Vote 1: Nameless tirade!
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Okay, so 2001 was the first post-SNK game. Although it was basically all made by ex-SNK staff, it was produced pretty quickly under the aegis of a Korean company called Eolith. Playmore-era SNK seems of two minds about Eolith’s work. Well, no they don’t. They’re of one mind: fuck that.
I mean, I love 2001, but it is a weird one. One of its stranger creative decisions was to give K’ a rival (not the strange part) modeled after Tetsuo from Akira. What’s strange is how closely he’s modeled, down to the voice actor. K9999 (Kay-Four-Nine) is great, and very weird to play, but this goes way beyond homage. SNK is willing to more or less accept 2001 as is, but K9999 gives them the legal jeebies, and just seems to bother several people there. So, they try not to mention him more than they need to.
I mentioned that SNK sort-of recently remade 2002. That was the other game by Eolith, and its whole reason for being seems to be panic over fan response to 2001. So it’s the most conservative design by committee hodgepodge of a game, exactly like what you’d get if you polled a thousand hardcore fans on what they wanted and then just made it verbatim. Which, I think, is what Eolith did. This was too much for SNK, so they tried to redeem it by adding in all of the missing NESTS-era characters, rearranging the teams, and refocusing a bunch of stuff – though they constrained themselves in not wanting to alienate people who liked 2002 as it was, so they couldn’t smash some of thr more fundamental stupid ideas at its core.
But, anyway. While they were totally re-envisioning the game, they decided to address the K9999 problem. This was going to be basically a brand new game, replacing the original 2002, and SNK wasn’t going to use K9999 in a new game… so they made a new character instead.
The new guy isn’t very imaginative; he’s called Nameless, and is made from a mix of Kyo’s and K’'s DNA (I guess like how an Uruk-Hai is a cross of orc and goblin-man). Instead of angry and insane like K9999, Nameless is kind of emo and earnest, driven to act reluctantly out of desire for a lost love. He plays exactly like K9999, more or less; it’s just a new skin and justification.
But here’s the thing. SNK wrote a whole story for this guy. In that story, he’s the 9999th Kyo “clone” (i.e., experiment with his DNA). Which, wait, is who K9999 is supposed to be. So he doesn’t just take K9999’s place in the roster; he is a full narrative replacement. And they put in this other circumstantial plot-related stuff, sort of referencing stuff that never happened in the actual NESTS games. Thr implication being, shh, K9999 never existed. It was really this Nameless guy the whole time.
Interesting thing here. In the NESTS team ending to 2001, K9999 brutally kills Foxy, one of Kula’s two mommies. There’s not much ambiguity there. People die in this series all the time, so it’s not even unusual. But… she’s not dead anymore. She’s in XIII, in cutscenes and in some of Kula’s animations.
So, what do we make of this? If we accept thay we are now on a theoretical branch timeline where 2001 featured SNK’s approved rival for K’, it would seem, and this is just supposition on my part, that Nameless didn’t kill Foxy the way that K9999 did, because he’s not a horrible monster; he’s just miserable.
It looks like the current series is actually built off of a sequence of events that never happened but that are close enough to what we saw happen that we can mostly ignore the discrepancies.
Which is doubly complicated if we try to figure out where Ash’s time reboot leaves us, but… let’s not, for now.
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Kizuna Encounter is a bonkers thing, and now seems to fit the same way that Art of Fighting does: awkwardly.
In the original South Town timeline, where Fatal Fury is set in the 1990s, and Art of Fighting is a precursor set in the 1970s, Kizuna is set in a hypothetical future – like Mark of the Wolves, but more so. One of the characters is a descendant of Kim (his grandson, I think)? Another old dude is wearing Terry’s hat, and is supposed to have got it when he was a boy.
(By the same measure, yeah, Last Blade is set in the past of… one or both of the FF/AoF and KoF tinelines; one of the characters is explicitly Eiji’s ancestor.)
KoF, of course, bumps the Sakazaki clan up to the present day, aged the same as they were in the 1970s. So it is with Kizuna, as of XI. And Buriki, come to it, which is basically the Mark of the Wolves of Art of Fighting. This makes for some stylistic incongruties, but I guess it works so long as we don’t meet Kim Sue-Il any time soon. (Maybe he’d be Kim’s distant cousin in this timeline?)
Samurai Shodown is in its own continuity, that until now has been kept consciously separate from South Town and, by extension, KoF… but this new conceit of a final boss who can bring in combatants from parallel worlds (ergo the “another world” team) kind of shatters any future concerns.
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Depends on your attitude. Other games it’s not worth it because the lore is undercooked, beside the point, and largely after the fact. Here it’s central, and a major part of the appeal. It’s just volumous and inconsistent, like any other soap opera. You can tune in and just work with the broad shape of things, and be set – but for me at least, the games really come alive when you get down to the character level and start to notice how meticulously everything interacts. How the story is told in the changes to a character’s move set, or the timing of a pre-fight interaction between two characters, which is clarified by a couple of sentences in someone else’s ending.
But, I understand that other people tend not to look at things the way I do.
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Not really. The special strikers there are just Easter egg cameos, like character appearances in stage backdrops. They’re not meant to really be there.
See, for example, the prototype versions of established characters.
Something that may not help: not all of a given game’s story is necessarily in the game.
You see, the games just chronicle the fighting tournaments which tend to serve as the climax of various ongoing conflicts. Often the story that climaxes in the game that you’re actually playing begins elsewhere, offscreen. Sometimes that material is in the manual; sometimes it’s on SNK’s Web site somewhere. If you dig around enough, you can find it. It’s rarely positioned in a really obvious place, though. Which may make the resolution to the story, that you’ll see in various teams’ endings, a bit more opaque than it might otherwise be…
The HD remake of '94 alludes to some of that game’s backstory in its new animated intro.
