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This one begins with a logic problem:
Four American men in Tokyo, one aged twenty, two of them twenty-two, and one of them twenty-three, when left alone with King of Fighters Maximum Impact, were playing Soul Calibur II within thirty minutes. Why is this?
I have only snippets of clues. I arrive home with two dudes in tow, sweaty as a dog. We boot up the game. I teach a few lessons with my Terry Bogard. Then I dismiss myself for a shower. The hot water heater is on the blink. The shower is freezing cold. I'm toweling myself off, tearing off purple frigid layers of my skin, when I hear a distant voice booming something about "souls and swords, eternally retold." I haven't been in the shower that long. I go back into the room to see four guys talking about Taki's breasts. Quite frankly, I think Taki's breasts are damned ridiculous. Look at them! They're American-football-shaped. The nipples are like knitting needles. The boobs flop down over her belt. It's retarded. And they call this historically inaccurate. When asked why they'd given up KOF: Maximum Impact, the common consensus is "You didn't tell us you had Soul Calibur II."
What does Soul Calibur II have that KOF: Maximum Impact does not? [question one] [and a question with no answer] [your public will hate you]
It has weapons. It has graphics -- layered, copious, rendered graphics, on top of which much money has been thrown. It has the most insanely tightened animation. It has the backing of a large corporation bent on selling games to Americans. It has characters who flail around like actors in a kung-fu movie when you press any three buttons in any order. It has a ninja-woman with football-boobs. It has a Greek warrior princess fighting to avenge her dead sister, and it even has her dead sister, if you play enough. It has no people who are interesting as people, and although it's vaguely about a fighting tournament, there is no real structure to the tournament, nor a caring thought in any player's mind as to who wins. It has console exclusive characters.
It has console exclusive characters on the fucking box.
The game is, arguably, less popular in Japan than The King of Fighters. [clue 1a]
My own issue with Soul Calibur, a game I quite like when I'm in the right mood, is its name. The word "Calibur" is a play on the ending of the word "Excalibur." I think it's kind of a dirty name. Its meaning is clever to the point where it's not really clever at all. Another series whose name I don't like is Guilty Gear. What the fuck does that mean, really? Why is a gear guilty? [For the same reason that a Jedi feels compelled to return, I presume.] Did it not turn in the right direction, and cause Big Ben to collapse? Call me silly, go ahead -- I never got around to playing a single Guilty Gear game deeply because I just don't get the title. Forgive me. (I do, however, more than appreciate the game's instruction to "ROCK" rather than "FIGHT.") "Bloody Roar" is a game about dancing circus-animal people, and that creeps me the fuck out. Plus, I don't see how a roar can be bloody, unless you're British and there's a tiger by your window when you can't sleep at night. [I took this part out, during my first pass. It tortured me, though. So here it is again.]
"Street Fighter," now, is a name I can get behind. No matter how much the modern installments deal with hundred-year-old Brazilian men with their bodies in burlap sacks, or body-stretching semi-demons, you're still, more often than not, fighting in the streets. "Virtua Fighter" is a name I can feel in the pit of my soul as well. Alive and kicking, that franchise is, in spite of or perhaps because it reminds us of the naďve [Why do we keep umlauts on words we import, if there are no umlauts in English?] days when we dreamt of one day entering our videogames.
"The King of Fighters" is another thing altogether. It brags slightly. The original, King of Fighters '94, debuted at a time when many fighting games were warring for what the industry of videogame journalism would have called the "quarter-munching crown." [The documentary that you refer to later indeed claims that the series rules over the world of fighting games as its king.] SNK had published a great number of them, including the first noteworthy weapons-based fighter, Samurai Spirits, and the too-quirky World Heroes. Their Art of Fighting introduced the way-ahead-of-its-time element of graphics that zoomed in and out as fighters approached each other or retreated. Samurai Spirits later used this effect. The prior Fatal Fury games had not used it -- rather, they used the also-way-ahead-of-its-time effect of dual planes. The idea is, you can switch planes with the push of a button. How many times I've seen matches of Fatal Fury 2 go on to time-out because the two human-controlled fighters just can't stop jumping back and forth legs-gung-ho at each other, flopping from plane-to-plane -- well, if I had a nickel for each one, I'd have a piggybank that weighs more than a Korean doughnut.
