Genre : Fighting
Publisher: SNK Playmore
Developers: SNK NeoGeo/Eolith
Release Date: December 19, 2003
Buy 'THE KING OF FIGHTERS 2000/2001': PlayStation 2
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The problem with reviewing a King of Fighters game is that there's no real point to it.
By now, anyone who's played a KOF game has formulated their opinion on it already, and subsequent games in the series won't change their minds. Starting in 1994, The King of Fighters took up the role of the Madden of the fighting-game genre. Each year, reliably, SNK would tweak the core gameplay a bit, add a few features, adjust the character lineup, and rerelease it to its reliable core fanbase.
Of course, then SNK went out of business eighty-seven times in rapid succession.
It's not like it was a perfect strategy.
They've come back again now, the unkillable Jason Vorhees of the Japanese gaming industry, and have released two of the most recent King of Fighters games on the PlayStation-2, within the same package. For forty bucks, you get arcade-perfect, somewhat retouched versions of The King of Fighters 2000 and 2001.
One would assume that this two-pack is meant to expose new fans to the series, as there are a lot of people who've never even heard of KOF; time was, you had to be in or around a pretty sizeable Chinatown to find a KOF cabinet, or a NeoGeo MVS cabinet with a KOF board, in North America. Further, the real hardcore KOF fanbase either all own Neo Geos, or, more often, have Dreamcasts and Utopia bootdiscs, so they could import Playmore's Japan-only releases of KOF2000 through 2002.
Therefore, I'm going to treat the rest of this review as though you've never heard of The King of Fighters before. If you have, skip to the bottom; if you haven't, grab a snack. I am about to drop mad knowledge.
The KOF series, which has been updated annually since 1994, is SNK's homebrewed all-star game, featuring characters from not only their flagship franchises like Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting, but "translated" characters from other games. For example, the "Ikari Team" in KOF is made up of the two main characters from the old Ikari Warriors topdown shooters, and their commanding officer. The focus has moved away, over time, from this "all-star lineup" to a fighting game franchise in its own right, starring a rotating cast of original characters.
The idea behind these games is pretty simple. Take your average 2D fighter, and create teams of three. You fight against other players in single-elimination rounds of five; whoever gets KOed is out for the duration. Whichever player runs out of characters first, loses.
Further, each character has an assortment of special moves, ranging from harder-hitting punches and kicks to fireballs and teleportation, as befits a Japanese 2D fighter. Most of the time, in KOF games, a character has more special moves than, say, a character in the average Street Fighter game (six or seven as opposed to four or five, plus command moves and throws), but they also have less standard punches and kicks. This includes their supers, which have gradually evolved from desperations into full-blown extra combinations in the spirit of Street Fighter Alpha. You build up meter; you burn meter on a super; things die.
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The result is a fighting experience that is, of course, utterly unrealistic (as with all good videogames), but still leaves room for a startling amount of strategy.
Starting with The King of Fighters '99, the series has also included the concept of "strikers," a fourth member of every team whose role is to wait offstage. With the press of a button and the expenditure of a "charge" on the striker meter, you can summon the striker to jump in and launch an attack on your opponent (or heal you, or taunt him, or whatever that particular character does). While it does add another interesting element to the gameplay, especially considering how easy it is to bring a striker out, it's also something they should've thought about a great deal harder before including it in the game. In KOF99, it led to quite a few braindead easy infinites or 100% damage combos. (For example, Clark Steel, with Joe Higashi as striker, could simply call in Joe constantly to nail an enemy on the ground, which brought them up, so Clark could knock them down again, and so on. The only limitations were the other guy's lifebar and the number of strikers you had in reserve.) While the KOF games always manage to have at least one or two glitches or accidentally-included infinites in them anyway, the strikers make them much easier to pull off.
That being said, The King of Fighters 2000 features the most complicated the series has gotten, as of this writing, with literally dozens of available strikers. It's the second chapter in the three-game "NESTS trilogy" of the series, where the King of Fighters tournament is exploited by the members of the evil organization NESTS; it also introduced some fan-favorite characters, like the secret agent and boxer Vanessa, her partner Seth, and the strangely-dressed but vicious ninja Lin.
