Only purpose of KOF XI anti-Kyokugenryu team I could see was an excuse to bring back Kasumi & Eiji and put them on an oddball team with Malin. I am more than okay with this logic, especially given how good Eiji was in KOF XI. (The more I watch of it, the more I miss that game. Really wish SNK would port that one to Steam.)
As for the new people revealed most recently, they all look cool. Nelson’s cool even if he’s not Vanessa (mostly cause she had her command dash and her sway stance, way more awesome to me than Heavy D!'s toolset IMO). Luong looks cool. But as new (or “new”) characters go, my heart belongs to KING OF DINOSAURS, Breaker of Glass.
How are they gonna repurpose Icarus Crash with a dinosaur theme, I wonder? Pterodactyl Crash?
I don’t care for Ash, but Shen and Duolon are cool.
Oswald is great, and I’d like to see him come back. Is he dead or something?
Not like that it would be an impediment. Geese should be deader than dead and he still appears in XIV
I always liked Malin and Momoko too, even though I didn’t put them on my teams too much. I feel Momoko in particular is a better execution of the Hinako concept, with a much stronger, more believable design. It doesn’t generate an immediate cognitive dissonance like Hinako
XI has the most interesting team composition in the whole series. Probably since it’s the only game that felt comfortable with changing up nearly every team and following through on plotlines by actually having the teams reflect the plot. It also graced us with Duck King.
I don’t think Gesse has even fallen off his tower once in KOF continuity so him being in XIV is perfectly fine within canon.
Yeah, Geese died in Real Bout: Fatal Fury 1 and KOF is considered a separate canon. From the SNK wiki:
The major difference from this [KOF] series’s continuity than others is the fact that Geese is still alive. An interview with Neo Geo Freak reveals that this is mostly due to the fact that The King of Fighters development team wasn’t initially aware about Geese’s fate in the Real Bout series. Once they heard about it, the developers from Real Bout team approved his appearance in the series due to their desires to create the Boss Team.
Yeah, it’s been pretty clear that they’re parallel timelines since at least the NESTS era.
That and, well, Ryo being the same age as Terry, even though the Art of Fighting games are set in the 1970s. But, for a while that wasn’t too hard to hand-wave away…
That said, Geese was still meant to be dead in the KoF timeline for quite a while. I’m a little foggy on the details – it’s been a while – but I think in 2000 all of the strikers for “dead” characters were marked the same way. Like, they vanished in a certain way or something. And Geese got the same treatment as the various clearly-dead-in-this-continuity characters.
What was the game where he appeared with a halo, or angel wings, or something? Was that KOF, or NGBC, or what?
But, he was suddenly alive again in the 2003 team stories, with no explanation. So, uh. I guess they never explicitly said it in previous games; just strongly alluded to it…
Speaking of dead characters: in XIII it was suggested that Mature and Vice were basically spirits that haunted Iori. Is that still what’s going on in XIV? Because they don’t carry the wounds anymore. I guess the bandages must have been symbolic more than anything, if the characters weren’t really there… but.
Considering he’s still yelling “JUSTICE HURRICANE” maybe he will still say all the same move names while claiming to not be Griffon Mask.
I have to say that the current footage feels a little too heavy on blur effects on special movies- I think it looks a bit cheap- but I am interested in how instead of going hard realism it looks like SNK is intending to keep a more impressionist style by replicating the wipes used in their spritework.
Yeah, I was pausing the trailers and taking a look at that myself too.
It’s a good compromise to keep the 2d motion. I wonder how it works? Some kinda post-processing blur together with a handdrawn billboarded smear texture?
Geese is lookin’ good, both in model and in playstyle. I don’t recognize that Evil Ryu-style knockdown stomp move of his, though (the one that he comboed into his OTG grab). Is that part of Deadly Rave or is he getting a new command normal or special for this game?
I’m also gonna get exposed if they revert Deadly Rave to the old manual-input style rather than the canned ranbu it was in '96 and 98UM. I never played him in CvS2 so I’m not very familiar with the timing/sequence for old Deadly Rave. Will try him regardless, though.
Yeah, I don’t recall seeing that move before either. It’s probably new.
I also didn’t realize that the beginning of the trailer is a callback to Geese’s stage from Fatal Fury Special. The trailers have been getting a lot more fun recently, not to mention more frequent! I wonder if they’re moving to weekly reveals? That would be cool!
Manual Input ranbus are trend that need to stay dead. I’ll only mildly accept them if they’re just a one off thing to use as a style ender like Order Sol’s and P4 MC. Even then, I’m not that fond of them.
Ryo’s looking like Ryo which is cool. Couldn’t tell if they’re ever going to let him have a proper fireball or just the usual splash of energy due to the range. Is it wrong that I want to see a bit more of 94/EX Ryo in his modern standard kit?
