characters. Fatal Fury Special and 3 are especially bad offenders.
Geese(before fighting Terry or Andy): Die like your father, you pin-headed son of an ice cream maker!
The fact that Geese is a Japanophile. Combined with his poor English, this should make him impossible to take seriously, yet it's such a unique concept for a villain and he's such a difficult boss that it loops around to making him surprisingly cool.
Never Live It Down: Geese only fell from a tower twice canonically in the series and the second one was fatal, so "Geese likes to fall off and come back alive" is only one-time thing. Still, this was referenced so many times (not helped by Garou: Mark of the Wolves, which starts with a flashback of him falling to death) that it's probably the most well-known joke surrounding him, especially if you're only familiar with his appearance in non-SNK games like Tekken 7 (whose announcement trailer ends with this very scene), or Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (where this same scene is shown right after he fails to get the invitation letter that Terry would eventually claim).
Newer Than They Think: While Terry's Buster Wolf has become an iconic part of his arsenal, it debuted in Mark of the Wolves, the final game in the Fatal Fury series. Prior to Mark of the Wolves, if Terry had another super besides Power Geyser, it was usually High-Angle Geyser.
Older Than They Think: Mark of the Wolves is commonly called a Street Fighter III ripoff for its smooth animation and replacing the entire cast with the exception of the main character, but few know that Art of Fighting 3 had done the same thing before either of them.
Polished Port: The SNES ports of 2 and Special by Takara do a very admirable job of squeezing the arcade games onto 16-bit cartridges.
Signature Scene: Geese's legendary death scene from Real Bout, where Terry finally beats him by blasting him off the roof of a skyscraper. Realizing what he's done, Terry leaps over to save him- only for Geese to swat away Terry's hand, choosing to fall to his death instead. The last we see of him, Geese is laughing maniacally as he plummets to the ground... and just before he lands, we see Terry looking down on him in a mix of shock and pity. The scene is so iconic that whenever Geese appears in other games, it is bound to be referenced in some form or another.
Unexpected Character: Nobody expected Richard Meyer to return in Maximum Impact 2 as a playable fighter, and similarly, Raiden/Big Bear in KOF XII and Hwa Jai in XIII
Viewer Gender Confusion: Jin Chonshu. He looks like a little girl, but is actually male. To make it worse, in some of the games, he seems to be wearing lipstick and guyliner... Not to mention, Kappei Yamaguchi went nasal/high-pitched in voicing him to make it sound like a girl voicing him. (And by that, we don't mean mascot-style nasal. We mean a level of nasal that makes Chonshu sound like he's being voiced by a female doing a Cross Dressing Voice)
The Woobie: Hotaru, basically a 16 years old who by default hates violence and fighting, but learned light martial arts mostly for self-defense. After her mother's death, both her father and big brother went missing, and Hotaru tried to brace herself into fighting, looking for at least her brother. And yet the one she thought to be her brother (Gato) has grown really cold and continues to dismiss her like a complete jerk. Hotaru refuses to give up, and kept looking for her brother who kept evading her, ending up in places where she gets swept up with silly shenanigans at her expense and finding nothing; all while she had to continue doing the thing she hates: Fighting. Additionally, if Gato's side of story is to believed, her father might not be the kind father she believed to be...
Woolseyism: Krauser's line "Blood is thick, but syrup is thicker. Think about it."
The Martial Emperor, born three millennia ago in China, desired to advance his skills beyond mortal comprehension and threw himself into battle to kill countless people. At one point, he even annihilated an entire nation's army on his own. Making a pact with demons, the Martial Emperor entered a deep sleep with instructions on sacrificing martial artists to him to restore him. Upon his awakening, he begins absorbing the life from fighters all over the world and consumes his own loyal followers before announcing his intentions of ravaging the world and making it into a new hell where countless die so that he can feed his hunger for battle.
Geese Howard, in stark contrast to his game counterpart, is a cruel demonic overlord who uses his army of demons to conquer villages and enslave their people. Desiring to bring the Martial Emperor back to life in order to rule the world with him, Geese orchestrates a fake fighting tournament where the winner is chosen as a fuel source to increase the Emperor's power. Kidnapping Andy Bogard—whose master Geese killed years prior—Geese hooks him up to a machine and promises him the death of his friends. When he finds Terry and the others getting closer to the Golden Temple, he sends Jirai to stop them, letting him mind control Andy to fight his brother and friends. Once the gang makes it to the Golden Temple, Geese tries to kill them, hoping to stall long enough for the Emperor's incomplete reawakening.
Liuo Himmler is the sadistic, cyborg leader of the Devil Street's Fourth Dragon Factory District. Appointed by the Martial Emperor, Liuo has his goons kidnap men and children to be used as slave labor for manufacturing weapons. Executing workers who attempt to escape, he threatens those who try to run away with the promise of killing three returned child slaves. Getting into a fight with Joe and Bear after promising to make them his slaves, Liuo tries to kill the returned children with a spike chandelier.
