That is super interesting. At a glance, some of his other newish-looking moves also look to suggest a lack of control. The one where he poofs his flame in a standing downward arc, for instance. I wonder if something is going on here, yeah.
From the Famitsu interview with KOF14 producer Yasuyuki Oda that mentioned it:
[quote]-When did you join the company?
I originally joined SNK in 1993 and was placed in R&D Division 1 which mainly did the “Fatal Fury” and “Art of Fighting” series. I left SNK when the company went in its fiasco near the end of the 20th century. Then in 2014, I came back together with other ex-SNK staffs to work on KOFXIV. So in other words, KOFXIV is being developed by a team consisting of core ex-SNK staffs that’ve reunited as well as new excellent dev members.
-
So basically you were entrusted with the creation of “KOF XIV”. How exactly did this happen betweem you and SNK Playmore?
It happened in 2013. The CEO back at the time suddenly flipped his switch or something and said “We’re gonna take back our Number 1 spot in [fighting] games again!” (laughs). So that was the start of everything and everyone came around, and so we ended up with a team of old and new staff. The project went in full throttle in spring of 2014. -
So that one word from the CEO got everyone fired up.
Right. Of course I told him “it’ll cost this and this, and the development time will take as long as this”, but he still said “We’re still gonna do it!”, so I went “OK then, let’s go!”. -
So was it you that reassembled the former SNK devs?
Actually it wasn’t me. There’s a staff who’s been in the company since the old SNK era and he’s kept in touch with everyone all this time. He’s the one who called them up. -
That’s a lot of drama, reuniting staff that’ve worked from the past.
Yeah, but because the skills and the environment for developing have changed so much during the years, we’ve called back the core members from SNK R&D Division 1 that are still active in the front line. Even up until now the KOF series has been in 2D, but this time we needed developers that had 3D skills.[/quote]
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Hmm, idk. His shadowboxig mechanic alone justifies the character for me.
Hm. It may well be that I didn’t get him at the time, and now that it comes to it I don’t think I’ve given him another look in years. My memory calls him sort of bland. Will take another look.
Basically it’s his main distinctive feature. Heavy D!'s d, d, + p does a short shadowboxing taunt and after that the next special attack you execute acquires new properties and secondary attacks. Without that, I agree that his moveset feels pretty run of the mill and old-school, already by the standards we got in 1998 (but still, not as bad as Brian Battler).
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Some great stuff in the tournament from the other day. Sad there wasn’t more Mai, but some neat stuff regardless.
Really coming around to Athena, looks like she has all her zoning strength from 13 in a game that favors her (relatively low) damage output a bit more highly. Seemed like Kyabetsu got by on people’s lack of matchup knowledge, but he’s still solid as hell. Makes Athena look like mad fun.
Kyo and Iori are definitely poised to be on the higher end as usual. Kyo’s corner “Body ga” juggles and Iori’s DCs into Scum Gale may be a thing of the past, but both have more than enough power on simple combos, with well-rounded offensive/defensive toolsets to create opportunities to land them.
Time will tell on who floats to the top in this game, though. Lots of characters remaining to be explored in a more lab-friendly environment than show floors and promotional tournaments. But I’m still putting Kyo on my team for sure, heh. Jump d+C/df+D>MAX my way to victory…
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brian ufo the best
my favorite was how you could TK input it straight up and he’d just fly a mile high off the screen for no reason
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'98 Brian was secretly kinda scary if you picked him in Extra mode. He could lunge at people’s limbs with dash j.d+A for a quick knockdown (either from an air hit or a combo to sweep) on top of all his crossup Screw Body Press (Briancopter) shenanigans. He also did a surprising amount of damage with combos outside of MAX mode; a clean hit Screw Body Press to his rekka series ending in the piledriver was something like 60% all on its own! Here’s a little Extra Brian in regular '98:
The only real downsides to him were that (a) you had to put him in Extra to get his maximum potential so you could use dash j. d+A, and (b) getting a clean enough hit on Screw Body Press to combo was kinda tricky.
'98 UM took away dash j. d+A (universal nerf) and nerfed his meterless damage a bit, but ultimately made him scarier. His tackle became a much better combo tool, his normals got buffed, he gained a great new super, and most importantly, he gained access to Quick Max if you chose the Extra meter system (which itself became the new “groove” of choice over Advanced). Gaining Quick MAX let him combo into SDMs without pre-activating at neutral. Check this out (9:07):
Where’d Mai’s life go?
By '98 UM Final I would unironically say he was one of the best characters in the game. Top tier Brian Battler. Just let that sink in…
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We’ve already got tier lists.
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I love how Kyo is as far in the lower left-hand corner as possible. Same with Vice and Daimon being relatively far to the right. Surprised Tung is so far to the left, but I guess he’s more of a fossil than a dinosaur proper.
