King of Fighters titles

No matter how you cut it, the King of Fighters series is one of the most important in this genre. Heck, I tend to limit my participation specifically to three series: Street Fighter, Fatal Fury and King of Fighters (not counting spin-offs that contain Street Fighter, Fatal Fury or King of Fighters characters, like Capcom vs SNK, for instance.) I recently watched a few videos on YouTube from a guy in Morocco of all places, who's a big King of Fighters fan. I found his channel while looking for a summary of the plotlines of the various sagas within King of Fighters, since I was a little rusty on the details. He did one on each of the main sagas: Orochi, NESTS and Ash, and they weren't bad. I'd actually like to make posts summarizing the plots myself, if for no other reason than so I have them archived for my own use. (Who am I kidding? This entire blog is a journal for my own use. Nobody else reads it.) But one video that he posted I found kind of interesting, in which he rated all of the King of Fighters titles. Now, he made exceptions: he completely ignored the Maximum Impact line (just like most Street Fighter fans usually ignore the EX line, or at most make a mention of how they're not considering it) as well as any hand-held titles. He limited himself to mainline titles only. This is more or less what I'm going to do, but I'll be going through the titles that I have and talking briefly about how much I do or don't like them relative to each other and the genre as a whole.

I should point out a little bit of context. I say that I'm a collector, but I don't mean that in a very obsessive sense. I don't have any arcade cabinets, or AES hardware, nor do I go out of my way to have all kinds of versions on all kinds of hardware. I mostly just want to have a decent port on piece of hardware I have of all of the titles. I'm also kind of notorious as a late hardware adaptor. I usually adopt one generation of console when the next generation is on sale, for instance (my PS4 adoption is an exception, but we mostly got that for my teenaged boys for Christmas one year, not for me.) Because of this, I've had a lot of titles on older hardware for a long time.

The King of Fighters games, of course, being subject to some of SNK's financial troubles, didn't always get very wide releases in North America, so sometimes I had to get them on whatever system I could get them on. Over time, I gradually picked up loads of systems (my wife isn't super happy about that. Not for the cost, more for the systems sitting around in the basement issue.) Let's go through my systems that have a King of Fighters title on them, in chronological order, and I'll talk about the games that I have for that system briefly. To be fair, I haven't fired up my older playstations in a couple of years at least, so it's been a while since I've played any of these titles. But I'm feeling the itch again, and I think I can actually coopt an old spare monitor with some adaptor cables and have a dedicated older console set-up here soon. 

One quick note about the series: one of its main conceits, of course, was the three man team conceit. I don't like three man teams. I don't like trying to mentally switch gears between rounds from one character to another and what are the special moves again, and what is the timing, reach, priority, etc. again? I like big rosters, and I like playing multiple characters, but I like playing one character at a time. To be fair, most of the home ports offer a 1x1 mode alongside the 3x3 (or 4x4 during the NESTS saga) that does best two out of three matches; in other words, playing more or less like Street Fighter or Fatal Fury does. This is actually my most common way of "consuming" these games, and those that don't offer a decent 1x1 mode are much less likely to appeal to me, because I greatly prefer playing that way to the team play. I know, I know... I'm allegedly missing the whole point. Can't help it. I just very much prefer that style of play.

Playstation

King of Fighters '95 While the oldest chronologically, I think this is the second title I ended up picking up (for whatever reason 99 was available all over the place for a while there.) It's not a bad title. I don't really love the early system with the charging super bar that the first few KOF titles had, but it's not horrible. This is, I believe, the first console port (not counting the AES home system by SNK) of a KOF game, and of course, it came to the Sony Playstation, the biggest and best system of its generation. People often knock the Sony Playstation for its supposed inability to do sprite-based fighting games well, but I'll be honest with you: I've got a lot of titles from this era on this system. Sure, sure... now I play them on my PS2, which being backwards compatible, only requires a PS1 memory card in order to work. Hardware wise, it's perfectly capable, but the games on disc will feature less frames and some reduced graphical quality. For the most part, I only occasionally notice the difference, though. Some of these PS1 fighting games are just fantastic, and are the definitive way most people played those games. 

