Mere months after Capcom successfully managed to reboot the Street Fighter franchise, here is SNK Playmore doing the same thing with their longest running fighting game series. With a new graphic style, a few noticeable gameplay changes and a brand new line-up of characters, The King of Fighters desperately wants to be relevant. Unfortunately there is far too little in this package to get excited about, especially with the uncharacteristically strong competition coming from all sides.
Fifteen years ago SNK had an idea, what if they took two of popular (albeit mediocre) franchises and turned them into one three-on-three fighting game for the ages. Believe it or not, the idea worked. Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting were reborn as The King of Fighters, which also included characters from Ikari Warriors and Psycho Soldier, two other SNK arcade games. Here we are 15 years later and we're now 12 games into the series (15 if you include the Neowave and Maximum Impact spin-offs). In those years we've seen new characters added, new storylines told and some truly amazing fights. In a lot of ways The King of Fighters XII does a good job of keeping the spirit of the series alive.
The King of Fighters XII offers 22 different characters, including a number of fan favorites. You get Terry and Andy Bogard, Joe Higashi, Mature, Iori, Kyo, Ash, Goro and a number of other familiar faces. In fact, the only brand new character in the line-up is Raiden, the large wrestler from the original Fatal Fury and 3 Count Bout.
Interestingly enough, it's not who is in the game that is worth mentioning, but rather who is NOT in the game. The most notable absents seems to be Mai Shiranui, easily the most popular female fighter in the SNK universe. Also missing are a few of my favorite characters, including the Garou Team (Gato, B. Jenet and Tizoc), the Geese Howard team (Billy Kane, Blue Mary, Mr. Big, etc.), Seth, Vanessa and Wolfgang Krauser. It's not that they've been replaced with better characters, but rather that they are just missing in action.
I'll admit that much of that last paragraph was the very definition of "geeky." But by the time you've made it to the twelfth game isn't that to be expected? The core audience for this series is largely made up of gamers like me who have played many (if not all) of the installments, finding teams and characters that kept you interested in the three-on-three battles. This game can't seem to decide if it's trying to cater to all of the old fans or trying to attract a bunch of new players. In either case, it doesn't have enough of the beloved characters from the past to satisfy old timers like myself and it makes no attempt to bring new players in. And that's the problem with The King of Fighters XII; it can't decide what it wants to be.
Did I mention that The King of Fighters XII only has 22 characters? It's true, you didn't just imagine that. While two dozen may sound like a lot for some series, that's nothing for The King of Fighters franchise. This is a series that routinely has three and four dozen characters to choose from, while this 2009 installment doesn't even hit two dozen. In comparison, the last installment had more than 40 characters to choose from, many of which were brand new. Heck, even the game's first installment had more characters than The King of Fighters XII. For a game that requires you to choose three characters at a time, 22 isn't enough to truly satisfy the hardcore fan.
For the most part the game plays like many of the recent King of Fighters installments. You are still choosing a team of three characters and going against another team of equal size. Unlike Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (Capcom's answer to the three-on-three fighting game), The King of Fighter XII doesn't allow you to switch characters on the fly. That means that you will have to fight with one character at a time, only switching characters when one guy runs out of health. The good news is that you can choose your character order at the start of each match.
Fans of the series will notice a few changes to the way the game handles. For example, the Tactical Shift System from The King of Fighters 2003 is gone. However, the game does offer a brand new system called "critical counter," which allows you to perform an impressive looking (and damaging) counter attack when your opponent tries to land a strong punch on you. This system can really turn the momentum of a match, because the player will go into a special mode where you can link a bunch of moves together seamlessly. There's also a new "clash" system, which will trigger if two characters try and hit each other at the same time. The characters will actually generate a break effect and are pushed away from each other. It won't change the momentum, but it is an interesting idea that you don't see in a lot of 2D fighting games.
Beyond the new gimmicks, The King of Fighters XII really has a nice feel to it. The characters have never felt more natural than they do in this game, perhaps helped by the incredible animation and responsive controls. The special moves are (for the most part) easy to pull off and the game feels fine on the standard Xbox 360 game pad, though I would certainly recommend some sort of arcade stick if you plan on taking this game seriously. The game's four button system works well with the standard four face button layout of the Xbox 360 controller, something I cannot say about every other fighting game on the market.