King of Fighters was a union of Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting; there were other characters from other places, to be sure, and there were plenty of new ones. [Here, you cut out my explanation that in KOF: Maximum Impact, Geese Howard is running for President of the United States. There are political posters and everything.] [Yeah, I liked that part. You took too long to get to the following sentence, though.]
The first thing King of Fighters did right was remove the damn stupid plane-switching and the god-forsaken nausea-inducing zooming. This spirit has carried the series into the present with a vigor that only fans previously known as "hardcore" could appreciate: each new game in the series subtracts one unnecessary formerly-experimental element for each new feature it adds. [clue 1b]
While the graphics approach hyperrealism in every three-dimensional fighter in Japanese arcades, King of Fighters' [For regularity in scanning, E.B. White advises retaining the trailing "s", excepting aphorisms like "for goodness' sake". In this case, it looks even more awkward. Maybe some other phrasing is possible?] yearly updates still look stuck in 1994.
Yet the characters keep growing up. [This is kind of true. SNK keeps messing with the logistics. Things have been weird ever since the NESTS era.]
This fine website's own Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh [I don't ever put the umlauts in your name, I should warn you, because the Japanese encoding can't handle them; you will notice, now, that you need to fix every instance of your name in this document.] [Be careful with them. My umlauts define my very being.] will tell you, someday, that the characters in the King of Fighters universe are some of the most honest, living, breathing fictional people in videogames today. It takes a person who truly loves videogames to understand this, however. A kid's mother's not going to walk in on a match of King of Fighters 2002 on Dreamcast and appreciate that Seth, the suit-wearing tough guy her son is using on the large-breasted ninja-girl Mai, is gaming's most active vegetarian. It requires a whole lot of digging, and honest infatuation with the games. [clue 1c] [Though it must be said, MI lowers the requirements a good deal.]
Why do King of Fighters games breed this infatuation? [question two; explore further]
I, myself, am infatuated with King of Fighters in my own way -- a way I like very much, thank you. I get a kind of odd chill in my stomach when I explain to someone that Andy Bogard has gone away, and that he won't be coming back for at least another two years.
The games play in their own way. They feel slightly differently from Street Fighter. The special move motions sometimes involve many snaps from a diagonal to a nearly-opposed direction, something totally absent in a Capcom fighter. The characters traditionally have fewer frames of animation. The hardest special moves to perform, if performed quickly and on a joystick, can cut the muscle fibers between your thumb and forefinger bones. [Imagine how they work on a PS2 pad. I can barely feel my hands after two matches.]
These are games for people who like to play games that are slightly different from what other people who play such games like to play. And they're quite good on that. [possible clue 2a; expand and tie into previous clues. Hint: you imply that a person kind of needs to be obsessive and keyed to subtlety, in perhaps a Japanese way, to appreciate KOF (and yet that people so geared are perhaps more prone to grow endeared toward a series like KOF than something like Soul Calibur). At least, up until now.] [I think I'll address this toward the end, just because. Or, well, I suppose I could mention something up here. To put it simply, it's about cleanness. I go on about it up above (and then down below), in (two) parts that you cut out. [Yeah, they kind of rambled. Though, I enjoyed the bit about Guity Gear. Maybe I can de-ramble a bit of it. ... And. Now I have.] The characters are clean. There are no Voldos, no Ivys. No characters of lumpy or freakishly bold graphic design. The title is clean. The gameplay is equally clean. The fans are people who like Treasure games, because Treasure games always exhibit sparkling clean concepts. Gamers, by nature, are kind of obsessive people. Look at the amount of... collecting required, just to play games. Think of how many game systems Vincent Diamante has in his apartment. Think of the insane order in which Drew Cosner keeps his PC-Engine Duo (he keeps a hand-towel spread over it when it's not in use, for God's sake). Think of the amount of bullshit you have to go through to unlock Link's purple outfit in Soul Calibur II. Some people see the stupidity of this, and yet... go on. They figure, if they're going to hold down such an unwieldy hobby, they might as well do it with clean games. King of Fighters, to these people, is safe. That's how i've always thought of it.] [Safe, in the sense that it is clean? In contrast to all of the other junk that goes on in and with and around and because of videogames? That seems... clean enough.]