Following the death of their agent Krizalid, and the failure of their plan to conquer Earth with an army of clones of the greatest martial artist in the world (KOF's hero from '94 through '97, Kyo Kusanagi), NESTS has constructed a new plan. Using the energies they can collect from the bouts in KOF, they'll be able to power up their orbital laser satellite, the Zero Cannon, and use it to blackmail the world.
Of course, most of the fighters in KOF would prefer to not be responsible for the destruction of a major city, so they're going to have to try and stop it. After a full day of battling through the greatest martial artists the world has to offer, whoever wins the tournament will also have to face off against Zero, the leader of NESTS, to defuse the Zero Cannon and save Earth.
It's a wonder anyone comes to these tournaments anymore.
In any event, in KOF2K , you have more options for abusing your opponent than ever before. It all comes down to the super meter, and to the strikers.
Unlike the early games, your super meter in KOF2K fills up as you hit an opponent, or are hit yourself. When you generate a full bar's worth of meter, you can expend it at will on a super move, as before; use a Guard Cancel to instantly attack after blocking an opponent's move; or, by taunting, burn one level of meter to get another opportunity to use your striker.
When the super meter's maxed out, you can spend two super bars on a special super move, which usually takes the form of a character's "super desperation" from past games (i.e. Terry Bogard's SDM Triple Geyser). You can also, for a short time, enter Armor Mode, where your attack power increases and you can't be hit out of your attacks; or Counter Mode, where you can use as many supers as you want without burning meter on them, and cancel your special moves into supers.
The striker system in KOF2K has also been enhanced. Many of the returning characters from '99 have changed their striker move, and every character in 2K gets what the game calls "Another Striker." When you pick which member of your team gets to be the striker, you can opt to use them, or another, optional character. Sometimes, it's a past KOF cast member who was left out of this game (Mai's Another Striker, for example, is Chizuru Kagura from KOF96); other times, it's a character from another game entirely (Ryo Sakazaki's Another Striker is Kaede from SNK's Last Blade series; Yuri's is Samurai Shodown's Nakoruru).
Several characters-Ramon, Kasumi, Ryo, etc.-also have a third, "Maniac" striker as an option; in the arcade, and the Dreamcast version, you had to input a special code to unlock them, but they're available from the start of the game in the PS2 rev. You can unlock more Maniac Strikers, such as the '94/'98 American Sports Team, by playing the game's Party Mode, a sort of short-lived, dead simple survival mode where you have to beat a certain number of characters within five minutes.
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As this is the last KOF game SNK made before what looked like their final descent into bankruptcy, the game has a sort of weirdly mournful air to it, like a coda to the company's career. The characters who show up as Another Strikers are a sort of abbreviated history of their games, and even the music isn't as peppy or upbeat as it has been in the past.
The issue at hand, though, is that while this is a solid enough KOF game, it's also one of the most broken. It's a judgement call on my part, yes, and most casual players will completely miss this. Still, KOF2Kis notorious for a great many horrible things you can do with strikers, even above and beyond the kind of thing that was possible in KOF99. 100% combos, redizzies, infinites, long juggles, and the occasional off-the-ground combination are all possible in KOF2K, all thanks to the striker system. If you see a player who knows what he's doing, and he picks Seth, Goenitz, or King Lion as his striker, run away. It's about to start looking like Marvel vs. Capcom 2, complete with the potential for getting helplessly curbstomped.
The King of Fighters 2001 is a different beast entirely. The Korean company Eolith acquired the rights to the series after SNK's bankruptcy, which explains the vast shift in art and style between games. KOF2K1 simply isn't as polished as the game before it; while the changes aren't exactly jarring, the lack of presentation is visible and almost tangible. There's a new opening video in this version, but otherwise, it's much as it appeared in arcades.
This forms the conclusion of the NESTS trilogy, but I'll be quite frank and say that I have no idea what the hell is going on here anymore. There's a satellite and people die and Angel has boobs. She has the boobs, they are visible from orbit and worthy of your respect. Oh, and Kula and Whip might've hooked up. Thus endeth the available storyline.
