lol @ replies
King of Dinosaurs is real and he is my friend.
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Haha, yeah, I only saw that this morning. Got dangit Iori. I had him pegged for top tier very early on due to the stuff Xiaohai came up with just by messing around on show floors, but at this rate I think he’s locked in. Unless SNK decimates him with an ArcSys-style patch or something early in the game’s life, which is doubtful.
That said, there are many characters who can compete with him at neutral in this game and suppress him well enough to avoid this kinda stuff, so I don’t really expect him to ruin the game or anything like that. But people definitely need to be prepared to see a lot of him in top 8 for this game, lol. And he’s definitely the first matchup any new players should learn how to survive.
I’m kinda relieved that Iori is this nuts because every time I feel guilty about something dumb that Mai has in this game, Iori crashes in Kramer-style with something really stupid like Scum Gale loops. Shoutouts to playing a relatively honest character, lol.
(Iori is also on my demo team. My favorite character in CvS2 was Sagat; my scruples in fighting games are few and far between.)
as drake would say: that’s the motto n***a yolo
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Someone please summarize the story of the last 14 KOF games for me.
Was that in the Axe?
In there I skimmed over pretty much everything, because it would quickly become weird otherwise.
I wonder if Kyo and Iori will finally kiss on-screen in this one.
I had a hard time finding any aderack KOF thread that wasn’t this one; any help?
I think it was by loki?
“Looking for a website that will tell me…”
like a quick rundown of what in the fuck is King of Fighters’ story
like i know there are different sagas but it’s hard to find a nice summary of what happens in each
there is probably better but this official site is really sweet, written in premium engrish
There are three major eras so far. The new game, XIV, starts a fourth.
The first story, therefore the one people always think of as “traditional” KoF and wish the series would just get back to, is the Orochi era ('95-'97). Basically a cult is trying to resurrect an ancient evil god who was sealed away generations ago. The hero, Kyo Kusanagi, is descendant of one of the three people who sealed Orochi way back when. His rival, Iori Yagami, is descendant of another of the three — except somewhere down the line his ancestors made a deal with Orochi and his bloodline has been cursed ever since. So those families have been trying to kill each other ever since. In the end the two of them put their rivalry aside and join with the descendant of the third team member (Chizuru Kagura), to seal Orochi away again – at a price.
Initially it’s assumed that both Kyo and Iori died in the struggle. At any rate, they both vanish. Two years later, the NESTS era (‘99-2001) begins with a new hero, a young man with no memory (K’, pronounced Kay-Dash) who recently escaped from a biotech nightmare called the NESTS cartel. It turns out the NESTS group kidnaped Kyo after the events of ‘97 and plans to take over the world through manipulating Kyo’s DNA in increasingly weird ways. K’ was one of the earlier experiments, an individual who had his mind wiped and Kyo’s DNA grafted into his own. He couldn’t control the power, so was considered a failed experiment.
Other experiments and other investigators show up, South Town (setting of the Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting series) is destroyed, and K’ gets a few more clues about his past , before Kyo and Iori return for good, and royally pissed off. Kyo has gotten a little deranged, and begun to take after Iori. Eventually they all destroy the cartel – though several of its members manage to skip town.
In 2003, SNK was back in play and they kicked off the third, somewhat less focused era (2003, XI, XIII). There’s no one consensus on the name to this one: Three Sacred Treasures, Tales of Ash, whatever. Whereas the other games had all been yearly episodes on the Neo-Geo, this took the best part of a decade across three different hardware platforms.
The “hero” this time is a strange French fellow named Ash Crimson – who is soon revealed as more of an anti-villain. The story and his motivations are inconsistent, but his main power seems to be the power to steal others’ power – which he proceeds to do to Chizuru, then Iori – in order to resurrect Orochi again. The suggestion was that he was going to take Kyo’s power, but then the story shifted to the left, revealing that Ash was doing all of this as a ruse to kill his own ancestor, who was a demon that due to a time loop had possessed Ash’s own body… meaning that Ash was his own ancestor, and in the end probably wiped himself and most of the events of the last three games out of history. So… okay then.