Now, however, the company that makes those games is in some kind of financial trouble, I take it [Not really; actually, Playmore seems a much more stable company than the original SNK ever was. I think, now that they're back, they just want to avoid languishing in the same rut that SNK dug for itself in the late '90s, where they couldn't escape the shadow of the NeoGeo. They're in a process of exploring their options, at the moment.], because they've produced a three-dimensional update to their much-beloved old-school series. In the introductory fly-bys to versus matches involving the time-honored bouncy-breasted Mai Shiranui, we are treated to a flubbering close-up of cleavage. The polygons are shaded skillfully. The background helicopter buzzing around the skyscraper roof shines with a plasticine sheen in the light of the setting sun. The electric guitars wailing at you are most likely real.
King of Fighters has grown up, so to speak, and in doing so has brought confusion to many, anger to some, a good time to me, and a reason to play Soul Calibur II to four guys who are not my brothers. Let's take a closer look, by first stepping back a bit.
Before each match, your opponent awakens from a distracted state, teases you with a line of dialogue, and approaches. The screen fades to black. It holds on black for a moment. Then, the opponent speaks some specialized dialogue. A half a second into the speech, text comes sliding in, announcing the name of the arena, the name of the opponent, and the number of the stage.
The little delay before the final line of pre-battle dialogue, whether it's just to mask loading time or not, is crucial. It might just be the game's number-one achievement. [You never clarify this, though you veer through related territory for several paragraphs.] [It's called a dramatic pause. In the game, it's a dramatic pause. In the review, it's a kind of dramatic... lapse. It's perhaps more effective in the game, however. It's destined to be that way. It's destined to work not so well in the review.] [Perhaps you can include a .wav file of you reading the article, to make it clearer.]
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[I'm replacing most of the following because now that I've spent more time with the game, I get where you're going with it. Reading it blind, it's hard for even me to understand.] I was watching my roommate Marco play Dark Cloud 2 on the PlayStation2 the other day. That's an alright game, with too much stuff to do in it. It has pretty graphics, and lots of graphics, at that. The game is all about traversing dungeons, crawling through them, and killing all the monsters. Yet when you press the right button to make the hero, Max, board his giant robotic pod, all you get is a flash of words on the screen, telling you you've boarded the robot. Then the action continues without a skip-frame, with you in the robot, bashing things. I asked Marco, that day, "Why can't there be an animation showing you getting on the robot?" His reply was quick: "Because it'd take too long." Would it, really?
The advent of three-dimensional graphics has put the idea in the head of every damn dumb kid with a Dual Shock that flairs of any kind, whether cinematic or gameplay-accenting, have to be grueling in pace. Why can't the robot-summoning animation be lightning-quick? I blame Final Fantasy VIII, though not angrily. Final Fantasy VII was the first game on record to make grown large men weep at the movement of flat-shaded polygons on single-colored backgrounds. Bahamut the dragon king swoops down from space and sprays a laser at a field of helpless goblins, or else sprays a laser at the ground beneath their feet, lifts them up into heaven, and then projects a wider, more yellow laser at the chunk of earth beneath the vile beasts, disintegrating it and sending them careening back to earth, where they bounce like flung graham crackers at an air mattress. What's the point of this? To give us time to masturbate, should we be so inclined?