I don't play this much anymore because at the end of each saga, the "definitive" game that gave you the best gameplay experience for the entire saga came out. Why play '95 when I had '98 on the Dreamcast, and later '98 Ultimate Match on the PS2? Well... that's a good question. Occasionally I'll still whip it out just for old times sake, although to be fair, even then I'm more likely to play this now on my PS2 Orochi Collection. The old PS1 '95 title is just been made obsolete on more than one front. Which is kind of a shame. I'm not going to say that this is one of my favorite titles in the series or anything, because it's not. But I have a lot of good memories playing this when I didn't have very many other options yet. Although a little stiff and primitive looking in some ways, the backgrounds were amazing and impress me even now. The sprites look a little Street Fighter 2 vintage, though. Most of the characters would be redrawn soon.

King of Fighters '99 This doesn't really seem to be a fan favorite in many ways, and I saw it for sale cheap all over the place. I really quite like it, though. I think its a fabulous game. The menus and select screens were, admittedly, kind of ugly. I'll be honest; I wasn't a huge fan of the striker system. You have to select a striker even in 1x1 play, because a striker is an integral part of the game play (although to be fair, I don't necessarily use my striker all that often either.) I've said before that I think 99 has more atmosphere than almost any other game in the title. Its look is tons better than even the sequels within the NESTS saga (which sadly, often featured a number of really ugly backgrounds, even if everything else about the games seemed to work OK), the kind of vaguely cyperpunk EDM soundtrack for many teams really enforced the atmosphere... There's a lot to love about this game. When the only two KOF titles I had were 95 and 99, both on this system, I greatly preferred this one. 

Dreamcast

King of Fighters '98 Of course, the actual Dreamcast title was King of Fighters: Dream Match 1999 because they didn't want to sound out of date, but the game itself was actually 98. One curious thing that the King of Fighters series did was that it had "sagas". Several games made up a continuous story; four in the case of the Orochi saga (94, 95, 96 and 97.) Once the saga was over, they did a "dream match" which brought all of the characters that had been in the saga at all back together again for a dream match. It had no story significance, but it was the best gameplay and the best roster. In short, unless you were specifically playing for the story or to see a specific background or something, it made all of the games within the saga that preceded it kind of obsolete.

Now, this game didn't literally (at least in this release) feature every character who had been in any game of the series, although it certainly had most of them. For many years, this was considered the pinnacle of King of Fighters development, and many fans even considered it a real contender for best game in the entire genre. I can't argue with that. While I doubt that I would have ever picked it over Capcom vs SNK 2 or even Street Fighter Alpha 3, I can certainly say that I liked it nearly as much as those. The Advanced Mode, from 97, is a great improvement over the older Extra mode (like 95 had) and made it play quite a bit more like a Street Fighter super gauge, quite honestly. Which is OK. I always preferred that mode to any alternatives I've yet seen. The 1x1 mode works as well as the 3x3 mode, and I naturally played that more often. I even thought the awkward Dreamcast controller worked decently well for the four button King of Fighters layout. I don't actually know that the Street Fighter six button layout is an improvement on the SNK four button layout, especially now that we're in an era of home console playing, not arcade cabinet playing, and four buttons is the standard face of any controller for any console I've ever seen. In fact, for many years, this was by far the Dreamcast game that I played the most of. 

I also have 98 on the Orochi Collection, although it's not, I don't believe, the slightly upgraded Dreamcast version, and is more like the AES version. However, the game that makes it completely and totally obsolete is the King of Fighters 98 Ultimate Match for the PS2. Getting, finally, all of the characters involved, further tweaks to the gameplay and a bunch of new stages (some of which are great, but some of which aren't actually improvements on the originals—and the game seems to prioritize new ones in arcade mode, unfortunately) the game is even more a contender for best in the series. Of course, by the time it came out, Capcom finally got their act together and released Street Fighter IV, which ended the long hiatus, kind of rebooted the genre into a more modern age, and threw out prior rankings of what was and wasn't the best that the genre could offer. But the Ultimate Match is still a great game today, and is still a serious contender for best King of Fighters game, if not best SNK fighting game. If not best game in the entire genre.

