Fashion: KOF MI2's promotion

March 05, 2006, 05:15 PM

by chazumaru, via SNKP -
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The Fashion Week ends in Paris and, once again, Chanel crushes the competition. But in the peculiar world of cosplayers, sense of fashion is decided by other standards, such as what Falcoon has decided to dress his characters with in the upcoming KOF Maximum Impact 2. As most of you know, SNK Playmore is having trouble adapting to a market that doesn't care much about bitmap-based fighting games anymore. The KOF MI series is an interesting attempt from the publisher at keeping in touch with its fighting roots while adapting to polygons and focusing more on what made the original series a success among a more casual crowd: weirdly dressed characters with complex storylines. As their numerous recent cellphone games have shown, SNK Playmore sees a lot of potential in the legions of charismatic characters they have developed. For the promotion of KOF MI2, they even produced various short animated features titled KOF Another Day (produced by Production I.G.). These presented the characters' motivations and more important things such as Kyo's new outfit. Polygon-based games open new possibilities for the likes of Falcoon in terms of what kinds of outfit and how many of them they can include in the game, and this aspect is so crucial to SNK that it's no surprise to have the art director of KOF MI2 also being the producer. Check the game's introduction sequence as well as this roster's presentation, courtesy of Cain Highwind from the MMC forums, to see how SNK Playmore struggles and sometimes succeeds in balancing their long tradition with new, breast-implanted ambitions.

It's also amusing how Ryo in his orange gi almost looks like the most normal guy you could meet in the street, amongst this flamboyantly dressed crowd. A few years ago, "pajama-wearing" characters like him looked cliché, and most people perceived KOF as being more credible with its new characters' dressing habits...The game comes out in Japan on April 27.