I think that’s one of the best onboarding points, yeah. If you wanted to leap around from there, like sampling different eras of Doctor Who, 2003 and '96 would make sense to show how the series changes. Different looks and sounds, different game systems and formats, different central casts and storylines. (Also, those two are relatively harder to find elsewhere.)
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Shion better be back in XV, or I start a riot.
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im enjoying the 30 mins i’ve played of '99. ill definitely try out '96 and '01 and '03 at some point.
2001 is an acquired taste, to be sure. Kinda like Tetsuo: Iron Man. It’s grotesque, uncomfortable, deranged. It is just barely hanging together in every way. And yet in that, it has a coherent sense of tension. It’s the chapter that really makes me feel things, in a way that is super appropriate to what it’s doing with story, character, and all that.
It freaked people out enough that the next game is the biggest conservative whiplash in the series. HERE IS EVERYTHING YOU SAY YOU REALLY WANT. SORRY ABOUT THAT.
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2001 is terrible but it is at least the remaining members of SNK’s old team paired with a bunch of upstarts trying to make the game they wanted to make.
2002 is them capitulating and making a bunch of stuff and not even trying. 2002 is the cash grab of classic SNK games. It is the first of their games that might as well say “we give up, we need money”.
SvC Chaos is a weird middle ground between the two of them.
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KD-0079 is probably the best K’ theme ever written. The original OST version’s lead synth is a sound that has inspired me to watch videos on how sound synthesis works, just so I can emulate it accurately.
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2000
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Some musings about KOF. This goes in a lot of directions randomly. Sorry.
Aesthetically, the strongest games are '97, '99 and 2000. I feel like to appreciate the aesthetics of '97, you also have to play '96 before it, because the tone of '97 is set entirely by how bombastic and celebratory '96 is before ending in a warning of things to come, with a final boss with ominous music, who is by all means still affable in his evil.
'97 is weird, sparse and bleak by comparison. Characters have no end quotes, so it feels like no one is talking to each other. Damage is high—characters just melt in '97 compared to '98.
There is very little music in the middle of battle. You will mostly go into a fight and you will only have the stage’s ambient music or sound to accompany you. When there is music, it’s just for one character usually. The character themes only highlight main, important (or new/popular) characters, while almost everyone else doesn’t get even a peep of music. You can tell the New Face Team is up to something, because all three of them get a theme, and it’s surprisingly edgy compared to everyone else’s. The Orochi alternate characters (Iori, Leona) have their own theme, which is what would happen if a horror movie theme and a fighting game theme had a blood-soaked baby.
You end the game by fighting a literal manifestation of a god.
Fun times.
People say '96 is the first modern KOF, but '97 really is the first game where the engine is instantly recognizable. '94 and '95 have their own thing going on and they are great legacy games, and they’re a good way of looking into SNK’s mentality of “let’s make a megamix-type fighter with all of our franchises!” and what that resulted in.
'96 is the first game where the game clearly turned into its own thing, and you can hear it in the music (some of the best in the series), but the game still handles a certain weird way—you can literally feel that it hasn’t completely shed all of '94~'95 from it in the way that hits feel. Lots of moves that cause several “ticks” of block damage, for instance, and that’s very common in the first two games. The short hop feels real clunky compared to the much more polished implementation in '97. Characters still kind of slide around plenty when they get hit, which is a big overreaction from how little pushback there is in the earlier games. It’s a weird game, and it’s beloved, but it isn’t quite there yet.
The engine in '97 is instantly recognizable as KOF. People who have played '98 way more can easily sit down to play '97 with not much of a learning curve.
'98 is probably the best of all of the games to play if you wanted to truly learn what KOF gameplay is about, and your primary concern was to play with other people. All of the major system elements of classic KOF are there. The game is balanced decently enough, and even the space of top tier character is fairly wide enough to allow variation (you will see some combination of Iori, Daimon, Orochi Chris and Chizuru). Characters range from incredibly easy to be effective with (Ralf, Chris and O. Chris) to needing a firm grasp of execution, knowledge of your character and full applications of their options to succeed (Chizuru). There’s a ton of great tracks, there’s some cool stages—pretty much, it’s my favorite of all the versions.
