Fans loved the idea, and thus SNK gave the crossover concept its own series. SNK thought it would be a cool idea to stick in Ryo Sakazaki - the hero of Art of Fighting, one of their other series - as a playable character. The King of Fighters series unofficially began with Fatal Fury Special on the Neo Geo. All of the Neo Geo CD versions and home port (at least, the ones on CDs/DVDs) feature these arranged soundtrack, and all of the MP3s found herein are the arranged versions unless noted. ![]() Although many songs are limited by the Neo Geo synth (at least until they switched over to the Atomiswave platform around 2004), nearly all of the games have had full arranged soundtracks produced for them. All of the King of Fighters music spans a wide variety of genres, and is unarguably the most ambitious fighting game soundtrack on the market. ![]() Iori is almost always accompanied by a screaming saxophone. The Psycho Soldier team is practically defined by upbeat J-Pop ****songs, some of which have lyrics. The Art of Fighting team's songs tend to feature an acoustic guitar and use similar melodies. Terry and Blue Mary usually has jazzy themes. Folks like Kyo, Kim and the Ikari team usually have hard rocking heavy metal themes. This brand of personality shows through in the music as well. But once you get into it, there's a whole world that easily rivals any RPG ever made. Granted, it doesn't do a great job of it - the in-game cinemas are confusing (and often poorly translated), so gamers have to rely on translated documents to figure out exactly what the hell is going on. All previous fighting games have had loose plots to justify everyone getting together to beat the crap out of each other - The King of Fighters is one of the few that tries to make any sense out of it. Each of them have a unique design (although not necessarily a unique ****, most with their own deep background and history. There are well over eighty fighters in the entire series, which has spanned well over ten years. But other than that - there's some guy with a goofy red hair cut with his pants tied together? A purple haired girl with teleportation powers and a screeching voice? A basketball player? I'd played almost solely played Capcom games when I was up growing - I rarely went to arcades (my father still insists that the arcade by my local mall was a drug den), the SNK ports for 16-bit systems were almost universally trash, and the 32-bit ports rarely made it to America, So here I was, staring at dozens of unfamiliar faces, being asked to pick three of them and made headway into battle.īut once you get over that initial intimidating phase, there's something addicting about the huge character roster. And it's impossible to be a video game nerd on the Internet without having some passing familiarity with Mai Shiranui, the girl who practically defined "bounciness" when it came to video games. I knew a few of them - I had rented Fatal Fury for the Genesis when I was kid, so I recognized Terry Bogard, his brother Andy, and Joe Higashi. There are over forty characters on the select screen. My first brush with the series was King of Fighters 98 for the Dreamcast. Add in your usual array of super moves, and that's pretty much KoF. When one fighter falls, the next in line takes their place. Just pick three characters and send them into one-on-one battles. King of Fighter's gimmick is that there are simply a ton of characters. Back in the early days of the Neo Geo, SNK tried different things to differentiate themselves from Capcom - Fatal Fury introduced the multi-plane system, Art of Fighting had gigantic characters, Samurai Shodown had weapons and World Heroes.well, that didn't even really try. And compared to other SNK fighters, there's really nothing about the fighting that stands out. ![]() Compared to truly hardcore one-on-one fighters like Virtua Fighter or Street Fighter 3, King of Fighters is relatively simplistic, although it still requires plenty of skill to master. Not from a technical standpoint, at least. As much as I love the King of Fighters series, it is probably the most difficult fighting game series to get into.
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