Xbox

For whatever reason, I ended up getting an original Xbox long before I got a PS2 (the Sony entry in the same generation.) Technically the Dreamcast is considered the same generation, which means that all of the major systems for this generation are systems that I owned. Sadly, my Xbox stopped working long ago, so I haven't been able to play the titles that I have only on this one, but I haven't gotten rid of them, on the off-chance that I either buy a new box or install a good emulator to run the discs on my PC. Both of which are, of course, possibilities.  This ended up being a good choice for a time, because there were a number of SNK titles that only got Xbox releases, and fighting game fans were pretty irritated that Sony was reluctant to approve some of their titles for fear that they would make the console look backwards or primitive, because the SNK titles weren't exactly graphical marvels by any means, especially in the day and age of 3D graphics. After my Xbox died, I did end up replacing most of my Xbox fighting game titles with the PS2 versions of them, often on collections when I could get them, but there were a few that I either didn't or couldn't replace, either because the price point just didn't seem worth it, or because they never got a PS2 release in the first place. I'll cover only those titles here.

King of Fighters 02 This game is similar in many ways to 98, being a retrospective "dream match" that combines the supposed best of the NESTS saga. Curiously, the whole striker system was ditched, making it play much more like a traditional KOF game. This game (as well as the one prior) were developed by Eolith, a South Korean company who had picked up the KOF assets when old SNK went into bankruptcy. Playmore, a company formed by the remnants of some SNK staff, is also credited, although I'm not sure exactly what the relationship between the two of them was; I think Eolith was the developer and Brezzasoft, later Playmore was the publisher/distributor. I've heard other reports that it was the other way around, which in most ways makes more sense. Playmore ended up rebranding itself as SNK Playmore, and became the emergent, post-bankruptcy version of old SNK, but I think they actually had to fight for a while to get some of their own brands back.

That isn't to say that Eolith did a bad job on these two games. I do think that they lack some visual punch. The sprites were mostly already the same sprites that had been used for several years, but the backgrounds were mostly kind of terrible. (To be fair, they were worse in KOF01.) The gameplay, balance and roster here were, on the other hand, pretty good, and this is yet another contender for best game in the KOF series. This is especially true once the Unlimited Match version came out. I'll talk about that here, even though I have that on my PC (my version is from Steam, but I can't find it on the Steam store anymore. You can, however get it from gog.com.)

I would say that unless you really loved the striker system, that the NESTS games are, on average, not as good as 98 anyway. This game doesn't do strikers, but it does for the NESTS saga what 98 did for the Orochi saga. A few minor details from 99 that I like, probably as much for nostalgia reasons as for any other, I miss, but otherwise, I think this completely and totally obsoletes all of the games in the NESTS saga, and there's no reason to revisit them anymore at all. This is mostly true of 98 Ultimate Match too; once you have 98 Ultimate Match and 02 Unlimited Match, there's very little reason to ever revisit any of the games between 94 and 02 vanilla versions ever again.

King of Fighters 03 I was really excited about this game for what is probably a stupid reason; Terry made his debut in the King of Fighters game in his leather bomber jacket Mark of the Wolves sprite. Sadly, the game hasn't aged quite as well as I'd have hoped. The game makes two significant changes to the way King of Fighters had been done previously:

1) It started a new saga, since NESTS was done. This is called the Ash Crimson saga. While the storyline and the villains seem kinda cool, they introduced a new protagonist again (Kyo being the protagonist of the Orochi saga and the flagship character, in a way, of the KOF series overall; K' being the protagonist of the NESTS saga.) Ash Crimson is, to put it bluntly, not a very likeable or attractive protagonist character, and he doesn't even play all that interesting. His moves feel like an abbreviated version of Guile. SNK was notorious for designing very "SNK-looking" characters, i.e., stylish in a charitable description of the word, and the word that SNK designers themselves prefer to use. Most normal people just say "super gay and stupid" instead of stylish. Ash, although supposedly a man, looks like the blonde girl from ABBA and has a smirky, smarmy, gamma attitude. If he's the protagonist, why design him in such a way that the only thing anyone will ever want to do with him is punch him in the face and get him out of your sight? That said, the storyline was pretty good, kinda complicated and interesting. Of course, because it was told by Japanese writers of a fighting game, it's almost impossible to actually figure out without going to someone else who's interpreted it online and can summarize it for you, but still; a good attempt at storytelling was always one of SNK's strong suits relative to Capcom, until Capcom stepped up their game in the Alpha series to match them.