Final Fantasy IX, a sad heap of too many ideas that got all tangled up together, introduces monster-summon spells that are short and punchy. Bahamut swoops out of heaven, unfurls his wings, blasts the enemy with a sonic boom, and soars back up. The attack is hard and fast. The first time we see it, we say "WHEW." It's effective. We look at the damage numbers, and think, "That's about right."
It didn't take rocket science to figure out that this was the most effective method of handling in-game cinematography [As evinced in Metroid Prime], though of course the folks at Square are far less than rocket scientists. Hell, I'd not even trust them operating on my brain, these days. The basic truth, one evidenced in the fact that we now stand before a Final Fantasy XII -- the twelfth installment, for God's sake -- is that when the power of polygons fell into the hands of game designers, the first thought on their collective money-hungry minds was very much like the thoughts of Nike's mind when they had sixty seconds of Super Bowl commercial air-time to kill -- let's make it long, and slow. Let it go, let yourself flow, slow and low, that is the tempo. So they did it.
There's a problem with this model, however. In Nike's case, they made the pretentious long slow commercials that didn't even show the product until the end, if at all, because they had the money to spare. In Square's sake, they made the polygonal animation long and slow because they wanted to attract people's money with it. It's doesn't make much sense. Now, watch, as I bring the game I'm actually reviewing into the equation, kind of:
Tekken (meaning "Iron Fist," a respectable enough name, as it were) has no soul. Yet its sequels have the love of money, and lots of money, so they look good. Like The Blue Hearts said, "Even when there's nothing inside, if you've got image, you're gonna be okay." The games sell copies. They move units. They push boxes. They load carts. Et cetera. Their parent company flourishes. The grandparents are happy. Puppies are born. The yacht begins to rust. Et cetera.
Before the Japanese game industry fell into what some call a recession or what some call a rut, there were those who understood that less was more. When Dragon Quest still required players to press the A button to open a menu so they could select "stairs," press the A-button, and then climb those stairs, a company called Falcom was crafting Ys, a role-playing-game where mere frontal contact with enemies results in their death. My roommates can walk in on me playing Ys on my (kind-of) new PC-Engine Duo, and laugh about how I'm "walking around pushing people to death." Then they go back to playing their Final Fantasy. Yet I know something they don't.
See, when I touch an enemy in Ys, a role-playing-game battle is occurring. Sometimes I take damage. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes the enemies die in one hit. Sometimes they don't. Falcom merely understood that the idea of an RPG battle was bullshit; witnessing turn after turn in which fighters attack imps and blue imps attack and kill white mages is interesting to the budding statistical analyst, and boring to anyone who walks through the room with a cup of coffee from the local gas station, if you live in a country where they have coffee at gas stations (bless those countries). Ys is a game you play without worrying about the trifles of gaming. Falcom was onto something when they made it. What they were onto, who the hell knows? They exist now in developer purgatory. They turn out games, yet are never cleansed of their sin, a sin which was most unkindly never explained to them.
Years after Ys, years before the RPG random battle was a standard, invented the RPG with no battles per se, period, SNK's The King of Fighters comes to the third dimension, and someone, somewhere, is in awe. Someone else is unimpressed.
