Index

Page 1 - Characters
Page 2 - KoF 94/Rebout, 95, 96
Page 3 - KoF 97, 98, 99
Page 4 - KoF 00, 01, 02
Page 5 - 03, Neowave, XI, XII
Page 6 - Portable Versions
Page 7 - Maximum Impact
Page 8 - Spinoffs / Media

The King of Fighters Kyo - Playstation (1998)

Japanese Cover

King of Fighters Kyo

King of Fighters Kyo

King of Fighters Kyo is an interesting game - it's technically an RPG, although it has more in common with a life/dating sim than your typical Final Fantasy. Considering the rich storyline behind King of Fighters, it's really no surprise that they'd eventually make a game that focuses primarily on the story and characters, but the execution is somewhat lacking. Most of this is due to the crappy battle system. Imagine if you took King of Fighters and made it turn-based, and you'll have a vague idea of how it all works out. Each turn, you can make three moves. You can move forward or backwards, guard, charge up your power meter, or execute one of your numerous attacks. Once selected, the game then does a roll of your move against your opponents. Depending on several factors, including your speed, the distance between the characters, and the move selected, you'll either win or lose the roll. Win and you'll execute the attack. Lose and you do nothing. After all of the moves are done, the turn is over and you select your attacks again. This continues until either you or your foe is dead. The major problem is that it's nearly impossible to determine whether your attacks will succeed or fail - there are plenty of factors, but the game never lets you know what they are. All you can do is dodge (to increase your speed) and memorize the distance of the different attacks, and hope you'll connect. Given the haphazard nature of the system, it's hard to make any real strategy, especially if you keep failing moves (which also drains your power meter.) Furthermore, the whole system is slow and painfully uninteresting. The only character you play as in Story Mode is Kyo. Taking place in between KoF 96 and 97, the plot details Kyo's research into his family bloodlines and his connection to the Orochi power. Along the way, you train to become more powerful, recruit allies for the tournament, and constantly fight against that annoying bastard Iori. You'll explore areas of Tokyo and Esaka, as well as parts of American and Mexico as you meet all of the usual King of Fighters cast. Each character who joins has a friendship affinity to Kyo, and only by selecting the right dialogue choices - and protecting them from Iori - will you be able to maintain your buddies' companionship. Moving around is accomplished by clicking on areas of a map. There are also several exclusive characters to King of Fighter Kyo: Yuki Kushinada Kyo's girlfriend. Her and Shingo accompany Kyo on his adventures, although she ultimately doesn't do a whole lot. She does appear as a playable character in Gals Fighters for the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Souji Kusanagi Kyo's cousin. He's quite a bit older, with a family of his own, but at one time he almost fell under control of his rage. He's since sworn off fighting so he doesn't flip out of control. Aoi Kusanagi Souji's wife. Aoi mysteriously disappears and is found later emanating the same purple flames as Iori. She rides a motorcycle and is also pretty hot for being your cousin-in-law. The Sendou Family These three jokers constantly show up to challenge you to fights. Their names are, from left to right: Shota, Junko and Kyoji. A vast majority of the game is spent listening to characters talk, as most of the dialogue is voiced. The artwork is a bit different from the games, and while it's not bad, it does have a kind of amateurish quality. All of the battles have poorly animated sprites against a practically nonexistent background. Most of the music consists of various SNK themes played through the Playstation's synth, which somehow sounds more artificial than the Neo Geo. If you're interested in the storyline and are familiar with Japanese, King of Fighters Kyo is a cool way to learn more about the characters and their background, but ultimately it's just a lot of plot segments connected with some awful battle scenes.

King of Fighters Kyo King of Fighters Kyo King of Fighters Kyo King of Fighters Kyo King of Fighters Kyo

Quiz King of Fighters - Neo Geo (1995)

