The King of Fighters XII Review
Fighting games are really hot this gaming season. In addition to Street Fighter 4, BlazBlue, and the upcoming release of Tatsunoko VS Capcom, SNK has decided to throw its chips into the pot with King of Fighters XII. Like BlazBlue, King of Fighters XII eschews 3-D graphics for astoundingly sharp and detailed 2-D animated sprites, and a large portion of the appeal this game has lies in seeing all your favorite characters from KOFs past in glorious HD. Unfortunately, this is about all the appeal the game has, and considering how long fans have been waiting for King of Fighters’ triumphant return to the spotlight, the game feels unfortunately rushed and slapped together more than anything. Not in gameplay mind you, no no no. In fact King of Fighters XII is just as fun to play as any other King of Fighters game, maybe even more so. No, where King of Fighters XII really lacks is in its presentation, and this lack of polish unfortunately sets it back when trying to compete with the big boys like Street Fighter 4.
King of Fighters XII is about as no-nonsense as fighting games get. SNK somehow finally realized that fighting games are all about the versus play, and took this to heart throughout the design process. It’s kind of cool to see a fighting game developer admitting to themselves what their genre is all about, and as such, the multiplayer in this game is great. You can fight one on one, or in KOF classic style with 3 character teams. Online you can even join a 3 on 3 fight controlling one character on a team while your online allies control the others.
The gameplay itself has been changed quite a bit but still feels true to the old King of Fighters formula. Counter attacks, at least as they are performed in this iteration of the series, are kind of new, and the critical counter gauge rewards you with a powerful custom combo opportunity if you pull counter off at the right time. Characters have new ways to break through guards, and the vast array of movement options that has always been present in the King of Fighters series has been tweaked slightly as well, allowing you to hop and roll around the battlefield to maximize your spacing game. The rest of the game is the same old King of Fighters super bar, life bar, beat face till the other guy dies formula, and it feels good.
Once you get past the actual gameplay, King of Fighters XII starts to fall behind. The game only features 22 fighters, which is kind of small for a fighting game sequel, especially a King of Fighters sequel. Normally I wouldn’t gripe too much about this … but where the hell is Mai Shiranui? For those of you who don’t know, Mai Shiranui was a big breasted (and when I mean big breasted, I mean damn near bordering on offensive) magical ninja girl who basically popularized the KOF name in the first place. Now, we have the chance to see her inexplicable bouncing breasts in full HD and she is mysteriously absent. What the hell!
There are also only 5 stages to host your battles on, and regardless of what other reviewers might be saying, I think they look like ass. The backgrounds are the same old two to three frame repeating 2-D graphics we saw in the days of Street Fighter II on the SNES and aside from some overused sparkle effects or downright ugly flame graphics, they are wholly uninspired and pretty disappointing to look at. Attack animations and effects are dirty as hell and seriously take you out of the experience. It looks almost as if someone forgot to set the background transparency color for some of the grainy strikes and explosions. The character animations themselves are very fluid and quite pretty, but for some reason they suffer from heavy pixilation. I don’t know why, or even how such smooth looking sprites can be suffering from the jaggy edge problem we more commonly saw two or even three generations back, but they do, and once again it’s disappointing. There is an option to turn a graphical filter on which smoothes the edges a bit but it also makes the whole game a bit blurrier. There is no excuse for this. Graphic filters are things you put on emulated games or new remakes of old favorites like Marvel VS Capcom 2. They aren’t options you put into your brand new release because your art team was too lazy to up the resolution on your sprites.
Aside from graphical issues, the music is also very repetitive and can grind on you for hours. Of course this is easily remedied by playing your own music over the game’s soundtrack, but it would have been nice if we didn’t have to. In fact, the only good audio in the game is the voice acting, which I have to admit is impressive, but considering that the game has no story mode the only time you get to listen to the voices is during particular attacks in fights. It is a well done feature that is unfortunately very easy to overlook.
Let’s talk about the lack of story mode for a while. For the longest time I have been saying that stories don’t matter in fighting games, and they don’t. You could have a deranged kindergartner on Prozac write me a fighting game story and I’ll still play it if the gameplay holds up. In fact I think that is how Guilty Gear was made. However, you can’t just say “screw you I’m not even going to try” and that is exactly what King of Fighters XII did. There is no story mode; in fact there is nothing that even hints at a story at all! No multiple taunts, no character specific intros, no between battle cut scenes, nothing! If you were totally new to the King of Fighters series upon picking up this game, then the characters will be fighting each other for literally no reason. As much as I gripe about how pointless stories are in games like this, you have to at least put in the effort. Hell, Tatsunoko VS Capcom has characters from different universes fighting each other, and it has fully animated endings!
Instead you have the single player time trial mode, the versus mode, practice mode, and that’s about it. You can take your game online, but holy hell why would you? You can rarely find a match, and everyone, EVERYONE has lag problems, many time to the extent of making the game nigh unplayable. Maybe this is just a function of the game being new and thus having a very small online following, or maybe someone at SNK is too busy using their server boxes as beer pong tables, but either way it’s totally inexcusable.
Through all of this shittyness I feel I need to re-iterate that the core gameplay of King of Fighters XII is actually a lot of fun. Trying to get that one critical counter in, or finding just the right time to unleash a super move is very satisfying, and you can easily eat away afternoon after afternoon perfecting your team against your friends. However, that being said, this is the only place the game excels. There is every reason to play this game, but no reason to actually purchase it. If you don’t have a group of friends over this game will just collect dust on your shelves, and when you do have a group of friends over, you will most likely default to BlazBlue, or Street Fighter 4, or even old classics like Marvel VS Capcom 2 before someone says “hey break out the King of Fighters XII.” This game is a perfect rental if you are looking to try something new, and if you can manage to find one inside a cabinet at your local arcade, even better, but no one is going to cry foul if you neglect to add King of Fighters XII to your personal collection.
(25 votes, average: 2.80 out of 4)
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