King of the Fighters fans are a lot like people who tell you they prefer The Rolling Stones over The Beatles. They seem insane to us normal, Street Fighter-loving folk, and their predilections make us deeply uncomfortable on a fundamental level.
I kid. Outside of the weapons-based affairs, like Samurai Showdown and Last Blade, I never cottoned to SNK’s two-dimensional fighters. I’m the first to admit that the King of the Fighters titles, and the series that birthed them, are all beautiful, well-made games, but the flow of their fighting has just never clicked for me. Call it Capcom brainwashing. I respect the hell out of the King of the Fighters series though. Fighting game staples like enormous character rosters, franchise crossovers, and team battles all have their roots in the series. I also have to give props to a series that was developed on hardware from 1990 for eleven entries over as many years. That’s awesome.
King of the Fighters XII is an event for the series. It abandons all of the character sprites of yesteryear, loses many fan favorite characters, and it is built from the ground up for HD play. What’s more, every single facet of the game, from the backgrounds to the character sprites, is hand drawn. Even Arc System Works, the 2D fighting hounds responsible for Guilty Gear, Arcana Heart, and others, didn’t make their HD debut, Blazblue, fully hand drawn. And understandably so. SNK has taken an enormous risk with King of the Fighters XII. It is monumentally expensive (not to mention time consuming) to make a densely animated 2D fighter by hand, let alone one built for high-definition. And fighting games broadly aren’t the most profitable genre in gaming,
From the looks of this new trailer for KOFXII, it looks like SNK’s efforts have yielded very positive results. This game is gorgeous. So gorgeous, I’m going to have to pick up its inevitable home release like it were a work of art I would hang over my mantle. After almost twelve years, it looks like someone may finally best Street Fighter III’s level of detailed animation in its characters.
Previous Trailer Reviews:
Scribblenauts
Resident Evil 5
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Edge
Wanted
The Chase: Felix Meets Felicity
Yakuza 3
Dragon Quest IX
TGS Trailer Time: Resident Evil 5
Retro Game Challenge
Golden Axe: Beast Rider
House of the Dead: Overkill
Riz-Zoawd
Idolm@ster PSP
The Last Guy
Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff
Captain Rainbow
Mega Man 9 and Chrono Trigger DS
Densetsu no Stafi 5
Sonic Unleashed
Infinite Undiscovery
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
Street Fighter IV
The Conduit
Mirror’s Edge