The King of Fighters that we see before us today, in three-dee, is like every other three-dimensional fighter, with a layer of excess skimmed off the top. In Dead or Alive, we have a dozen girls with pendulous perpetual-motion-machine breasts. In KOF: Maximum Impact, we have three. (Well, there are many girls -- though only Mai, Lien, and Migon have excessive breasts, Lien being the queen of the moment. She should really zip up her cycling suit just a little bit. It's rather indecent. Really. I say this as the same red-blooded man who watched "Cowboy Bebop" and loved it, yet complained that Faye Valentine's outfit was ridiculous.) [I find Mignon the most disturbing in this regard. Isn't she supposed to be about twelve years old? Chae Lim might be worth mentioning, for having some of the most realistic proportions I've seen in a female character in a videogame and for being bisexual.] In Virtua Fighter 4, I wince every time Jeffrey McWild does his damned eight-second whirlwind suplex throw. In Maximum Impact, no special move lasts longer than a half a second (with the exception of Clark Still's god damned super move where he throws the opponent into the air, breaks her back over his shoulders, and then repeats three times, before whipping her onto the ground in a suplex -- this move lasts seven whole timer clicks, and is an abomination). Soul Calibur II has a "Weapon Master" mode in which you traverse the world, getting into text-window-non-character-specific "adventures" looking for dungeons with straight-line maps, where each room is a battle with the goal being to "defeat the opponent," and the prize for completion is a money to buy weapons for any character, not just the one you're using. In Maximum Impact, you earn new character colors by playing "Challenge Mode."
It's an ingenious mode, really -- you face a list of challenges (for example, avoid a 500%-health enemy with unlimited super meter for fifty seconds, on half of a life bar and with no blocking ability), pick one, try it, lose, scream, try again, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, win, get a new color, and auto-save. Then you choose a new challenge. Eventually, there are no challenges left. At this time, you either quit playing the game or make some friends. [Couldn't Noise have done more with this mode? It feels like it wants to teach me how to play the game correctly -- which would be a real aid with as weird a game as this. That's not what it does, though.]
SNK knows full well that the glory of a fighting game is in the fighting. The fighting in Maximum Impact handles well. To be simple and honest, SNK has reinvented the 3D fighter. And I don't mean "reinvented" in the hype-artist sense. I mean reinvented as in they've taken some previously existing thing and remade it from the ground-up.
[So what does KOF have that Soul Calibur does not? The partial answer seems to be a lack of certain elements.] [It has cleanness. In Soul Calibur, you press three buttons and your characters start swinging around uncontrollably in flashy combos. In KOF, you're almost always in control. The Soul Calibur characters-a-swinging thing was actually invented in Tekken 3's Eddie Gordo, if you need that extra history. And ironically, Maximum Impact's Soiree Meira also fights with capoeira, swinging ridiculously around. Though design-wise he's cool as school, he really does feel too much like a Tekken character. too much like a Tekken character for what, you may ask?]
I say, then, hopefully to someone's delight, that this game plays like a King of Fighters game. Remember Street Fighter EX, and how that felt kind of like Street Fighter? Well, this is more than that. This game is blest with the same quirky physics as a classic 2D fighter; those physics that allow you to jump clean over your opponent's head from a standing start. Only there's been a little fine-tuning since E3, and now the game is fast as hell. I don't know how it got this fast, or why. It's almost obscene how quickly fights can be fought and won, now. The time-attack mode, on the "Maniac" difficulty setting, is like Zen meditation while listening to wailing rock guitars. [Here, monsignor aderack, you should have red-texted something about the soundtrack sounding "like Sonic Adventure, only less." right?] [Well, it does. I'm still confused by the guy who sings "Get your hands off mah ma-yun! You're UNBELIEVABLE!"]
It never really feels like a 3D fighter, sidesteps and plane-shift-attacks be damned. Terry's Power Waves sparkle across the ground like Power Waves. They hit the opponents like Power Waves are supposed to hit opponents. It's possible to side-step projectiles, or any other moves, really, and this feels to me like less of a 3D fighting staple and more like the natural progression of the original Fatal Fury's old plane-switching combat system. Though I guess, yeah, now that you think of it, it's 3D, alright.
