Bring back chubby athena.
I don’t think I read the same doujinshi as you.
I assume he means meaty thighs Athena from XII/XIII.
Sorry guys I’m thinking of the J-word and had to do an approximation for english.
I terrorize the wife with this song. thanks @Persona
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A bit too doe-eyed but she looked good in 13. It was a departure from her usual look but having someone not hyper-skinny was nice.
RIP
Edit: A second too late. 
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[URL=http://foruser.la.coocan.jp/athena/]I’m glad to see you again![/URL]
I like that for all of the high tech glamor of his arm (whichever arm that may be), Nelson seems to have strapped on his gloves using duct tape.
God help me, I’m genuinely starting to enjoy this horrible piece of music as well.
It’s been a long time since a game has felt like an event to me. Probably the best part of a decade. KOFXIV is starting to manage that.
I believe that with the addition of Nelson, there are now eight SNK boxers. With that in mind, I would totally be up for the hilarity of a dlc team made up of Michael Max, Mickey Rogers and Axel Hawk. They should give Mickey a tornado upper so that the trailer could be the three of them doing tornado uppers for two minutes.
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same physique!
[quote=“lasa, post:155, topic:128, full:true”]
I believe that with the addition of Nelson, there are now eight SNK boxers. With that in mind, I would totally be up for the hilarity of a dlc team made up of Michael Max, Mickey Rogers and Axel Hawk. They should give Mickey a tornado upper so that the trailer could be the three of them doing tornado uppers for two minutes.
[/quote]i saw someone point out on tumblr that they have enough to make up a roster for an arcadey boxing game, should they wish
The best part of these 2 new cool characters is that I am now really looking forward to the remaining 8(!!!) new characters, good times
Yeah, it’s encouraging. These are probably the most grounded new character designs since the NESTS era. They feel like they could have always been a part of SNK’s roster, while also feeling new. Nelson feels like a Real Bout character that wasn’t.
I find it telling that this game completely ignores the Three Sacred Treasures arc for its roster. The only post-2001 characters it includes are Tung and Tiz… er, King of Dinosaurs. And those are both Fatal Fury characters, so that doesn’t quite count.
I mean, if Ash has been wiped from history, that’s a justification. Still, they could have included some non-Ash characters. Except… who would you want to? Malin? Momoko? Remember Momoko? She existed. Oswald is the obvious exception.
SNK has this whole genre of throwaway young female characters. They may appear once or twice, or fill a hole in the roster when they don’t have any better ideas, but mostly they’re just kind of… there, interchangeably. Kasumi, Xiangfei, Hinako, Momoko. They rarely have a significant story role or even personal motivation.
They could have a whole sequel to Gals Fighters, just called “… Her?”
But I like every character mentioned in this post. 
SNK even made mockup sprites.
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bring back hinako and xiangfei ;_;
And I guess that’s why they’re in there. It would be nice for the characters to be, you know, vital in some way, though, rather than just be icing on the cake for a certain demographic.
Malin seemed important, then she didn’t do much of anything, and she vanished.
How many characters really get significant story roles though?
I mean, whatever the “hero” team of the particular story arc do, Iori and Kyo usually get some angle on things, and the Ikaris are pretty much always at least going in trying to find out the evil scheme behind every KOF, though I don’t recall any personal angles except way back when (Leona and the Orochi, and didn’t Heidern lose his eye to Rugal?), but everybody else usually is just there to win KOF for whatever reasons.
I suppose it’s easier when the characters have a shared history. Mai may not have any new specific motivation in a given chapter, but she has developed mutual relationships with other characters, and much of what makes her presence interesting is to see her interact with the others, slowly fleshing out her presence in SNK’s universe. Mary balances her undercover police work (giving her an occasional story reason to be there) with her low-key romance with Terry (giving her a character reason).
To contrast, say, Hinako with a few new characters this year, on the one hand we have this schoolgirl sumo wrestler who exists in a vacuum. She doesn’t have any particular relationships with the other characters. She isn’t really out to accomplish anything. She doesn’t play any real role in even her own team’s storyline. She basically takes up space in the world of the game. On the other hand, we have Kim’s master’s wife. And… aha. Her presence, and what she is like, seems to lend a new dimension to our understanding about Kim. We know that Kim is basically a paladin, but until now that’s just been a static, often hypocritical, character trait. Between what his master and his master’s wife seem like… maybe Kim is working against something here. Maybe he’s trying to prove something to himself. Suddenly he becomes that much more interesting as a character, because of the presence of these other new characters. Likewise, our knowledge of Kim and his family and associates, informs how we read the new characters, lending them instant weight.
Do you see what I mean? If Malin had been overtly introduced as, say, an embittered rival of Athena, out to undermine her for some perceived slight, and if that had affected Athena’s storyline and the characters around her, then she would have not just a space but a role in the game. The games she’s in do offer a facile sort of background story suggesting that she’s a spy of some sort, with petty perceived rivalries, but the games are inconsistent on this point and even then don’t really do anything with the idea.
And even then, that’s the most weight that any of them has.
Didn’t Malin have some kind of motivation tying her together with the other Bitter About Kyokugenryu characters like Kasumi and Eiji? But yeah, even by KOF standards it’s not exactly developed.
She took affront at a passing comment of Yuri’s. And… okay. But does this anti-kyokugenryu team even play into the Art of Fighting team’s storyline? I guess the joke is that Ryo and company don’t even know that they exist, but the joke isn’t developed very far. They have intertwining endings, sort of, where they anti-kyukugenryu team peers at the Art of Fighting team from the background and eventually gets squashed by a table thrown asunder in the midst of typical Sakazaki hijinks.
And… you know, that wasn’t her motivation in her other game. That’s the thing. They shoehorned in a justification for Malin to be there, but in doing so she was changed from a potentially important if inscrutable new character into a tagalong joke character whose history doesn’t set her up for her changed role. I get how it’s funny for Kasumi and Eiji to be following Ryo’s family around out of some continued misguided grudge. But what is Malin really doing there with those two? The best answer is, stirring shit. But to what end? A joke doesn’t work if there isn’t a detectable connection between the setup and the punchline.
I mean. Let’s say for some reason she had been hired by Greater Powers to take out one “classic” SNK team per game, and for each game she built up an apparently sinister threat, yet kept getting accidentally thwarted for one reason or another, usually due to some intrinsic quality of those teams. (e.g., how annoying the Sakazaki family is.) And from game to game, nobody ever clearly remembered seeing her before. That could have been a great ongoing gag. It seems like they almost went there with her, but… she’s just this loose end, flapping.
and wife and daughter, but those are easier to replace, of course
A curriculum reminder for those who dislike scrounging for canon:
http://kofaniv.snkplaymore.co.jp/english/history/kof94_story/index.php?num=ikari
Click around, click above. No reason to be less informed than Japanese fans who obsessively read arcade scene magazines
http://kofaniv.snkplaymore.co.jp/english/character/index.php?num=malin
order-maid hammer, hmm.
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