Not bad, but not quite as majestic as we would have liked.
Two-Thousand and Nine is supposed to be the "Year of the Fighter". Street Fighter IV lived up to most everyone's expectations; BlazBlue was shockingly awesome; Tekken 6 is the proven worldwide arcade king of the moment, and the home and portable releases are looking spectacular; The downloadable Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix was a hit and the much anticipated re-release of Marvel vs Capcom 2 is destined to be. We also can't forget a number of other fan-favorite downloadable retro fighters that hit XBLA and PSN including Garou and Street Fighter Alpha 2. So in celebrating the 15th anniversary of the franchise, where does that put The King of Fighters XII? Unfortunately, and rather disappointingly, not at the top of the pack.
Fans of The King of Fighters have been demanding a high definition makeover for the series for quite a few years now. With the announcement that XII would be the "re-birth" of the franchise, complete with totally new 2D hand drawn HD visuals, the collective was notably ecstatic. I mean, the screenshots and trailers looked great, and the presented features and bullet-points were just what everyone was hoping for... and they don't lie, right?
The King of Fighters XII is probably not re-birth of the franchise that players hoped for, especially considering the $59.99 price tag. I understand that hand drawn 2D is a time consuming, and sometimes expensive project, but as a console release, XII is just too bare-bones for what it is. If SNK Playmore released the game as a download only title at an appropriate price point, well, it may have made more sense.
The single player Arcade Mode boils down to playing through 5 rounds against the CPU with the attempt to finish up as quickly as possible. And that's it. There is no boss and no other single player challenges other than earning Trophies and Achievements and uploading your clear time to the leaderboard. Depending on the difficulty level chosen (Easy, Normal, Hard) and player experience, it may take 4 to 10 minutes to play through the mode. For a KOF title, it's shockingly easy, even on Hard. There are some very laughable, brief "news report" style cut scenes to set up the mode. While fighting games are usually geared around Vs. play, I still enjoy my single player experiences here and there, and KOFXII just totally fails in that respect.
It's fairly obvious that The King of Fighters XII was created to be a competitive on and offline Vs. fighting title. The online feature set is actually quite impressive with ranked (Arcade) and unranked (Player) games, friend invites, a lobby system with text/voice chat, match spectating, clan support (PS3 only), Truskill match-making (Xbox 360 only), the ability to save and upload replays and ranking leaderboards. Searching for and joining matches/lobbies is handled nicely and works well. In Arcade mode, lobbies support up to 8 players and can be set to Winner Stays, Loser Stays or random. The players not currently fighting can either spectate or just hang around until it's their turn. There's a little too much waiting around for my tastes, but it does provide that authentic feeling of "waiting in line" so to speak. Lag, or rather the way lag is handled within the game, is unfortunately a little bit of an issue when playing online. After having been utterly spoiled by the usually silky smooth Street Fighter IV/BlazBlue online experiences, feeling like you are suddenly playing the game in slow motion isn't particularly exciting. I have a speedy Verizon FiOS connection, and even fighting against players with a yellow (good) connection, with or without spectators, ends up less than full speed a decent portion of the time. It throws the timing off, kills the pacing of the matches, and leaves a lot more up to luck than it should. It's playable, though certainly not ideal in this day and time. When it does work, it works well however. The quality seems to vary from match to match, even with the same connection status, so it's not possible to tell until you hit the character selection screen.
Being a reboot of the series, the core of the gameplay itself is solid enough. All of your favorite characters mostly play as one would expect, well, the characters that actually made it into the game at least. A good portion of the input commands for almost all of the older character's standard and special moves have reverted back to the more classic KOF style. The game is still a 3 on 3 affair, with chosen characters fighting in order, and there's no tagging or partner attacks thankfully. The series has experimented with a number of new gameplay systems over the past 15 years and XII is no exception. It's a mixed bag however. By hitting HP+HK, Guard Attacks/Blow Back Attacks allow you quickly block/counter or to perform a crumpling SF4-style charged focus attack. It's a pretty useful maneuver is used correctly and a nice addition to mix it up and keep your opponent guessing. On the other hand we have the new Critical Counter Attacks. CCA's rely on a new, green meter near the character's energy bar that fills as a match progresses. When it's full, you have few moments to trigger a CCA by hitting high punch (with no direction) while in close, as a counter hit. If it connects, what can best be described as a Street Fighter Alpha 3-style custom combo sequence is activated. At that point you can spam regular moves until the either the meter runs out, your opponent finds a way out, or a special/super move is used. Critical Counter Attacks aren't always especially reliable, especially online with a bit of lag, and there's something about them that feels a little too cheap. Air Guarding and Deadlock Counters are also new and aren't much of a game changer either way. Overall, XII feels fairly balanced and close to the classic KOF titles, with a few tweaks of course. If you were familiar with the characters and gameplay from previous iterations you will be perfectly at home with The King of Fighters XII.
Speaking of characters in XII, the 20 fighters from the arcade version along with 2 console exclusive fighters are included this installment. For a KOF title, the roster is surprisingly small, and overwhelmingly male, and in lieu of fan favorites like Mai, Eiji and Yuri, we get the cross-dressing Ash Crimson. Considering that the game's main menu links to what will eventually be new a storefront for new DLC, I wouldn't be surprised to see some of those characters end up being offered separately.
Visually, The King of Fighters XII looks really nice from a hand drawn, 2D animated standpoint. The new designs are a little soulless in my opinion, and in 1080p, you'll often see a few jagged edges and pixels when zoomed in if the optional visual softening filters aren't used. The characters are large and the animation is really good obviously, even if many of the characters don't have much in the way of facial detail. There's also only about 5 backdrops, which range from attractive (the Arena fireworks are awesome) to a little too busy (the outdoor cafe). Effects are colorful and decent enough if not sometimes a little too wild. In comparison to the amazing menu systems and interfaces in other modern console fighters, the UI and presentation in KOFXII is on the bland side.
The announcer is hilariously Engrishy as expected, and many of the character voices I'm pretty sure I've recognized before. The option to use either English or Japanese voices is provided is a nice touch. The music and background tracks are quite varied and sometimes interesting and ethnic sounding. The little 8-bit sounding "ping" effect when using a Guard Attack is strangely out of place. XII basically sounds like you'd expect a King of Fighters game to sound like, and not much more.
There is a rather interesting issue with the game, at least in the PlayStation 3 version specifically. If you're online when you first boot up the game, you will be presented with the ability to download a 1.01 game update. That alone is not an uncommon occurrence with a new game. The weirdness is that the patch is a 770MB+, and it is apparently the entire game which needs to be downloaded/installed to the system. The "install" option, which is no longer available after the patch, basically explains/confirms this. I'm not quite sure what changed between 1.00 and 1.01, but it better have been something good. I know there were issue in preview code where the load times in both versions were fairly lengthy, and besides a few seconds between matches and a brief pause before the next character loads, there are no issues with load times post-patch.
So yeah The King of Fighters XII could have been so much more. It's a reboot/re-birth alright, albeit a seemingly unfinished one. With a good online connection or local friends who are fans of the franchise, it offers some Vs. mode thrills for a bit, but that's about it. Overall, KOFXII is a good enough start, although it's neither as interesting as Street Fighter IV or BlazBlue, or as infinitely playable as Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. It was at the top of my list of fighters for the year, and the end result not measuring up to the hype isn't something I take lightly. At least we finally got those new, 2D hand drawn HD visuals.
