By John Flickinger
Staff Writer, Coffee Fiend
The King of Fighters series has a long history, dating back to 1994. It started out as an experiment to combine characters from the Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting games to create a new series with a massive roster. In fact, the roster was so large that the tournament was comprised of three-person teams. Every year, from 1994 to 2003, saw a new entry to the series with new features and characters, and improvements to existing game mechanics.
All in all, it’s a pretty solid series with great characters, excellent gameplay, good storylines, and loads of replay value. It is a series that is sometimes dismissed as a generic Street Fighter, and around the year 2000 there were several crossovers with Street Fighter characters, but it has a cult following in America, and in Japan the games are so popular that a new King of Fighters release is a small event like new Madden and Call of Duty games are over here. It’s the kind of thing that has people waiting at midnight to buy a copy. There’s even a King of Fighters movie with a poorly written plot and bad acting like so many other video games.
King of Fighters has similarities to other fighting games, but what makes this series special is that nearly everything is in excess. The games feature massive 30+ character rosters, and the three vs. three format creates a lot of variety due to the fact that you can play through several times with the same team and have different match ups every single time. There is even a strategy element in selecting the order for your team members before each fight. In different situations, you may want to start different characters. This allows you to come out of the gate with a faster character, or a more powerful character, or save the one you’re best with for last. No corners are cut either. There aren’t lots of palette swap characters, or clones, and each character has a unique style. Even characters with similar disciplines play differently.
Another staple of the series is the boss fights. The bosses are absolutely merciless. It’s not uncommon to go through an entire game without losing a single round only to be completely annihilated by a boss. With King of Fighters bosses, all the rules go out the window. The standard roster characters are very balanced, but the bosses are cranked up to 11 with devastating special moves that are difficult to avoid, incredibly powerful, and in some cases humiliating. It is very satisfying when those boss characters are defeated, and for this reason many fans have a love/hate relationship with them.
One of the nicer touches of the series is that they often add extra animations that help to bring the characters to life. For example, rivals like Kyo and Iori have different pre-match animations facing each other than they would for other characters because they can’t stand each other. To contrast that, characters that are friends, or have a mentor relationship interact differently, and there are even special animations for couples. If Blue Mary faces off against her boyfriend Terry Bogard she’ll flirt with him before the match. Another character has a pre-match animation where he jams a steamed barbecue pork bun into his mouth, and most of the time he just eats it, but every once in a while he chokes, his face turns blue, and right before the match starts he recovers and quickly gets into his stance as if to say “I’m okay, let’s do this.” Before the fight even starts, the tone is set. The extra animations aren’t limited to just the pre-match introductions either.
There are great in-game animations that really give the characters depth. One of my favorites is for Vanessa, a boxer. She rushes in, lands a flurry of punches, punctuates it with two really hard hits, then as the enemy falls to the ground from the force of the blows she winces and shakes her hands in the air like her knuckles sting. The “time up” reactions are great too. Some of the more aggressive characters look disappointed like they were interrupted and wanted to finish, while the more well-adjusted characters look disappointed in themselves that they didn’t win before time was up. The detailed body language and animated facial expressions really give a sense for who each character is and what they are about.
These animations are subtle, but really add a lot to the characters. They don’t feel as rigid as characters in similar fighting games, and as a result they really improved the series. It wasn’t apparent to me just how important those animations were until a few 3D spin off King of Fighters games were made and these lively characters became just as rigid and lifeless as the ones in other games.
The animation is the heart and soul of these games, and in King of Fighters XII it completely changed. As the first high resolution King of Fighters game for the current generation of consoles, the decision was made to draw all of the characters and animations from a blank slate instead of re-using the archive they’ve built up over the last decade. It may have been out of necessity due to the new resolution, or it may have been to give the series a graphical overhaul. Whatever the reason, it was going to be a tricky process.