There are, for instance, these new things called "Stylish Arts." (They are called this by SNK Playmore's Noise Factory studio. You know them as "dial-a-combo.") Basically, just hit attack buttons in the right sequence, and they'll chain together hits. Some special moves can be performed immediately after certain regular attacks; if a combo ends in this regular attack, chances are you can chain a combo onto the end of it. It's very rudimentary stuff. A few run-throughs of time-attack with your favorite character (if your favorite character is on the roster -- TIZOOOOOOOOOOOOOC!! NOOOOOO!!) should have you performing that character's stylish arts in no time. Hell, you'll even be chaining stylish arts to the ends of stylish arts, putting together two eight-hit combos into one sixteen-hitter -- after which there's a glitch-like imposition of fairness that ends the combo and pushes you away from your opponent like a good referee. This is a civilized contest, remember.
There are a few fundamental flaws with the design. The temptation I felt, continually, to use rapid low kicks on my fallen opponents was revealed as normal when, during the bonus DVD that comes packaged with the Japanese version of the game, the game's director does the same damn thing in every sample match. These little kicks can't be avoided, and fallen fighters can't get up fast enough to scream and super-combo their asshole opponents. Usually, when I low-fast-kick a near-corpse, I'm doing it because I just want it to stand the hell up; if each match is a sheet of newspaper, each knockdown is a hole punched in by someone's fist. And these people take their time getting up. The addition of a Street Fighter Alpha 3-like block meter (they call it "Block Clash" here) penalizes your opponent for turtling in the corner. It gets him out, and fighting, punching his way on through life. When playing this game -- this fast, graceful game -- you want it to continue as efficiently as possible. You feel most alive when you're hitting people. That's how you get your main enjoyment out of the game. [So... the pre-fight delay? A delay outside of the actual fighting is different, then? Does its significance have to do with establishing the upcoming battle, and perhaps lending it meaning?] [Yes, that's what I meant. Should I insert another white-texted sentence here to hammer that point in? Say how these little dramatic fade-to-black pauses are chances to gasp in some breath, whereas pauses when you can see the fighters on-screen are just irritating because you're still thinking about fighting? Or should we just let it drop?] [Yes, I'd like to see that.]
[Segue to discussion about the intended and apparent actual reactions to the game, from both the obsessed and from the unattached, and a comparison thereof.] [Uh... check?] NOW LET'S COMPARE AND CONTRAST. [That wasn't a request. It was an intertitle.] You can also get enjoyment out of the new character colors, if that's your thing. Collecting them by way of completing the various challenges can be fun and fulfilling, if you like screaming. Beating the game in story mode reveals each character's "rigging model," which allows you to toggle (via the profiles menu) things like a guitar case on Iori Yagami's back, or headphones on Kyo Kusanagi's head. Some of the Rigging Models are lame as shit, though -- Mai get a big round ninja-wheel on her back, and a cat mask on her face. What the hell? [I believe that's a white fox -- perhaps to set off all the Tengu masks.] Something tells me these things were maybe an afterthought.
An interview with the artist and clever fashion designer Falcoon, however, reveals how much thought actually went into just about everything else. The interview is on the special features DVD. In it, he talks about the secondary models he designed for each character. He is most proud, says he, of the bicycle-shorts-and-tank-top, ultra-rare model for Clark. His white-snakeskin- pants'd Iori Yagami alternate costume is also priceless. I like what he's done with Iori's hair: dyed it black. [Note, though, that his first color choices for each of the redesigns were pretty traditional. The color schemes that appear in-game as the defaults are alternates.] The blood-red shirt is in fashion. I also, honestly, want to marry Rock Howard's new (fake?) fur-lined jacket, and then have an affair with Kyo Kusanagi's hidden jeans.