2) It introduced a tag-team approach, which felt like a lame attempt to rip-off Capcom's own vs. Marvel games. I actually don't love that in the Marvel games, so seeing a lesser iteration of the same idea here was a poor choice. But not to worry! I prefer 1x1 play anyway, right? Well... the 1x1 play kinda sucks too. Instead of having best two out of three Street Fighter style 1x1 matches, you get three health bars as if you were doing a three man team, and you just fight the one round. Speaking of this team approach, you had a pick a team leader, and only the leader got the maximum super combo, the so called "leader desperation move." Everything about this tag team system was really screwed up, and I never liked it. And because it made even the 1x1 play not really work, this game was always disappointing to me. Which is a real shame; from a presentation standpoint, I quite liked it. The characters were great, it introduced a lot of new characters to the series from other games that had never really done KOF before, the backgrounds were beautiful. This was especially true for the 3D backgrounds developed for the PS2 and Xbox ports. But the gameplay just isn't there.

The game is available for the PS2, so I could replace my unplayable Xbox copy, but for whatever reason, it sells for no less than $50. I'm not paying that much for an 02 game that I don't want to play anymore because I already have an advanced version of it available instead, and an 03 game that is flawed to the point that I'll likely not play it very often if at all. I'll work on getting a decent Xbox emulator first, and then maybe I'll throw my old Xbox disc in and try that out just to say that I can every once in a while.

King of Fighters Neowave This was an odd game. It seems that it was developed mostly just to test new hardware, and it is the first KOF game to move off of the now very aged Neo Geo hardware; to Sammy's Atomiswave system. Of course, this is a bit of a moot point for home ports, but this didn't get a lot going on there either; in Japan and Europe there were PS2 ports, but in North America, it only got an Xbox port. Given that the game was (mostly) just a remake of 02 with few slight tweaks and new backgrounds, you're not missing much by not picking it up. For whatever reason, I didn't really get into this game as much as I did my other KOF titles; I'm quite sure I played the very similar 02 much more often than I did this one. This is odd; there's nothing really wrong with this title, it just feels like it offers very little. I remember thinking that many of the backgrounds were boring, the music was flat, and I just never got excited about playing it. I don't overly miss not being able to fire it up right now, and if you never picked up a copy, you're not missing much. Just get 2002 Unlimited Match instead, and don't look back.

Playstation 2

King of Fighters 94 As part of the Orochi collection. This title is, sadly, almost unplayable nowadays compared to its more advanced relatives. That's an exaggeration, of course, but stuff that we take for granted from better members of the series often weren't present at all here yet, the character selection is pretty Spartan. It's kind of fun to occasionally revisit where it all started, but there's very little gameplay reason to ever go back to this.

King of Fighters 96 I'll skip the PS2 version of 95, since I've already talked about that in the PS1 section. This is a transitional title. There were a few memorable new characters that became iconic that were released here (Vice, Mature, for instance) and a few gameplay tweaks like hops and evasion, which became standard for the series. But because every game after it had these too, it seems like only a minor update to 95, really. Although I have to give this game credit for having some of the best stages in the series. Some of them are still beautiful even by today's standards.

King of Fighters 97 This is the end of the Orochi saga in terms of story, which makes it important (although sadly, the main villain characters that represent this Orochi threat were... supremely underwhelming, to say the least.) The gameplay had a number of advancements, most of which were carried forward as is to 98, so I've already discussed them above I also have the original 98 on PS2 as part of the Orochi collection, but I won't be discussing it again either. Sadly, except for the story, 97 offers us almost nothing that 98 doesn't. 98 has all of the characters 97 does and more. 98 has all of the gameplay improvements and tweaks that 97 has. 97's presentation wasn't wonderful; it probably has the worst soundtrack in the entire series, and only a couple of stages even rise to the level of being adequate, much less beautiful. It's hard not to recommend just playing 98 Ultimate Match instead and reading a summary of the Orochi saga, or watching a YouTube video of the cutscenes or something instead of subjecting yourself to having to go through the experience of playing lesser entries in the series just to get the story. I would say that in general, that's a major problem with the King of Fighters series overall. I have the Orochi Collection... but I never really play it. Why would I, when I have King of Fighters '98 Ultimate Match right there next to it, and it's everything that's good about every Orochi game and then some all in one game? The only thing that I wish that it'd done was add all of the backgrounds from all of the games as selectable in vs or training just for the heckuvit. The same is true of the NESTS saga to a great degree. I don't really love the striker system, so I'd much rather just play 2002 Unlimited Match rather than fire up any of the games of the saga itself. They've all been made completely obsolete by their own successors.

