NEWSLETTER

		SHEPPARD’S VIDEO-GAME PIE By Stephen Lea Sheppard Photo by Dan Siney

THE KING OF FIGHTERS XII
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: SNK Playmore, Ignition Entertainment

My problem with The King of Fighters XII is I can’t think of a reason to play it.

We are in the middle of a 2-D fighter renaissance. Street Fighter IV and BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger are fucking excellent, and now it looks like we’ll be getting new versions of both those games with balance tweaks and new characters sometime soon. It’s like the early 90s all over again.

The King of Fighters series was good back then. Lower budgets than Street Fighter, but they made up for it with large casts, each member of which had a much larger array of special moves than the Street Fighter characters and remained balanced despite this. If KoF XII occupied that niche now, it’d be great. It does not.

It’s got the smallest cast of any KoF game, and every character has a vastly abridged special-move set compared with their past appearances. Characters have lost about half their special moves, and the remaining moves have been simplified—stuff characters used to be able to do in the air or the ground, they can now only do on the ground, etc.

I think I understand why. First, in most fighting games, each player picks one combatant and then they fight for the best two out of three matches. In KoF, each player picks three combatants, and when one of your characters gets knocked out, you switch to the next. Whichever player loses all three characters loses the match. That means you need to be proficient with at least three characters to be good at the game. Second, each character is hand-drawn, but they move fluidly enough that you could mistake them for 3-D models at times. I’m sure it would have been a phenomenal pain in the ass to fully animate as many special moves for each character as they had in earlier KoF games. But just because I can understand SNK Playmore’s reasoning for doing this doesn’t mean I want anything to do with the result. (Especially since, on top of these problems, KoF XII has bad, laggy netcode, so the online matches here aren’t nearly as good as they are in its two major competitors.)

If you’re tired of Street Fighter IV and want something that’s kind of like it but with different characters, and you play primarily on the couch with your friends in the room with you, KoF XII will do you perfectly. If you want something meaningfully distinct from Street Fighter IV, though, or if you want to play online, go for BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger instead. If you already have SF IV and BlazBlue and want something on the same level as both of them, I can’t recommend this.

On the other hand, there’s another easily available King of Fighters game that does deliver the goods. It’s on Xbox Live Arcade and it’s called The King of Fighters ’98: Ultimate Match. It’s eleven years old and looked like ass even by the standard of the times when it was new, but it plays great.

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Comments

Anonymous, on Nov 20, 2009 wrote: holy fucking shit those kof sprites are wild looking
Anonymous, on Nov 16, 2009 wrote: 2-d is the only kind of fighter game i ever liked and when i say that i really mean st2 and mortal kombat.
Anonymous, on Nov 12, 2009 wrote: did you guys see the street fighter iv snuggie? i shit you not.
	neezy, on Nov 11, 2009 wrote: This series is usually great and hilarious, definitely gonna try Muramasa this weekend
	Pocket Nerd, on Nov 9, 2009 wrote: I remember the KoF series as "those games that friends who loved fighting games constantly praised as the best of the genre and always insisted I’d love if I just gave them a try." A shame this new entry doesn’t live up to that legend. And my God, Muramasa’s plot sounds like Video Game Mad Libs: "You play a [plot twist] [generic fantasy protagonist archetype] or a [plot twist] [generic fantasy protagonist archetype] and must cut your way through huge numbers of [scary adjective] [generic fantasy adversary archetype], [scary adjective] [generic fantasy adversary archetype], and [scary adjective] [generic fantasy adversary archetype] in a fantastically drawn and animated ancient [real-world location]. That said, it sounds fun. I should check it out.