Falcoon says it was important, most of all, to reinvent the looks of these characters because of how they're going to appear in three dimensions. He says he was skating on thin ice with what he did to the designs, though he stands by all of them to the end. He spoke with the air of a man who knew that the characters he was redesigning had fans who liked them just the way they were, and didn't want them to look three-dimensional and "cool" in a way that might appeal to people who didn't already love them deeply. [Note also that he already has a lot of practice with this.]. I imagine he had the words somewhere within him. He just didn't want to speak them. I'll speak them in his stead, kind of:
Drew Cosner, an avid hater of fighting games, was able to look at the video comparing 3D old-style Iori and 2D Iori and say that new Iori looks "badass" and old Iori looks like "shit." (Drew also, for the record, upon witnessing the Dragon Quest VIII demo DVD, has sworn to buy the game, after a decade and four-fifths of playing not a single title in the series, just because of its graphics.) [What I find interesting is the conflict between this and the four Soul Calibur guys. If the game is so successful in making the series superficially appealing, why is it so quickly dismissed? You seem to be implying it's because the game remains, at its core, KOF.] [Yes, that is exactly what I'm implying. It's the "cleanness" aspect again. Sometimes, clean is too clean.] There are people like Brandon Sheffield, who already like Iori muchly, perhaps because they know Iori as more than just a fighting game character. [I'm tempted to change out Brandon's name for someone equally arbitrary, like Andrew Vestal or Paul Wolfowitz.] [I'd go with Paul Wolfowitz. he sounds like a nice guy. . . . and, well, Brandon does like Iori, though. So.] He's not just a fighting game character -- he's a character in a story about the lives of people, however romanticized, which has been going on for ten years now. In order to come to love Iori as a character, Brandon has had to look at art books and fan-made websites. He's had to read fan-fiction about the character, maybe, and he's had to log hours squinting at a blurry sprite on his little television back in San Francisco since the age of ten-years-younger while thinking, real hard about that fanfiction. And now here comes mister three-dee; Iori Yagami has received a celebrity makeover, and he looks just like he does in Brandon's boyhood dreams, to the point that just about anyone can sit down on a sofa with a can of Asahi Super Dry and fall into a quick, crash-course respect for him. Brandon would see this and think, "I loved you before you had the money!" And therein lies the problem: He doesn't have the money yet. Appealing to the suckers is all part of the get-rich-quick scheme.
I say to the King of Fighters fans taken aback at the 3D perspective, and I say it loud and clear -- this game is working hard. It is evidence of a group of people working hard because they love you. Bear with them, and one day, they're going to come back, sweep you off your feet, and take you on a long, slow boat to China, and the cruise will probably figure into the second act of a rock-opera or some shit.
[Segue to discussion about what makes Maximum Impact its own game; not just a 3D version of King of Fighters; and how that figures into the picture, on both sides.] [Yes.] [I'm taking notes.] I also point out that the game isn't called King of Fighters: Maximum Impact. It's called KOF: Maximum Impact. This is important. It is important because it is not, specifically, even a King of Fighters game. It is KOF, and it is Maximum Impact. [Honestly, it doesn't even feel like it. It reminds me more of Fatal Fury. Of course, that's technically still KOF. Sort of.]
The tournament isn't the King of Fighters tournament. It takes place [in an alternate universe, no less] at some undisclosed time after the 2001 tournament has ended. Some guy named Duke, the king of some underworld regime, has gathered a few famous faces from the King of Fighters tournament to pad the roster in his own tournament, the Mephistopheles Fighting Tournament. The tournament is a ruse for getting the brothers Alba and Soiree Meira to fight each other. I think. Or to draw out the assassin, Lien, probably because Duke is a big, reasonable guy, and just wants to ogle her monster melons. A little girl named Mignon Beart figures into the mix; her profile says she is American, though I doubt it. No young girl in America can have a name like that, wear a leopard-skin bikini and lion-paw-shoes, and speak Japanese with such fluency all while being an air-head. She is, however, a witch, with magic powers. She's cute, and clashes only slightly with the other magical girl, Athena Asamiya. Yuri Sakazaki now has someone to bounce off of as well -- in Chae-Lim, Korean, Tae Kwon Do expert, and Kim Kapwhan replacement, whose character design shows me exactly what kind of girlfriend I really, truly want. She could beat me the hell up. [And, again, she's bisexual. I imagine that must factor in.]