King of Fighters 2000 I never really got into this game as much as I did 99, although from a purely objective standpoint, it's certainly an improvement on it. It added a few more iconic new characters, like Kula and Lin. The striker system was vastly improved, including adding a whole bunch of interesting cameo options; characters from other games that otherwise probably wouldn't ever merit a KOF release. I suppose the reasons I don't like it as much are emotional and non-objective: I think 99 is a much prettier and more atmospheric game, and I played it a lot on the PS1 when I didn't have access to a lot of other KOF games; by the time I got this one, I had access to better KOF games already. Made for a somewhat disappointing experience, where I just kinda only played it a bit to say that I had, rather than because I was really enjoying it.

King of Fighters 2001 Everything that I said about 2000 goes for broke on 2001. Gone were the cameo strikers in favor of a tactical order system, which tried to make more tactical implications for who and how you designated your strikers—which were back to being just selectable characters again. The music was OK, although the NESTS music in general was very different to what had been the case for KOF before in most respects. The backgrounds were almost uniquely unattractive and bland. The game is notable for 1) finishing up the NESTS storyline, and 2) being the first (of two) games developed by Korean company Eolith after SNK's bankruptcy before SNK Playmore, the new company that replaced SNK, was able to reacquire the rights to make their own games again. While I appreciate the story implications of this game, other than that, I find it rather forgettable. Again, 02 Unlimited Match makes this game completely and totally obsolete; there's no reason to play it when I can play 02 instead. To be honest with you, even the vanilla version of 02 did that.

King of Fighters XI Curiously, this is one of the better KOF titles, and one of the ones I come back to most frequently, even with lots of other options to choose from. Commentators make a big deal out of the arcade hardware change for this one; like the Neowave test game, this was on the Atomiswave arcade board; the first "mainline" KOF title not on the NeoGeo. Since I play it on the PS2, as does almost everyone who plays it at all, I don't know why that matters very much. It still uses the same sprites as before, and the backgrounds are 3D like the Xbox and PS2 ports of all of the last several titles. What's the big deal about arcade hardware when arcades hardly exist anymore?

Rather, the game is fun in its ported state in part because it has pretty solid options for play; a modified tag team still carries forward from 2003, but it's much better than it was. Of course, you can also ignore that and play a classic 3x3 team form, or they have a really good, solid 1x1 mode too (guess which one I play most?) The new characters have that overly SNK-gay vibe to them, but what makes this one fun is the wild variety of characters from SNK's past that haven't really ever had a KOF release before. Bringing Duck King and Tung Fu Rue from Fatal Fury back? Brilliant! Odd mid-bosses from obscure titles like Buriki One and Savage Reign to add a lot of variety to the roster? Excellent! In general, although it's not literally the largest roster from a KOF game (without double checking, I'd guess 02 Unlimited Match has that honor), it is one of the larger rosters, and it's certainly the most unique and interesting roster.

That said, the backgrounds and music are a bit on the bland side, and the boss is super cheap. But then again, the whole concept of the "SNK boss" didn't come from nowhere.

PC

While all of my PC games in this series were picked up on Steam, they're not available as near as I can tell in the steam store anymore, and have to now be bought via Good Old Games, as mentioned above. I have two titles from this series from Steam, 2002 Unlimited Match, which I've already talked about on my 2002 entry above in the Xbox section, and XIII. XII seems to not be available at all, but that's totally OK as it isn't a part of the storylines (curiously) and seems, if anything, like an overpriced beta for XIII, which is the "full" game XII should have been. As near as I can tell, owning XIII makes owning XII completely and totally superfluous.