It's unfair and misleading to call 2001 a "cheap Korean knockoff" of KOF, but it's hard to get around the idea. The sprites are there; the gameplay's kind of there; the characters are certainly there; but it lacks the essential feel of a KOF game. The hit detection's a little off, the music's repetitive and annoying, and the stages, which were never marvels of ergonomic design to begin with, come off as pretty flat, with the notable exception of the final boss's orbital lair, complete with the gentle curve of the Earth visible out of the window in the background.
The new characters in 2001 are also bizarre, both in their design and their moves. New archrival-type guy K9999 is a pallid ripoff of Tetsuo from Akira; fanservice Mexican wrestler Angel is fun to watch and has the same Japanese voice actor as Haruko from "FLCL," but she's got a weird circle combo system that's almost impossible to use effectively; May Lee, the replacement for Jhun Hoon on the Korean team, is cute and all, but seems to be in the wrong game; Foxy, some kind of crossbreed between a fencer and a windsock, is just lame. Several characters have been revamped or redesigned, such as Andy Bogard's new suit, which makes him look like the white Power Ranger.
Eolith's one big contribution, which is hard to undervalue, is the fact that they managed to overhaul and improve the striker system. Instead of a fixed three-men-in, one-man-out ratio system, you can now choose to put as many as four into the match, or leave out as many as three to back up a single fighter. The more strikers you have, the shorter your super meter is and the more bars you can have in stock at one time; for example, a single fighter with three strikers as backup can have up to four supers in reserve. You also burn supers to use strikers in the first place, as opposed to the two actions being powered by entirely separate meters. Combined with the fact that none of the strikers I've seen so far are as useful or dangerous as KOF2K's were, it actually evens out the gameplay.
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The only other thing to say is that even in a series like KOF, where the bosses are notoriously difficult to defeat (except, oddly, for Orochi), Igniz, the final boss of KOF2K1, is a bastard among bastards. It's not that he has to let you beat him, as with so many other bosses; it's that he can't let you beat him. It's like setting a tactical nuclear warhead to "stun." He gestures funny and you're down half your life. Even if you find something magnificently cheesy with which to whittle away at his lifebar, he takes so much less damage than any other character in the game that you'll probably still lose, on time if nothing else.
Both of the games share one serious drawback, and that's the lack of any real bonus content. The Dreamcast versions of both games had addictive, albeit simplistic, puzzle modes that you could play for hours on end; 2000's was a simple series of jigsaw puzzles that would gradually unlock bonus backgrounds to use in Vs. and Practice modes, while 2001's was kind of like Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. Neither are present in this version; instead, you have the aforementioned Party Mode.
While you can unlock new stages and strikers with Party Mode in both games-such as the American Sports Team from KOF94/98 as Maniac Strikers for the Fatal Fury Team in KOF2K, or Krizalid as a striker in KOF2K1 --the process by which you do so amounts to the single most boring survival mode in fighting-game history. Plowing through a few dozen other characters when they're all at 33% life, with an occasional break to fight a full-life opponent who might actually hit back, can be okay stress relief, but it gets real old, real fast. Further, I may be alone in this, but this would've been a great time for SNK to add a few missing characters back in (Geese, Krauser, Mr. Big, Eiji…), and the fact that they didn't is disappointing.
While these are excellent ports of The King of Fighters 2000 and 2001, and look a lot better than the Dreamcast versions, you're still talking about two of the weaker games in the series. If you're interested in checking out the King of Fighters series, you might do better to spend five more dollars and get a Dreamcast with >KOF Dream Match '99 (a.k.a. King of Fighters '98), which many people think is the best game in the series.
If you don't have that option, and you missed either of these games in the arcades, then the two-pack's not a bad buy. With dozens of characters to master, hundreds of possible teams, and the variety of strategies that the strikers make possible, King of Fighters 2000 might be worth the purchase by itself. 2001 is a decidedly inferior effort, but is still occasionally entertaining.
Besides, if you buy this, you're supporting SNK, one of the finest gaming companies on the planet. Consider it an act of gamer charity.
Score : 7.5/10
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