The King Of Fighters XV is a return to excellence

Heads up: I am trying something new with this review as I’ve been let into the Substack video beta. Unfortunately the one thing I can’t do is actually embed videos into the article, so below some of these screenshots you are going to see a link to a Substack video. Click through to watch the clips I’ve made. Hopefully a full embed option will be made available down the road, but it’s nice not to have to resort to Youtube or other video services and have my clips subject to random deletion.

Before we start talking about The King of Fighters XV, I want to set something straight: The King Of Fighters XIV was actually pretty good. It was the art that scared everyone away. The series’ full transition to 3D graphics was a rough one, with everyone’s favorite characters inhabiting a zone of doll-like uncanny valley weirdness. It didn’t help that this game followed an unsurpassed 2D masterpiece in the form of King of Fighters XIII.

But don’t mistake a game not looking great with a lack of effort: SNK puts its whole ass into its games. As KOFXIV continued development with a graphical makeover and new DLC characters, you could see the models, effects and animations gradually improving over time. The last few DLC characters— notably Rock Howard and Blue Mary— look like they’ve come from a different, more polished game than their peers.

By the time SNK rebooted Samurai Shodown, there was no longer any doubt their artists could turn out a beautiful 3D game. And that brings us back to the new King of Fighters entry, XV.

Aside from redone, much improved art and animation, KOFXV is not very fundamentally different from its predecessor. If you liked the way KOFXIV played but not how it looked— which seems to be the consensus— you’ll be quite pleased with this top-to-bottom makeover.

The developers have tightened up the roster of playable fighters, updated XIV’s gameplay systems, and, years overdue, finally fixed their busted online play. These are arguably choices worth the price of admission.

The glow-up

Despite the flamboyant character designs and fashion, KOF has always aimed for more of a realistic than “anime” art style1. It should be a more natural fit for a 3D transition than Street Fighter. But even so, as KOFXIV proved, it’s a big task to transition a series known for its 2D artistic excellence into a whole other dimension.

The years of improvement have paid off for SNK’s art team, and KOFXV finally looks right. The character models, formerly plasticky and doll-like, now have the depth of texture and display the convincing emotion we need to see them as living characters. The gorgeous fire and energy effects you might have seen in Samurai Shodown have come to KOF, lighting the screen in red, purple and green flames.

KOFXV also doesn’t come off like the artists simply prettied up a bunch of old material; the attention to detail is evident, especially if you paid attention to the previous game. Even for returning characters, the animators have gone over every movement and visibly tightened things up. New Climax super moves for every character— a purely aesthetic feature, considering these attacks are more like miniature cutscenes— really demonstrate how far the art team has come.

And, independent of anything else, can I just say that I love the announcer’s “Cool Guy Voice?” ‘Cause I do.

The actual fighting part

As far as gameplay, the dev team knows that KOFXIV already basically had it together. This game is definitely an iterative upgrade rather than a full redo. Between the disappointed fan reaction to XIV and the fact that the online play didn’t work even if you wanted to try getting into it, not many people got to play XIV at great length in the first place.

KOFXV preserves the elements that make KOF’s 3-on-3 team battles fun— the speed, freedom of movement, and satisfying combos— while making only small concessions to modern appeals to accessibility.

The basis is the well-loved King of Fighters 2002, which introduced *just enough* freeform combo madness to spice up the existing KOF style. By spending super meter built up over the course of the match, players can choose to turn just about any hit they land into a devastating high-damage combo.

The trick is when to spend the resource: barrage the opponent with 1-bar super blasts or save up all 5 bars to potentially KO the opponent in one hit?

This resource management pairs beautifully with KOF’s traditional 3-fighter team system, as players get more super meter to play with as each fighter on a team gets knocked out. There’s a meta-game to this, as players will build a team by selecting the characters who work best for them in each position based on how much meter they use. The last character on the team (often called an anchor) can bring about an explosive comeback.

Auto-combos return from KOFXIV as a “training wheels” system for new players: just mash the light punch button to get a combo string. I don’t need this system myself, but playing against newbies online showed me just what a difference it made for the new player to be able to deliver a flashy hit and big damage without much effort. This isn’t really an unfair competitive advantage— the only players it will give any trouble are other beginners— and it helps new players have fun, so I really hope it sticks around.

