"The king is back. Long live The King."
King of Fighters, simply put, is truly the king of all fighters. From lore, mechanics, character design and gameplay. Any one fighting game may be its equal in any one facet, but put together nothing can top it.
This review is looking at KOF XV on the PS5.
KOF XV (yes the fifteenth installment!) of this SNK mash-up series launched this week on all major consoles, minus the Nintendo Switch, and I am here to confidently say it sets a new high-water mark in fighting games and will go down as a classic for years to come. To give a little perspective: KOF 14 was the first attempt at a fully 3D KOF since the disastrous KOF Maximum Impact circa 2004, and gave a new foundation to the series. While KOF 13 should always be remembered as a true peak of 2D hand drawn sprite art, it was a technical dead end and we all knew it. 3D graphics are just too economically efficient to produce compared to 2D hand drawn sprites. Other series such as Guilty Gear have proven this: 2D art can now be replicated with 3D polygons if given the right design team, love and care for the source material. Moving forward, however close the gameplay of KOF 14 was compared to the 13 installments before it: the art style rubbed many the wrong way. A little too realistic, the animation a little too stiff. Hair, clothes, and keyframes... everything looked just a little off. It had lost the gorgeous hand drawn flow that complimented the gorgeous gameplay flow that had kept KOF relevant and popular through hardware dead-ends, SNK bankruptcies, and every other hurdle thrown in its path over the last 27 years (yes this series is now a quarter century old).
Early in KOF XV development SNK said they were leaning towards a more cel-shaded look, and this subtle tweak (think slightly flattened colors and animation like outlines instead of leaning towards photorealism) brings back the animated yet realistic feeling KOF series always had compared to its rival, the more cartoonish and exaggerated Street Fighter series.
Which is a long way to say: the art is gorgeous, again. For some, nothing will ever top the hand drawn masterpiece that is KOF 13 - but after the clunky implementation that was 14's shift to 3D, KOF 15 is clearly developers becoming more comfortable with they tools and assets and giving the fans what they want.
Moving on to gameplay, this series has always been the European sports car of fighters. Highly tuned, finicky. Yes you can look good driving it to the mall, but a novice will grind the gears while figuring it out. But in the right hands, unleashed on the autobahn, it is dazzling to behold the flow that can be achieved. This is the manual transmission Ferrari to Street Fighters automatic Mustang. It begs for precision and rewards mastery. Wake ups, cancels, super-cancels, rolls AND dashes... for the uninitiated it might be shocking to find out KOF even has 4 different jumps.
This isn't rock, paper, scissors on wake-up. It is boxing. It is F1 racing.
I will never forget the first time I played King Of Fighters 98 at a local arcade. Being a massive Street Fighter fan I was adept at fighting games and threw in a few quarters against the CPU. I felt the game out, quarter-circle and 'dragon punch' special moves. Ok, can do. A little faster than Street Fighter, but the same basic mechanics. Right? I can do this. It even had Terry Bogard from the Fatal Fury series who I was already comfortable playing with. And King / Ryo from Art Of Fighting. Ok there is my 3 person team.
And then after a few comfortable rounds against the CPU: another player joined in. A race car driver. Who showed me for the first time what this supercar was actually capable of. Showing me that there were mechanics not featured on the arcade marquee, and made me feel like I was driving with the parking brake on. Ill always remember because that was the moment I learned to respect the depth of this machine, and fell in love with the series.
KOF XV features: a robust training mode, challenges, online play with rollback net-code, rooms, ranked and causal games, and even a wonderful story mode that unlocks some of the great lore that has been laid over 27+ years of the respective series contained within. And yeah it has great lore that you can actually get into that has been developed in grand story arcs over the years (Orochi Saga, NESTS, Ash Saga, etc).
So whether this is the first time you have ever tried the series and you are driving with a learners permit.... or you are a seasoned racer eager to try out some of the new teams, features, and courses: strap in. The King of Fighters is back and wow what a ride it is.
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