The big change to this 2009 installment is the presentation, which received a major overhaul. Not have all of the characters been redrawn, but the arenas you fight in are absolutely massive. Well ... maybe they aren't "massive," but they are definitely the largest I've seen in a King of Fighters game. Not only are they big, but the backgrounds are also full of vibrant. In one level you are fighting in a giant sports arena, with a jumbo TV in the background showing your every move. The backgrounds are at their best when they are showing people watching, there's something about the humanity looking on that contrasts perfectly with these violent three-on-three fights. The background graphics are easily the best looking aspect to this game.
For some strange reason I wasn't as impressed with the characters as I was with the backgrounds. I can tell just from looking at these 22 characters that SNK Playmore spent a lot of time on the art. Without a doubt, these are the best looking characters I've seen in an SNK game. The problem is, depending on the kind of television you own, these characters may end up with a shocking amount of pixelation. Thankfully there's an option to smooth out the graphics, but they're nowhere near as satisfying as Capcom's recent Super Street Fighter II HD Remix. However, don't let this minor complaint give you the wrong impression, The King of Fighters XII is an amazing looking fighting game, and nobody is going to debate that.
The King of Fighters series has never been known for their vast quantities of extra modes. This is an arcade series, after all. But considering that this is a full price $60 release, I can't help but notice the complete lack of things to do in The King of Fighters XII. The game gives you an arcade mode, which has you fighting through seven rounds as fast as possible (no really, it's timed). Then there's the practice mode, which lets you, well, practice your moves and combos. Outside of the multiplayer modes (which includes online), there's really nothing else for you here. You can look at the replays and a picture gallery, but that's just about it. This game is as bare bones as you could possibly get.
This might be fine if this was 194 and SNK was new to the fighting game franchise, but we're talking about a company that has two decades experience making this kind of game. We're talking about a series that has been around for 15 years, always adding new modes and extras to play around with. We're talking about a console game here, not an arcade release. When you spend full price, you expect at least a few more modes to keep you interested. How difficult would it have been to add some sort of survival mode? Couple this lack of modes with the fact that the arcade mode is small and unsatisfying, and you have a 2D fighting game that comes up far short of what it should have been.
Thankfully the game has an online mode, but even that was marred by instability and lag issues. For what it's worth, SNK Playmore did patch the online mode in the course of my review. This added patch seemed to fix many of the laggy online problems I was experiencing, but didn't seem to resolve everything. For the most part this mode worked as promised, though it doesn't have the bells and whistles found in other contemporary fighting games.
That seems to be a reoccurring theme when it comes to The King of Fighters XII. While there's no doubt that SNK Playmore was on the right track with many of their changes, there just isn't enough in this package to warrant the high price tag. There aren't enough characters to choose from, the backgrounds repeat far too often, there's really only one game mode for single-players and the online is as bare bones as it comes. There just isn't enough here, which makes it hard to get on board with this product.
But I'll admit, the more I played the game, the more it grew on me. Talking with other people who have been playing the game, it seems clear that the game has something of a slow burn. It definitely leaves a bad first impression, but as I played through it I couldn't help but like what it was trying to do. I like many of the characters here, I think the graphics are the best they've ever been and I love the way the game handles. It makes me wonder if next year's model will end up solving most of these problems, especially when it comes to the lack of characters.
Speaking of lack of characters, I noticed that there's a marketplace tab right in the game's main menu. Perhaps that suggests that the game will start charging people for individual characters and teams, milking even more money out of you over time. This might not have been a problem had SNK supplied us with more than 22 characters, but I have a hard time not looking at this as a cynical money grab. I hope I'm wrong.
The King of Fighter XII is a solid fighting game that is marred by several major problems. The game's lack of content wouldn't be a problem if the game was $20, but at $60 it's hard to justify. I also have to take into account the fact that The King of Fighters '98, a superior game by all accounts, is available on the Xbox Live Arcade for a mere $10. There is fun to be found in this newest SNK fighting game, but that fun is not worth the asking price.