I think the game actually got considerably worse when they took it to UM and UMFE. There’s issues with the balancing and adjustments to those games that make them slightly degenerate in a way that I think '98 isn’t while not fixing the issues '98 truly has (for instance: hit stop makes rapid-fire light attack combos very clunky, which is an artifact of them trying to fix how heavily '94/'95 relied on rapid-fire light attacks for combos). All in all, though, every version of '98 has something for people to play.
It’s no surprise the two most heavily-played classic KOFs are still '97 and '98. You can find modern footage of people in Korea and China still playing these versions online via emulation lobbies. It’s a joy to watch, even when '97 is hysterically busted.
'99 is almost a complete turnaround to the classic KOF aesthetic. Everything feels industrial. The game is a lot darker. Everyone’s character portrait is oddly serious. Kyo and Iori are locked away until someone beats the game on the arcade cabinet to fight against them, at which point you can use a code to play as them. The hit sound is chunkier and has more of a dull thud to it. The music is, for the most part, a lot more aggressive (although there are some chipper themes, like SHA-LA-LA), with heavy use of sampled instruments, snippets and loops.
The game FEELS great, although strikers are implemented somewhat haphazardly. The game balance is also surprisingly solid. It’s a great effort that went mostly without much celebration because some of the engine adjustments are just strange. Rolling is significantly different in a way that made a lot of players unhappy (rolling would return to its pre-'99 form for 2000), with the back roll replaced with a backstep that also involved your character leaping back forward, making back roll useless as a purely evasive technique. Forward rolls could be followed with “exit” attacks, sort of like dodge attacks from '97 and '98, and those aren’t very good. There was also two “install” modes you could enter when you had full meter, called COUNTER and ARMOR, and it would take a while to really explain and break down why they’re just… not great. So we’ll leave it at that.
2000 is the last game SNK proper would make, and they know it, and it shows. It’s a celebration of everything about KOF, and the game culminates in the very symbolic destruction of South Town by a superweapon wielded by the evil organization behind the '99 and 2000 tournaments, NESTS. The sampling for the music is probably at its best here, with some incredibly iconic tracks all throughout the soundtrack. The game is also probably the best feeling game of all of the KOFs up until this point: characters move well, rolls work like you’d expect, hit detection is on point, hitboxes are great, tons of characters are viable. Strikers are a little out of control in this game, as they can be called at-will for the most part, and they can be called multiple times per combo.
I have said for a long time the only adjustment 2000 needs is for Strikers to be disabled after being called once in a combo, with a short cooldown timer once the combo ends and the opponent’s character returns to neutral. It is the only fix I can think of for 2000 (besides other bugfixes) that would make 2000 an absolutely fantastic game. The cast is great, the alternate strikers are a great idea… There’s a lot to like about 2000.
Everything after this is kind of a blur. 2001 plays OK until you realize how the striker system works, and then it’s just an incomprehensibly degenerate game at even a mid-high level. It sounds like shit despite looking pretty cool (the art rules, even though many people find it jarring—Nona is awesome). The story beats are terrible, but it also introduces Angel and May Lee, who are to this day still fan favorites (and Angel’s return was wildly celebrated for XIV).
Igniz is fucking awful. He’s a terrible design and he’s not particularly difficult to cheese out (nor are most KOF bosses, to be honest). The endings for each team are kind of trashy.
2001 also inexplicably makes Iori way less level-headed again. Whereas in '99 and 2000 he was mostly on the outside looking in, more willing to partner along with Kyo to solve issues since the pull of Orochi was much lesser, and there was understanding that they really couldn’t afford to fight while NESTS was running around.
Which is weird, because Iori’s intro with Kyo in this game is one of the better ones.
2002 is just an apology edition for people who didn’t like 2001 and a quick cash grab. It plays mostly OK, but it also heralds the beginning of The Bullshit™ by adding Max Mode, which is a terrible idea that should’ve probably died with 2002. I have no other comments on this game other than the music sounds fucking awful thanks to bad instrumentation and sampling, the backgrounds are lazy and ugly, and the characters barely interact with each other. Art’s fine, though.