Neo CD Cover

Quiz King of Fighters

Quiz King of Fighters

If you're familiar with the Capcom game Quiz and Dragons, you'll know exactly what Quiz King of Fighters is. Yuri has been kidnapped by someone evil, and only by battling through Quiz City and questioning everyone you find will you discover her whereabouts. Taking the role of one of six SNK characters (Terry, Mai, Haohmaru, Nakoruru, Ryo or Robert), you roll dice and move around a board, encountering some foe at each square. Instead of fighting, they'll simply quiz you. Answer enough questions right, and you'll go on - answer it wrong and you'll lose some life. There's a bit of variety, including a few strange mini-games (like comparing two pictures and picking out the differences) and some button-mashing marathons. Some of the most amusing segments are the boss battles, where your character will execute various attacks depending on how quickly you answer a question. Each of these are accompanied by a cinema scene, which shows off the nicest graphics in the game. Otherwise, the portraits are all mish-mashes of artstyles from Fatal Fury 2, Art of Fighting and Samurai Shodown, giving it a hasty, hodgepodge feeling. Obviously, unless you know Japanese, most of the game will be pretty useless. Even if you do, it requires a lot of obscure cultural knowledge (read up on your old anime), but it is quite hilarious when characters like Lawrence Blood walk up to you and ask you when Tokyo Disneyland was built. The odd sense of humor is really the only thing that makes Quiz King of Fighters worthwhile.

Quiz King of Fighters Quiz King of Fighters

The King of Fighters: Battle de Paradise - Neo Geo Pocket Color (2000)

Japanese Cover

Battle de Paradise

Battle de Paradise

The King of Fighters: Battle De Paradise is SNK's take on Mario Party. It takes several characters from the King of Fighters universe and makes them controllable on a giant board game. You go around the board collecting coins, and like a typical game of Chutes and Ladders, luck plays a big part in how you proceed. You'll lose coins on some spaces, others will send you back or forward a few spaces, and so on. Things get interesting with the mini-game spaces, in which you compete against another character for as many coins as possible. Some of them feature some amusing situations - in one, you try to guide Chang or Choi through a series of doors, but if you pick the wrong, you'll end up getting captured by Jhun Hoon. In another one, you mash buttons to escape from Rugal's exploding ship. Some are less interesting, like trying to pick out a character based on their shadow. In the end, few of them based on anything more than luck and/or jamming buttons as fast as possible. To win you just have to get to the end. The coins you earn can be used at shops found on the board to purchase cards that have varying effects (you start out with a hand of these as well). You can use the cards to steal coins or advance yourself a few spaces. In following with the direction of the King of Fighters series at this time (around KoF '99), you choose from a King of Fighters character to be your "striker.", as well as one of four kids to play the game as (Ai, Hatoko, Masamune, or Yuu G, the choice affects what cards you begin the game with.) The character will be your avatar in the mini-games and will cosmetically change the reasoning behind your progress in the game (a "lose a turn" space is represented by Kyo wasting time with his girlfriend, landing on the same space with Billy has him go off to buy medicine for his sister). You have good and bad (called Justice and Dark) versions to choose from the available characters. Justice/Dark? Strikers? Here's the hook, you don't buy this game to enjoy it, as a Japanese consumer, you would have bought it to level up these helper characters with coins and then upload them to King of Fighters '99: Evolution on the Dreamcast; this game featured these same characters as its extra strikers (also with the ability to level them up). The US version has the strikers and the power to level them up but has this link ability completely removed as Battle de Paradise never made it to America. There were also some strikers which REQUIRED the link in Japan, Gai Tendo from Buriki-One and Syo Kirishima (an unused design for Kyo Kusanagi). In the US version of KoF 99, one can unlock them by amassing a playtime of fifty hours or more. What good is Battle de Paradise at this day and age then? Very little, as while it does have a ton of catchy music and mini-games that are homages to other SNK (most notably Top Hunter and Iron Tank), the games are all extremely simple and depend much more on rapid button mashing and luck than on genuine skill. The boards are all based on SNK related environments (Krizalid's base in KoF'99, an Ikari Warriors type area, Neo Geo World) but are very bland overall. These reasons reduce the game to a curiosity at best.

