Uhm...No.
Fatal Fury 2 --- 1992
Fatal Fury Special --- 1993
Art of Fighting 2 --- 1994
That is absolutely not Eiji Kisaragi in Mai Shiranui's background. Eiji Kisaragi did not exist when Fatal Fury Special was being made.
The Eiji Kisaragi ending in AoF2 was a joke ending. This should have been obvious since Eiji flirts with EVERY female he sees. Anyone who's played through AoF2 knows this from his pre-fight quotes with King and Yuri Sakazaki.
Further, Eiji Kisaragi does not have a headband or a scarf as per the ninja in Mai Shiranui's background.
Now, originally I personally had always just assumed it was Hanzo Shiranui. Later I thought it was probably Hanzou from World Heroes, then disregarded this because, as Big Bear said, ADK and SNK never really interchanged their characters.
HOWEVER:
ADK has been around since at least the early eighties as a development team within SNK. It was not until the Neo Geo systems were made that they began to be their own company (which was still technically part of SNK, a second party company like Rare to Nintendo, per se). I propose that the ninja in the background IS Hanzou of World Heroes fame because at the time Fatal Fury Special was being made and considering the situation SNK was going through, anything was possible.
Take Fight Fever for example. This was a pathetic game made by Viccom. After it completely flopped SNK hired up the few talented people from within the Korean company which attempted to take on the Street Fighter 2 phenomenom with their Tae Kwon Do based fighting game.
Because of this, a few things from Fight Fever, such as some of the sound effect samples, made it into Fatal Fury 2 and Art of Fighting.
Also, of the Korean people that ended up working for SNK, one of them was at the time the president of Viccom.
His name is Kim Kap Hwan. So you see anything's possible.
These events were before the Capcom~Data East lawsuit. They had happened at the end of an era when you could play a Commando arcade game that had a Data East label on the side, and where almost no one new Tradewest made the game Renegade because they had Taito distribute it for them almost everywhere.
What I'm trying to say is that at that time ANYTHING went. Quite frankly the character looks somewhat like Hanzou and nothing like Eiji Kisaragi. It must be Hanzou from that standpoint.
The only other possibility is that it was from an early design for Hanzo Hattori (since there is a slight similarity) as I have heard that a male ninja character was originally going to be in Fatal Fury 2 (which a character along the lines of Mai Shiranui being a playable character in Samurai Shodown when it came out). As there is absolutely nothing to substantiate this (beyond Mai originally going to be male character) at the moment I will still maintain that the character seen in Mai's background in Fatal Fury 2 is Hanzou of World Heroes fame.
...
Of course, every World Heroes character had a real life counterpart. And Hanzo Hattori was a real life ninja. So in a manner of speaking it is Hanzo Hattori as well depending on how you want to look at it.
[ September 27, 2001: Message edited by: Neo Rasa ]