EU player Frionel suggests some scary stuff with Vice in 14. Haven’t seen video, but sounds like she can still do long loops reminiscent of the ones she had in KOF 13. Despite losing HD Mode and Drive Cancels, she still has EX Deicide, and it sounds like you can set up her MAX mode combos to “end” with EX Deicide, which leaves her close enough and at enough hit advantage to link close C > f+A > MAX mode re-activation.
She’ll still require lots of resources to get the most out of this, but if you put her 2nd or 3rd, it sounds like her damage output might not be very far diminished from her insane 13 anchor output. (Combo length is down in KOF 14, but single-move damage appears to be up.) If she can get decent damage out of it for 2-3 bars, she is a very early favorite for high tier, if not top. And of course she can go into it from a ground overhead – an ability shared by many in KOF 14, but Vice looks like she can take special advantage of it.
Vice sounds like she could be dodging an otherwise universal nerf to combo length in 14. Most of the other top damage dealers in 13 relied on long juggles, not links, to get their max damage. Exploiting many of those juggle states required the use of Drive/HD cancels, which of course are gone in 14.
One thing that does diminish the power of Vice’s loops in 14 is that she can no longer start them without already being in MAX mode. Since she could do EX Deicide at any time in KOF 13, and it was an “anywhere juggle” move, she could start a loop of of almost literally any hit at neutral. Getting tickled by a Vice air-to-air jA could mean all of a sudden you’re in the blender. That is thankfully gone for 14 because Vice must be in MAX mode to use EX Deicide, and odds are good most Vice players won’t want to pop MAX mode at neutral. Why potentially waste a bar on a hit that may not happen when you could use it to expand a hit that did happen, particularly if Vice is your last character? So the air is a less damaging place to get hit by Vice than in 13, but you’d better have your guard on point when you land from the air reset.
Thankfully, since it sounds like Vice must immediately re-activate to continue her combo from EX Deicide, she probably can’t refund very much (any?) meter while she’s outside of MAX mode. Maybe the game is progressive enough to suspend her meter build inside a combo after MAX mode ends, but I doubt it. But I don’t think it’ll make a huge difference; she’ll mostly be reliant on whatever meter she started with to determine how big her combo could be.
In case you’re curious, here’s “old busted”. Some of these are showboating, but many of the early ones are practical proof of concept:
Oh cool, the KOF14 box calls the game “PS4 Console Exclusive” like SF5 (which got a PC release) instead of just “Only On Playstation” like Uncharted 4. A sign of things to come?
Y’all should check out that PS2 Classics KOF 2000 on PS4! You can use your PS3 sticks on it too!
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SNK’s motivation to get back into active game development, as I understand it, was substantially motivated by Steam sales. So I would be pretty surprised if they weren’t thinking of Steam when making their next game
9.99 for a ps4 emulation of a ps2 port of a neogeo game is somewhat tempting. Still, very hopeful that we will get XI soon.
KOF 2000 is an underrated game competitively that has a surprising amount of fun stuff. Ironically, the crazy Marvel-style mixups/combos you can do in that game actually encourage character diversity, since the preferred format is 3 “point” chars + 1 striker.
This allows you to center your top-tier I-wanna-win cheeseball pick in your striker, rather than letting those considerations constrain the selection of your team proper. (Assuming, of course, you weigh those things as heavily as I do, which you may not.)
There are several strikers that stand above the others for utility (Seth, Joe, Another Iori, probably some more I’m forgetting), but those limited assists open so many doors that you can pick pretty much any 3 “point” characters you want and expect to do pretty well. Characters like Seth and Joe in particular can extend the combos of pretty much everyone in the cast because they can re-stand the opponent to combo whatever move you want afterwards.
Some of the crazy crap you can do in KOF 2000:
Now if only they’d put it on Steam for people like me who are too broke+cheap to buy a PS4 until KOF 14’s release absolutely forces the issue…
from a non-mechanical standpoint, i also love all the non-playable strikers in kof2000, and that they added even more for the ps2 version (i think?)
I still wonder why it got a PS4 emulated release in the first place. Was anybody clamoring for a re-release of the PS2 version of KOF2000? Especially in this age where people want netplay on these kinds of games (Shareplay probably doesn’t cut it)? If anything you’d think Sony/SNK would release the NESTS Trilogy collection for PS2 (unless that had issues). My running assumption is that SNK’s Sony contact, the same guy who got SNK to work on new ports of Last Blade 2 and Garou for PS4 because he loved those games, loved KOF2000 so much that he got that port okayed too somehow.
I’ve been itching to mess around with strikers recently so maybe I should throw some support behind this anyway even though Fightcade is right there.
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Bring back Neowave/Maximum Impact.
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It would be swell if PS2 on PS4 somehow resulted in MIRA getting an English language release over a decade after it first released.
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