Battle de Paradise Battle de Paradise Battle de Paradise

Anime - King of Fighters: Another Day

Nearly all of the anime based on fighting games - with the possible exception of the Fatal Fury movie - have been terrible, for any number of reasons. Primarily, it's usually because the story is too thin to handle anything of a decent length, and the sheer number of characters make it hard to develop any semblance of focus. King of Fighters: Another Day - a series of four anime shorts - neatly sidesteps these issues, because each episode is roughly six minutes in length. This way, it focuses solely in introducing characters to a predicament - with a different focus each episode - and watching them fight it out, each using their signature moves. It's primarily meant to fill the gaps between the two Maximum Impact games, although it also introduces elements from King of Fighters XI. The first features Soiree fighting against Iori in a burning church, with brief appearances by Mai and Athena. The second focuses on Rock, who has a nightmare about getting knocked off Geese Tower, similar to his father's death in Fatal Fury Real Bout. Then Rock gets involved with a fight between Billy Kane and Lien, also on top of Geese Tower. The third features K' and Maxima as they run in with the Ikari team on the subway, and features brief appearances by Whip and Kula. The fourth ties together all of the previous stories, with the focus on a fight between Kyo, Ash and Alba. It's cool to see characters like Alba Meira and Lien Neville drawn in 2D as opposed to the 3D models in the Maximum Impact series, plus newer characters like Rock Howard and Ash Crimson finally makes an appearance in an anime. It's fluffy, but definitely not bad. The Another Day episodes were initially released via the Internet on SNK's website. However, they were later released on a DVD bundled with the Japanese release of Maximum Impact 2. It was included as a separate preorder bonus for the North American release of King of Fighters 2006, although due to poor distribution, very few people were able to obtain them. Both DVDs are identical and contain both English and Japanese voices, and English subs, as well as director's commentary and an art gallery.

King of Fighters: Another Day King of Fighters: Another Day King of Fighters: Another Day

Manga / Comics

Throughout the years, The King of Fighters series spawned a huge number of comics. Most of these came during SNK's fighting game heyday in the mid-90s, although practically every game in the series has had some kind of manga devoted to it. These include humorous 4 panel books, as well as serious stories that focus primarily on action. None of these Japanese comics have made it to America. However, The King of Fighters 2003 comic, drawn by Hong Kong artists Wing Yan and King Tung, has been translated and published by DrMaster publications. Hong Kong comics, like the city itself, is an interesting blend between east and west - although they're usually larger, with full color illustrations like Western comics, their character designs are a bit closer to the Japanese style. The artists provided packaging artwork for some of the Dreamcast releases, and while it's not quite on the same level as SNK's regular illustrators, it's still pretty good. (DrMaster also released an art book in North America with their artwork, from the comics as well as other games.) The King of Fighters 2003 comic is five volumes long, and consists mostly of characters pairing off, yelling special attacks, and generally pummeling each other. What little plot there is fleshes out the new characters like Ash and Adelheid, although there's substantially less dialogue than in Udon's Capcom based comics. It's a better way of learning the story than reading online FAQs or piecing together the cutscenes, anyway, and it's still better than the SNK vs Capcom series, done by the same artists, which has substantially less plot and somehow runs for eight volumes.

Spinoffs

The King of Fighters series eventually led other spinoffs. After putting their rivalries aside, Capcom and SNK made a deal to publish several crossover games, featuring characters from both companies. Capcom created the mediocre Capcom vs SNK for the Dreamcast/Playstation, while SNK created SNK vs Capcom: Match of the Millenium (a portable fighting game in the vein of KoF R-1) and SNK vs Capcom: Card Fighters Clash (still regarded as the best card fighting game out there), both of which were far more enjoyable than Capcom's effort. However, as SNK ran into financial troubles, Capcom put out the much improved Capcom vs SNK 2, arguably the last good fighting game to come out from them. SNK eventually got back on their feet and made SNK vs Capcom: Chaos, but it was too little, too late, and was vastly overshadowed by Capcom's effort. However, SNK went on to ditch all of the Capcom character, refine the gameplay, and put out Neo Geo Battle Coliseum, which collects even more characters from older SNK games, along with the addition of a tag system similar to KoF 2003. Although the series has had a relatively series of ups and downs, primarily due to SNK's bankruptcy, combined with SCEA's anti-2D stance. preventing or delaying many of the titles from coming out in America. But the most recent entries have shown that SNK still has what it's got to not only please their devoted fans, but keep the 2D fighting scene alive, where the only real competitor in the last several years has been Guilty Gear. Here's hoping that SNK continues the tradition long into the millennium. Thanks to ReyVGM for the heads-up on the KoF 97 ending pics, and both Joesteele and Pat R. for the many, many, many challenging matches. Links Neo Geo For Life An excellent SNK site with lots of reviews. Neo Alec's Unofficial Neo Geo Home Page A bit dormant now, but a lot of good stuff. Neo-Geo.com The central gathering area of the English speaking SNK community. Cyber Fanatix Lots of gameplay videos. Orochi Nagi A huge King of Fighters resource.

Neo Geo Battle Coliseum King of Fighters 2003