You will notice I skipped a few games. '94 is sort of a prologue to the rest of the series: in continuity, but outside the major story arcs. '95 is basically a remake, with Iori and the start of an ongoing story added in.
'98 is a celebration of the series to date, with most of the characters (including now-dead ones) and game systems from '94-'97 but no story. Still joyous. It’s been updated a few times, and the final version includes every single character it should.
2002 claims to be the same idea except in regard to the NESTS era, except it omits half the NESTS era characters anf every game system since '98, and randomly brings back several Orochi-era characters. Basically, a super regressive thing that panders to all the fans whining about change. This one got substantially remade a few years ago. The remake gutted the original game and then built it up again into something closer to what it should have been in the first place: a comprehensive celebration of thr NESTS era. Still not perfect, but less… blah.
XII is an unplanned half-step game. It was meant to be XIII and more, but the game took so long to make (mostly all of those redrawn high-res sprites) that SNK had to release a WIP draft to recoup some expenses and basically say, yeah, we’re still here. So it’s a “Dream Match” in the sense that, like '98 and 2002, it is out of continuity – but there are only a few characters and levels and even musical themes, and the game system is all rough. So, uh, this is probably the least necessary major-series KoF of all. Everything in here is also in XIII, and there’s not much original charming context to make this one compelling in its own right. So.
XIV, again, is a new story. It’s as yet unclear where things will go, but we have a now Shonen Jump styled protagonist named Shun’Ei, who seems to struggle with controlling some kind of demonic power from another plane. And it all looks pretty neat so far!
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That’s the main series. There are, of course, many spin-offs, most of which are either out of continuity (NeoWave) or estsblish their own alternative continuities (Max Impact).
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Sorry; one more wrinkle.
Each in-continuity game has a fuckton of story. Every stsndard team has its own story, and usually there’s one or more “secret” team that reveals the true, definitive ending.
Although all of the teams’ endings tend to contradict each other in key ways, generally they all are canonical in two respects. One: each team’s story tends to follow that team’s story from previous games. Two: anything that doesn’t contradict events in the definitive (usually hero team or secret team) story tends to be held as true.
Complicated to soak in and make sense of, yes. And often SNK even loses track of things. But that’s all part of the fun.
SNK’s entire gameography is basically one monolithic web of internally inconsistent parallel timelines, that tend to intersect and bend and tangle around each other. And KoF is a microcosm of all of that, as well as an anchor for all of the rest of the weirdness. But, if you keep to the broad sweep and don’t think too hard about making everything line up, it’s pretty straightforward. Sort of.
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Probably the most momentous games, in terms of story development: '97 and 2000. I’m not really wild about either one as games (compared to other chapters in their respective eras), but both really go to town in the shit-happening-whoa department.
'97 effectively ends the series, before SNK chose to rather gloriously reconceptualize it, and they pulled no punches with that. Then 2000 was when the original SNK was falling apart. It’s basically their goodbye. So, they chose to blow up their fictional world.
The final words : “THANK YOU ALL WITH LOVE”
Gets me every time.
(Then the next game, 2001, effectively rises from that apocalypse, damaged, dirty, and angry. And I absolutely love it. But, uh, am close to alone in that…)
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Oh, that business with the creepy ninja guy(s) above deals with a dangling B-plot that has threatened to become important for about 17 years, and which speculation suggests may be connected to the new storyline.
That’s where you’ll really get mired with KoF: if you start messing around with all the subplots, which are impossible to count and tend not to have much direct effect on events… unless they do. Which may be the case here.
Starting in the NESTS era was this odd background story about a ninja clan called the Hizoku, who had some kind of internal schizm. One of its leaders killed a bunch of clan members and went off to join (or ally himself with) NESTS. Along the way he took particular interest in the psychic energy going around in the Psycho Soldiers team, which had its own little internal drama going on. So far nothing has really come of this, although little references and cancelled plans keep cropping up.
The new story sounds like it has potential to link up with the Hizoku story (what there is of it, and from what little we know of the new game), which would be kind of satisfying if true. If not, well, the new characters have tons of potential anyway. We’ll see where this goes.
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this is very complicated
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Your cat is complicated.
Wondering if I should talk about Nameless.
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Ok so not trying to follow was the right decision, as it is in every fighting game. Got it.
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