Sadly, the art and visual direction XII and XIII went was abandoned with XIV which went 3D. I've rented that for the PS4, but I don't see much need at this point to buy it; but I'm sure eventually I'll get around to it. It's relatively cheap. Somehow it just didn't grab me, though. Since XIII finished the Ash storyline, maybe I'll just wait it out for a few years and see where it all goes from here.

King of Fighters XIII One sad thing about buying the Steam edition is that I have no way to upgrade this to the "galaxy version" which you can buy in Good Old Games. That's OK, I think, since it doesn't seem to have added too much to the game other than two or three characters that I don't really care about anyway. While still using hand drawn sprites in this game, the hand drawn sprites were completely redrawn in high resolution. A lot of them have really significant graphical overhauls, not just in the technical aspects but in terms of how they look, too. All in all, I think the look of this game is certainly one of its stronger traits. 

The lack of a 1x1 arcade mode is it's weakest. Maybe most fans aren't bothered by that, but I find its absence both inexplicable and inexcusable. Games that don't have this type of mode, or don't have a good one (like 2003) are ones that even if I otherwise would be well inclined towards, I struggle to feel motivated to play much. And both 2003 and XIII would be among my favorites in the series with that mode, but drop significantly without it.

I will also state that I think it's a shame that the Ash Crimson saga didn't get a "capper" game like the Orochi and NESTS saga did. In both of those cases, the capper game; the "dream match" that came out after the saga was over, bringing everyone back with the best mechanics for the best gameplay experience, are considered the best games in the series; 98 and 2002. Especially in their updated "Ultimate Match" and "Unlimited Match" versions. I understand why they didn't and couldn't; all three games of the Ash saga were on different original arcade hardware; MVS for 2003, Atomiswave for XI and Taito Type X for XIII. In addition to that, the complete redraw of the sprites between XI and XIII is a deal-breaker; and after XIII, they abandoned even those new sprites for 3D models. 

But knowing and understanding why something couldn't be done and being happy about it are two different things. I think they should have kept the XIII sprites for one more venture and made an Ash Crimson saga dream match. Although given all of the crazy characters brought in for XI, that would probably have been prohibitively expensive, because they would have had to draw tons of new character sprite sets. Ah, well. I can dream about dream matches that we didn't get, right? And while I'm dreaming, I'll dream that Terry's bomber jacket version was the one that they used in XIII instead of his very dated ripped sleeve Levi jacket. What a step backwards there. (I notice that SNK developers have a real thing for various Kyo looks too. They keep wanting to bring back his Orochi version, even though it's by far the worst design. And even XIII actually has two Kyo versions; the Ash saga outfit and the NESTS saga outfit.)

In summary, King of Fighters is an interesting series. Capcom is my favorite in the genre, and Street Fighter specifically among Capcom, but King of Fighters has always been a worthy alternative. During the 00s, when fighting games were on a bit of a hiatus in most respects, I actually started almost liking some of the better KOF titles better; had there not been the unexpected rebirth of Street Fighter and the release of SF4, I might have eventually started liking some of the KOF titles better. Of course, that also assumes that other might-have-beens would have happened, like an uninterrupted progression of KOF titles without SNK's bankruptcy and the chaos that that introduced into the series, not to mention all of the farting around with different types of graphical styles; old fashioned legacy MVS vs newly drawn hi res sprites vs boring 3D models that look like every other game out there. It also might have helped had SNK not gone really hard into bizarre, androgynous characters. Wokeness is a thing of Western civilization, and to a lesser extent in Latin American civilizations, but it doesn't really have a direct counterpart in Japanese culture. But if it did, I'd say the wokeness of the character designs is a major flaw in more recent SNK offerings. Ah, well. Mistakes were made, and the timeline we got wasn't the best timeline we could have gotten. What're you going to do?

If for some reason you're a fan of this type of game, but haven't ever dabbled in King of Fighters, I recommend going to Good Old Games, following the link I posted above. You can get both 98 Ultimate Match and 02 Unlimited Match for $12.99 each, and both of those are almost certainly the best games in the series. After trying those, maybe you'll still be interested in some of the Ash Crimson era games like XI or XIII. The former is available on Playstation 2 if you can still find a used copy kicking around, the latter can also be bought on GOG.