The King of Fighters XII Review

SNK Playmore doesn’t mess around when it comes to the fighter genre. Franchises such as Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting are serious fighters for serious fighting-game fans—no button mashing allowed in these dojos.

Of course, we can’t forget about the king. Combining the best brawlers across SNK Playmore’s franchises, The King of Fighters has been the developer/publisher’s featured bout for 15 years. You don’t stay relevant in a genre for 15 years by accident; The King of Fighters is often the hardcore player’s choice, with some of its iterations being considered the best punch-for-punch titles in video-game history.

SNK Playmore is looking to relive the heydays of the last millennium with the release of The King of Fighters XII. Arcades still exist in Japan, so The King of Fighters XII is really a modern-day 2D coin-op fighter. It all sounds pretty good until you realize that it has been ported to the Xbox 360 and marketed as a feature-priced title. Well, that and the fact that it’s lacking some serious polish…lack of polish, as in it never really feels like SNK Playmore left everything in the ring on this effort. Admittedly, Blazblue has set the bar quite high for standalone 2D fighting on the X360. Having been already released, Arc Systems’ slick fighter isn’t doing KoF XII any favors.

Take The King of Fighters XII’s visuals, for instance. The hand-drawn characters are gorgeous. So gorgeous, in fact, that it’s nearly acceptable that there are only 22 fighters in the game—and that may seem like a lot, but for the KoF series, that’s paltry…the lowest count in the franchise’s history. The 2D backgrounds are even more impressive, due to their highly animated style and lack of pixilation.

Yeah, KoF XII’s characters are very pixilated, though this won’t be a surprise to those who religiously play SNK’s brawlers (as will the lack of going back to the main menu after hitting the character-select screen. COME ON!). The issue with said character pixilation here is that these aren’t recycled drawings—these are new drawings for a game meant for modern arcades. Clearly, the jaggies are there for nostalgia’s sake, like a modern-day rat-rod weathered with great care, rather than by Mother Nature’s whimsy. But not every fighting-game player is going to appreciate this ruse. SNK Playmore kind of realized this in KoF XII, and added three selectable levels of character filtering in the setup options. These filters appear to do nothing more than visually blur the still-pixilated models, rather than initiating some kind of smoothing system. It’s always easier to make high-res visuals appear low res…therefore, it doesn’t seem to make much sense why KoF XII’s brand new sprites weren’t higher resolution to begin with (with filters adding pixilation, if the user so desires).

KoF XII’s gameplay follows a similar scenario as its visuals package. The core fighting action is solid from a design standpoint, even though it’s not for every kind of fighting-game player. It’s a bit on the slow side in terms of its pacing, short on blockbuster moves and more about proper timing than anything else. That’s not to say that there isn’t serious potential here when two highly skilled players go at it. But users expecting big returns, visual or otherwise, just aren’t going to get it with KoF XII, even when a Super Special or signature move is dropped.

The gameplay downside here, for every type of fighting fan, is The King of Fighters XII’s issue with polish. There are many redeeming factors to its gameplay, however, such as controls that work better than most sans arcade stick, excellent overall hit detection and the preciseness and usefulness of the Critical Counter system. The issues, however, far outweigh these benefits. Most notably, there shouldn’t be slowdown in a 2D fighter running on such a powerful system. It’s also a shame that SNK Playmore still doesn’t have the bouts between fighters of grossly different scales down yet. You’ll find more than a few glitches arise, particularly in the grab-and-throw areas. Granted, it’s very tough to nail gameplay when proportional differences between two fighters are immense, but it should be like butter at this point in such a longstanding franchise (even if the game is running off of a new arcade board). And lastly, variance in how each character fights is lacking a bit in KoF XII. It’s more glaring in this version of KoF because you only have 20 or so fighters to choose from—each brawler kind of lumbers around the same, whether 100 pounds or 500 pounds and the moves tend to feel familiar from fighter to fighter, even if the visuals say something a bit different to your cranium.

And, it goes down hill from there. The only other area of KoF XII worth mentioning (the rest of the offline modes are bread and butter for a fighter) is its online functionality and…well, it’s pretty bad. It’s either that the connection bars lie and the lag is due to this fib, or the game just isn’t optimized to play right in the online environment. The latter makes more sense at this point, in keeping with the theme that KoF XIIfor the X360 feels like a bit of a rush job, which would explain its overall lack of polish. Online fights feel very sluggish and really won’t enable the user with the most skill to prevail…well, at least until some sort of new patch is issued. Even if the netcode was sublime, the lack of robust features is a letdown. In particular, the lack of team-based three-on-three fighting is a real downer.

At the bottom of the hill is KoF XII’s price. Had this been a fairly polished fighter with a bit more online functionality and a $40 price tag, KoF XII coulda’ been a contenda’. There’s just not enough value here at a $60 premium price point—a price that’s especially painful when considering some of its anomalies. Hardcore fans will obviously want to check The King of Fighters XII out and get into some online tournaments (after things are cleaned up a bit). The rest of you simply looking for old-school fighting flavor in new-school HD digs will be much better served by Street Fighter IV or Calamity Trigger (with a $60 Limited Edition, by the way).