I’ll write more later about what I think from 2003 and on.
(My favorite KOF as a complete game is '99; my favorite to play with friends is '98 and XIV.)
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“Good” is overrated. Some of the best things aren’t necessarily good.
2002 is so cynical. Eolith basically put out a poll and asked the most hardcore fans what they wanted them to make, then they made exactly that; no more, no less. No attempt to make sense of it all, no real organization or justification. Just, fine: you happy now, fuckers?
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A thing about Kyo and Iori in 2001: what fascinates me is that in this game, Kyo seems to be taking Iori’s lead. His moves, his animations, his expressions, his voice acting—it’s like he’s been spending way too much time with his rival. With some of his stronger moves, you see this shadow fall over his face.
This all plays into the sense that, in this game, everything is falling apart. Everyone is losing control. There’s such an ominous, unsettling tone to the game, like the whole thing could explode into the gristle and wire of K9999’s arm. It’s broken in so many ways, but… it kind of makes narrative sense that it is?
It’s such a frickin’ strange chapter of the series, and it doesn’t work as a fighting game—but as an installment of a yearly melodrama? It’s got a lot to say.
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Again 2002 UM isn’t… super interesting, but SNK Playmore did its best to tart up some lemonade out of the original 2002. They tossed out nearly everything but the engine and (most of) the roster, then pulled hard into trying to rehabilitate it into a proper “dream match” of the NESTS era, as '98 had been for the Orochi era. And superficially, it’s… like, they did a good job, right. It’s appealing enough. There’a a big cast. There are even some things to say about the retcons they instituted here, replacing K9999 with a new character who plays mostly the same and writing new story to explain his and Kula’s roles.
There are a few structural problems, though, that I wish were addressed. If it’s a celebration of the NESTS era, it feels really weird that it doesn’t play anything like a NESTS-era game and is full of all of these Orochi characters who were dead before the era began. In the same way as KoF usually lets you choose team or 1-on-1 play, I wish there were an option here for four-person teams. In the same way '97 and '98 let you choose your system, I wish there were a way to pick whether or not to play with strikers, and with what system (off/stock/ratio). Since they went to all the trouble of changing all the teams from the original 2002, I wish the characters who really didn’t belong there were sidelined as “extra” or unlockable bonuses rather than core features, bringing the focus back to the NESTS era.
But, you know. If you want to play an extremely traditional KoF game with a lot of characters, and have an aesthetic appreciation for the NESTS era, it’s fine. It’s not objectionable.
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They are all very Instagram-ready, yes. 2003 is similar.
2001 is basically everyone showing their ass, each in a unique and fascinating way that gives insight into their character.
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I like how it feels like, after two years of a lot of characters being separated for various reasons, 2001 has most of them come together in comfortable configurations in preparation for what’s to come. K’ and Whip are reunited. Team Japan is back, with Shingo as a full-fledged member. Heidern returns to the field for the first (and last) time in years. Seth and Vanessa are together instead of working separate angles. Only Iori feels out of place, except also not, as at this point, he’d never actually had a consistent team. It’s a bit like where I expected Resident Evil to go, after Nemesis and Code Veronica, with all of the characters getting together to really go after Umbrella.
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THING TO KEEP IN MIND when I speak up: I tend to find deep meaning in “ugly,” broken stuff. This is not, I notice, a universal mode of appreciation. So my notions of cool may not necessarily apply.
I want to check out the Tales of NESTS compilation, as I think that’s got basically the Dreamcast version of 2001 (with the time-variant levels and stuff) plus the arranged soundtrack?
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Oh, I should mention that 2000 also introduces Vanessa, my other special lady besides King.
And that 2002’s other sin is it’s the only full game to omit King.
(XII ain’t a complete game by any stretch.)
Ah, yes, Nerichagi, when SNK decided they’d take the main leitmotif/riff from Nine Inch Nails’ “Into The Void” and called it a day.
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My problem with this is that Iori still acts like a treacherous fuckbag, when it is heavily implied he’s a lot less corny/murderous post '99.
It’s kind of distressing that The King of Fantasy more properly explores a “what if Iori actually had to interact with other humans” scenario than most “official” material thanks to '01 
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