The catch here is that they were still using the traditional techniques to draw each frame of each character pixel by pixel. Since this was in high definition it was especially taxing on the development team. This process is like trying to create a wall mural by drawing individual dots the size of a pin head. Because this was very labor intensive, and each character took about two weeks. Ironically, they commissioned a 3D model of each character to use as a reference for these animations. You can read in depth about the technique they’ve used, dubbed “dot art” and check out some of the animations at their official website.
The end result gave it a look unlike any fighting game I’ve ever seen. It’s old school, but modern at the same time, and in terms of art direction it’s a pretty amazing game. Unfortunately despite the artwork and animations, the game itself was a bit disappointing.
Due to the intensive animation process the game had a limited roster similar to the 3D titles. As a result it also adopted the standard one on one, best of three rounds formula since there weren’t enough characters for the traditional three on three King of Fighters matches. That alone caused replay value to take a hit. There were very few stages, and the main game mode was a time attack where you try to go through a few fights as quickly as possible to get the best time. All in all, a full game takes only a few minutes to complete from start to finish. Don’t misunderstand me, what’s there is good, but there isn’t much there, especially for a series known for its massive rosters and animations. In XII each character has one win animation, with limited special moves.
Really, it felt more like an incredible tech demo more than a full game with a $60 price tag which, in reality, is what it was. The character selection was missing major characters, and most disappointingly, there was no epic end boss. The gameplay itself was solid, so it was still fun, but there just wasn’t anywhere near as much content as the others. If it was presented like Gran Tourismo 5: Prologue was, as a tech demo of what is to come, preferably with a discounted price of $20-$30, it would have been great. I’m not sure if it would turn a profit like that, but it might have gotten more people interested in the series which might boost sales when the full game was released, and it wouldn’t have felt so drastically over priced.
Personally I wondered if drawing the characters for high definition would have been a better way to go. I would love to see a King of Fighters game where the characters look as detailed as the ones in BlazBlue, but at the same time I respect their decision to use the traditional techniques. It’s admirable that a company would be willing to go to such lengths to create something with artistic merit; especially in an age where more and more companies try to cut corners to increase their profit margins instead of treating the medium as the art form which it is. King of Fighters is about tradition, and perfecting the same formula year after year. This animation was a massive undertaking, but it honors that tradition, and although XII felt like “King of Fighters Light” it’s still fun to play, and it’s a great reboot to the series.
In the long run this shift will likely pay off for them; realistically, they couldn’t just keep editing the same set of character animations forever. Now they have a new set of characters to work with, which were born out of countless hours of developers’ blood, sweat, and tears. We’re about to see the fruits of their labor firsthand.
It’s been in Japanese arcades since last summer, but finally, in November 22nd, King of Fighters XIII will be released for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 here in America. From the looks of it, they are building upon the foundation that XII created, and if XII was the tech demo, then XIII is the real deal. Key characters are back, there are more game modes, and personally, I’m hoping that they give us an end boss worthy of the series. It seems like this new entry in the series will correct the shortcomings of the last, and give the King of Fighters its soul back with tons of animation and lively characters. For at least one more year, the tradition will continue.
Front page image from fanpop.com, KoF ’94 Ad from scottdecker.com, KoF XI boss fight screenshot from aznbadger.files.wordpress.com, KoF XII screenshot from strategyinformer.com, KoF XII character select screenshot from nerdiest-kids.com, KoF XIII screenshot from inthegame.nl
TITLE: Pushmo
Yeah, so I’m no level designer, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t all sorts of cool ideas out there from classic game references to brain teasing walls of hell. Though, no matter whether the level was user created or in the main game, the best puzzles are the ones that appear deceptively simple, but actually make you think. When you finally solve it, you smack your forehead and yell, “Of course!” As far as the main game goes, if you get stuck on a level for a decent amount of time, you can always skip it and come back and try later. To paraphrase what I said earlier, the developers really went out of their way to be as user friendly as possible.
