I jokingly asked for a new Last Blade game made by L0 months ago during Salty Cupcakes and Ravi told us we should bombard them since they tried to talk with them. The details regarding Capcom... I can only speculate. I hear something interesting was once mentioned on Salty Cupcakes about them and Darkstalkers, but it might just be hearsay.
If it were easy to reach SNKP, trust me, it'd happen often. Their silence is deafening as their Japan-only cellphone games and pachinko are frustrating to read about.
When KoF XIII was released, it was Atlus that handled all the heavy lifting, and even if they weren't the european publisher, they were a lot more easy to reach than Rising Star Games,
who didn't even bother to address an issue that would help them get more money through the PSN store.
Japanese fluency would probably make things easier, I'm not sure that skill exists in the core Lab Zero staff, but it would likely help.
Communication can't be that big of an issue if L0 managed to snag Michuru Yamane for the soundtrack and follow-up tracks. It's more a matter of whether or not SNK wants to work with someone from the outside.
Working with the outside hasn't been much of an issue for SNKP, but a lot of that in recent history has been contained in Asia, with their characters appareaing in other games like Lord of Vermilion, Queen's Gate, Lost Saga and that chinese game Xuan Dou Zhi Wang.
I'm sure Lab Zero could work around the setting. It's not like the Fatal Fury series story is that convoluted.
It gets a dash of weirdness starting in Fatal Fury 3 when the Jin scrolls of immortality come into play along with an exorcist like Sokaku and the oddity that is Geese's Real Bout 2 ending, not to mention the connection to Last Blade shennanigans through Eiji's ancestry, since the setting is shared with Art of Fighting.
But at its core, despite the international detour in Fatal Fury 2 and Special
Fatal Fury is the story of a city and its families, something in a way it shares in common with SG, so if that's the heart of the setting it should be fine.
My question is how Mike Z could handle a game where he couldn't make big combos, as FF isn't about airdashes and rejuggles.
Hopefully he can get that mindset out of his system with SG tweaks and the characters to come, and a 4-button system (maybe an extra just for throws like FF1 would be nice) would ease the load on the animators and make eash individual attack matter more.
I tend to worry about Mike's Capcom-centered philosophy that shows so much in SG, but as a grappler guy, it's probably not beyond him to do justice to something a bit different.