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…and ironically, the edition which includes the most actual story in the actual game–the console version of KoF XIII–is attached to the game that arguably has the most disappointing core plot. Heck, there’s a mode in that version whose entire focus is the story, starring various KOF characters not actually playable in the game, in roles which feel natural enough, but were not at all hinted at in the core game. And even then, there’s still a lot of story that didn’t make it in, such as the backstory for each team and why they made it into this version of the tournament–one team, for example, decided to go because one of its members was bribed with ice cream–backstory which like with Re-Bout is only hinted at in the console intro of the game…an intro which in itself is a less complete version of a video located elsewhere.
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Yeah, they took aaaaages on XIII and then still had to cut off huge hunks of story. The roster was meant to be larger, including several new characters (some of whom are in cutscenes). The game is gorgeous, and seems to play okay, but its production is just a huge fuck-up.
And then they never made another game, until now. And not that I’m complaining, but they put in that much work to totally redraw the characters – only to ship it unfinished (twice) then never use the resources again. Yeesh.
Well, whatever. It should be easier to update a 3D game, if this one does okay for them.
there should really be a book or something that details all this stuff
but i think that about every arcade series
I will probably never play any of these games but I sure love reading aderack talk about them
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Play Maximum Impact. People hate it, so you know it’s good.
Different continuity from the main KoF series, so you can basically just enjoy two games of Falcoon being an idiot and side-steppin’ glory.
And in the Japanese track, Terry screams “Shitto!”
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But MI 1 at least lacks a Japanese option in the US release! Which is a big problem, becasue I refuse to accept a Terry Bogard that speaks proper English.
Oh, does it? I don’t remember. Doesn’t it change language if you change your console settings or something? Or did the Xbox version fix that?
I know the second game has the option. Really it’s more interesting anyway.
I know aderack answered everything, nice and serious and accurate like, but on a coincidental note, I came across this other day. Kinda unnecessary, maybe but I still enjoyed the overall delivery…
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Haha! Well. That’s more Shinkirou’s fancy than anything of substance.
Basically, you know how all fighting game characters have these statistics. Often they contain survey questions, like favorite food or biggest turn-offs. They’re dating profiles, really. It happens that many characters introduced in the early years of the series played musical instruments, or were said to. There are two major aspects here. One, each character theme (usually a team theme is applied to that team’s leader) is meant to both be descriptive of the character and to reflect that character’s taste in music. Naturally each character tended to be associated with a particular instrument, Peter and the Wolf style, and sometimes that showed up as a color detail in the character’s profile. Yeah, this one plays bass; that one, keyboards.
Two, the early character designs were patterned after contemporary youth fashion in Japan at that time, which in turn was informed by the music scene. So Iori gets his slave pants, and whatnot.
Shinkirou was SNK’s main illustrator back then, and as you can see in his illustrations, he has a literal mind. Not much in the way of abstraction, stylization, or even grasping the whole picture. His characters all look like mundanely posed mannequins, drawn like they belong on the back of a 1980s cereal box. He decided to draw an ongoing series of pictures depicting all of the KoF characters in a band together, because obviously that would happen.
Shinkirou was obsessed with creating his whole own world for his dolls that had nothing to do with fighting games. He’d draw them at fashion shows, at luxury resorts. Check out the violent fighting action on the AES cover to KoF’98.
He just loved to dress the characters as fashion models, really. And Band of Fighters was one of his favorite poses, presumably because of the way it showed off the outfits.
Haven’t heard a thing about this business since Shinkirou left…
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i think shinkiro’s weirdness really helps give snk’s games their own world and personality, though. like, you don’t see official art of street fighter or tekken characters lounging around in cafes or going to fancy parties together or whatever.
and at least after kof97 with its heavy in-universe tv coverage, you’d expect kof competitiors to be household names
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They would, if his illustration actually had much personality. Everything Shinkirou draws is skin-deep. This is another reason why 2001 so hits home for me; this is where Shinkirou leaves town, and the very peculiar, very expressive Nona steps up to fill his role.
I mean, here’s Kita Senri’s idea of the Mark of the Wolves gang all together for a group shot:
And here’s Shinkirou’s idea of Rock in a dynamic pose.
Here’s Hiroaki, versus Shinkirou.
Both Ryo, just idling. Hiroaki communicates through slight stylization; forms and tones, suggesting implications. The more you look at it, the more you see. Ryo is basically calm, but he’s pensive. He has something on his mind, and from the way he’s fingering his belt he seems to be idly preparing for something. It seems like he’s waiting for battle – a serious one, but one that he feels prepared for. More or less. Or maybe he’s just zoning out in training, thinking about something King said to him last night. You can make up your own story, but the point is that there is a small story here.
Shinkirou doesn’t leave much room for ambiguity. He details every hair, every vein, every stitch on his belt and gi – but to what end? Here we have a plastic sort of cheesecake pose. Affected expression, affected posture. No dynamics. A weird sort of smugness to the whole affair. Whereas Hiroaki has a reasonable subjective element, Shinkirou’s approach is very objective, very much about the thing of a thing.
This comes down to taste, of course. There’s a counter-argument to everything I’ve said, I’m sure. But Shinkirou just… really doesn’t feel like he “gets it” or particularly wants to.
In principle I agree with you, though, yeah.
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MI 2 is secretly just a really fun game.
So many good lines in that ending:
“ENOUGH MERRIMENT!”
“YOU LIE LIKE A RUG!”
“PREPARE TO ENTER EXTINCTION!”
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