That being said, auto-combos are the only bone that KOFXV throws the newbie. Though this game doesn’t approach the Marvel Vs. Capcom-like combo excess of KOF XIII2, this is still a fast-moving and complex game that demands quicker reactions than the more patient and deliberate Street Fighter. Even veterans of other fighting games get tripped up by KOF’s unique movement and tempo.

The tutorial doesn’t go beyond “this button does this thing,” so expect to hit up Youtube tutorials and guides if you want to really learn the game from scratch.

Character roster- who made the cut?

The roster in KOF is always a touchy subject: there are so many beloved characters— who typically come in themed teams of three— that no one game can (or should!) contain them all. KOFXV scales down quite a bit from XIV’s 58-character barrage to 38 core characters, just two of whom are legitimately new to the series.

As part of a conscious effort to trim the roster while fitting in as many fan favorites as possible, the developers have come up with new story that shifts characters around into new team arrangements. For example, the series’ rival heroes Kyo and Iori call a truce to form their own team with the long-lost Chizuru Kagura. Everybody’s favorite idol Athena Asamiya is on deck as always, but she leaves her usual team behind to team up with Mai Shiranui (the busty ninja so popular that fans nearly revolted when she was left out of XII) and my fave Yuri Sakazaki to form the “Super Heroine” team.

This compression means that a lot of the second and third-tier characters— and almost all of the new characters introduced in KOFXIV— are out. As a long-time KOF player I was most surprised that Goro Daimon, the quintessential grappler, and taekwondo master Kim Kaphwan were out. It genuinely doesn’t feel like KOF without those two. The absence of the series’ biggest oddball regulars— Chin, Chang and Choi— is also keenly felt.

With only two truly new characters on the “rival” team and plenty of “basic” characters for newbies, the devs went out of their way to make those new characters memorable and unique. Splatoon-chic Isla hops all over the screen with the help of two sentient spirit hands and attacks using spray paint. Dolores is a witch mom with excellent hair who attacks from a distance by manipulating the earth: sinking the enemy into quicksand, entombing them in stone, and the like.

The cool thing about KOF’s big roster is that not only do you have every fighting game “type”, you have multiple variations on each concept. KOF boasts at least ten different takes on the basic “fireball and dragon punch” protagonist archetype. Want a grappler? We’ve got five. Long-range, rushdown: However you want to fight, KOF probably made a character for that twenty years ago, and it’s all here. And just so you know, a lot of people pick Iori.

Online, finally

After a chain of disappointments going back over a decade, KOFXV now has functioning online play.

This is a first for modern SNK titles, but frequent SNK collaborators Code Mystics have been gifting the Neo-Geo classic catalog with rollback netcode for some years now.3

Finally giving in to fan pressure after years of poor-quality, unresponsive, slideshow-lookin’ online play, SNK has gone with a rollback solution for XV and used Code Mystics to consult on it.

I’m pleased to report that it works, like rollback games (aside from the botched Street Fighter V) always do. Lag is extremely low, even on poor and wi-fi connections (but kids, always play fighting games wired if you can help it). KOF is a fast game with demanding timing, so it has long, desperately needed this change.

Matchmaking seems a little shaky, though: it feels like it’s taking too long to get a match for a brand-new game like this. And there is the odd disconnect or error, and the players on connections too bad to work even with rollback. But it’s a small price to pay for the game to work correctly.

In closing

It’s really nice to be able to recommend a new King of Fighters game without any reservations. XII was an incomplete beta for XIII. XIII was beautiful but you had to practice combos for a hundred hours, plus it didn’t work online. XIV was reasonable enough for a newbie, but it was kind of ugly and it still didn’t work online.

I don’t have to qualify my recommendation of The King Of Fighters XV with anything. It’s just an excellent fighting game.

(Note: I have been told on Twitter not to forget that SNK is presently owned by a murderous warlord. This is true, which is why I do not scold people for watching Disney+)