King of Fighters XI

This seems like an opportune time to indulge in another game feature post. My son, while playing with this the other day, accidentally deleted the savegame file (he inserted the memory card after it was already running, which caused the autosave to rewrite the file with no data to speak of) so I've had to spend a little bit of time going back through and attempting to unlock all the hidden characters again. As of the time of this writing, I've got everyone except Mai and Geese done, and I should be able to have them complete the next time I'm able to sit down with the game... which hopefully, but not necessarily, will be tonight.

This is the first game from the King of Fighters series that I'm featuring, and it's in most respects an unusual entry in that series. A little background: the King of Fighters series used to come out with a new entry every year. From 1994 through 2003 that was the case, even when SNK went belly-up, a new title came out every year, but increasingly, they barely squeeked in under the date, and the games were (almost certainly) rushed in at least some respects. King of Fighters XI is the first in-sequence game to abandon this schedule; the year was dropped from the title, and it was released when it was ready to go. The poorly recieved King of Fighters Neowave was also released prior to this one; really it was a lightly tweaked adaptation of King of Fighters 2002on the new hardware. This game, then, was the first real new game, on new hardware, with a new titling scheme.

That said, it was a continuation in every other sense of King of Fighters 2003. Not only is it part of the same "saga"--miniseries within the greater King of Fighters series, but it also continues to build on the tag-team mechanics of that game. In XI, there are new tweaks to the tagging--you can get out of combos with a timely tag team, or jump in and complete combos. Like 2003, you pick a leader for your team, and the leader is the only character who can get the so-called Leader Desperation Move, your big supercombo. This is unfortunate, but there are ways around it.

For example, although you can play it in arcade mode with the tag teaming, you can also play it in a mode that more closely resembles "classic" King of Fighters gameplay, and you can also play in a mode that more closely resembles classic Street Fighter play; i.e., instead of a team, you pick a single fighter and play best two out of three (or three out of five, if you set it up that way.) Needless to say, based on my already well-established preferences, that's usually how I play. In 2003 that mode was rather poorly executed; instead of having rounds, the battle was collapsed into a single round and each character has three health bars. Lame. Here, it works exactly as you'd expect.

The character selection for this game is unusual. While many classic characters that have been in almost every chapter of the series so far are conspicuously missing, at the same time, the game is packed with a number of unusual characters that have made only sporadic appearances before, and even characters who have never been in any King of Fighters title before. So frankly, even though it seems maybe a little weird to not have Joe Higashi or Andy Bogard show up (and the exclusion of Mai from the standard version of the game--she's a PS2 exclusive who has to be unlocked--was very controversial amongst fans) I've got them already on every other King of Fighters title I've got; it's kind of nice to see instead more esoteric characters like Duck King, Eiji Kisaragi, Mr. Big, or Silver, Gai Tendo, Jazu and Tung Fu Rue make appearances. One odd thing of note; once you get beyond the basic character color and start exploring the other three, there are some really weird ones out there. Of course, there's also a color edit so you can create two custom colors. These are also interesting; as in the PS2 Ultimate Matchversion of KOF98, you can also edit the colors of the character's "special effects" so that if, for example, you wanted the flame effects around Terry's Buster Wolf to be white and blue instead of yellow and orange, to give them a colder feel, well, you could. It seems a lot of work, but it's doable. Although I still haven't finished unlocking everyone again after losing my original savegame file on the memory card, I did go in and create an edit of Athena that looks more like her KoFXII version--just for fun. I actually quite like Athena in this game, after not liking her much in several recent ones. Her "deadly rave" style supercombos are replaced with a simplified and graphically quite astonishing move that makes me wonder if the designers are familiar with the classic X-men "Dark Phoenix" saga.

The presentation of the game is otherwise also very good; menu is perhaps a bit too small to easily see the character portraits when you're looking for your favorite, and the hidden characters are all off screen. The backgrounds are very nice, and higher resolution than the old Neo-Geo hardware was able to provide (although the more recent ports of Neo-Geo titles still had upgraded backgrounds anyway. 2002 simply redid the backgrounds in higher res, while 2003 did that to a few stages, and then created a whole bunch of new stages that were only loosely similar to their Neo-Geo counterparts.) Notably, there are fewer changes to these backgrounds as you advance--not much of the going from daytime to sunset to night time, for example. Given that the game is meant to be played in a single round format, with tag-teaming fighters, this is certainly an excuseable lapse.

All in all, I don't know that King of Fighters XI will go down in history as a real classic title in the series especially given the unusual character selection and a few other oddities about its game sstem, but it's certainly one of the better ones, as well as one of the most attractive ones. Frankly, its one of the ones I come back to the most, along with King of Fighters '98: Ultimate Match, so I consider it amongst the very best in the series.

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