Soiree and Alba are rather inspired. I've never seen them before, yet each of them is designed with such a balls-to-the-wall exuberance that I can't help be reminded of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. If I see Falcoon, I simply must ask him where Soiree's cowboy hat came from. He's German, and loves disco dancing; his fighting style is capoeira, and he controls kind of like a Tekken character, with multiple-hit wheeling combos initiated by double-simultaneous button presses. Alba is a sunglassed assassin, cool as ice. He fights with a fist-by-ear shotokan easy stance, yet also excels in whipping up energy vacuums. According to his profile, nothing in this world scares him more than Japanese sashimi. It creeps him out.
Lien Neville is the real star, however. With a haircut straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie about San Francisco, she's the kind of character that can make a franchise. She dresses in a motorcyclist's leather zip-up number -- the choice of female assassins these days, I reckon -- and keeps her hair back with a wide band. Her fighting style is graceful to behold, and her moves are the only ones in the game that, really, incorporate side-stepping to a fine-tuned degree (okay, so Leona has a couple, as well, though she also has a knife, so she doesn't count). Lien has this laser move, which sends a vertically-sweeping beam to another point on the battlefield, ending close to you or far away, depending on your punch button. If you can somehow sidestep, do this move, and then use the "3D attack" (hard punch + hard kick), you can knock your opponent into it for ten or more hits of damage. She plays a lot like Soul Calibur's Ivy, only with less mundane stance-switching and more breast-flopping action. And the breasts only flop efficiently.
Duke, the final boss, is a real son of a bitch. He's halfway between the "carnival ride" final bosses of other 3D fighters -- Ogre from Tekken 3, or Apocalypse from Marvel vs. Capcom, for example, fill the screen, attack you sometimes, and otherwise just look menacing -- and the absolute feeling of awe you felt when you first got mauled by Vega (M. Bison, if you like that sort of thing) in Street Fighter II. [What about Geese? Duke strikes me as an attempt to make the first really final nemesis that SNK has had in a long while. He has a similar kind of class to him.] You could compare him to Mortal Kombat's Goro, if you needed to -- that big half-dragon half-man son of a bastard had four arms, visual proof that he was cheating. No other character in the game had four arms. Duke, in Maximum Impact, is difficult when you face him in the story mode because he is seven feet tall, capable of punching a hole through the floor of the graveyard stage, revealing the final, golden arena beneath, and has a special meter that doesn't decrease no matter how many times he supers your ass. Sometimes he chains three supers in a row, and when each one hits, it does 80% damage. When you finally unlock Duke by beating the game with Alba and Soiree [I think they're all I needed -- though that's in the US version], you find that he's just another fighter, kind of like a quicker Maxima, and his super move does, indeed, do normal damage. The first couple times you fight him as he's controlled by the computer, you'll have no clue that such a fighter can be beaten. Then you'll get over it, and take to using those Tekken combos that you don't otherwise use.
THE GAME, AS A GAME, HAS FLAWS
For one thing, the stages are so empty. I'm thinking of that farm stage in King of Fighters 2002. [Oh, come now. That stage is boring. Pick something from '99 or earlier.] [Hey, i was thinking of that stage because i'd just played 2002 that day. what is any experience, even gaming experience, if not something you do "that day"? besides, maybe you don't have the affection for farms that i do.] [Do you have much affection for farms?] You know, where there are all those people in the background in the first round, and then, as the fight wears on, the crowd grows thin? As the institution sponsoring the Mephistopheles tournament is an underground demonic mafia, all of their matches take place in depressingly secluded areas with no audience members more interesting than a waterfall, a roving helicopter, or empty standing parked cars in a parking lot. The spectators in the "Live House" and "Showtime" stages are grainy, and reminiscent of PlayStation sports titles. They move three whole times a second. [This just in -- There's an "Esaka" stage, too (almost impossible to unlock), complete with a nearly photo-real NeoGeoLand in the background, as well as the game's entire cast cheering you on; well, the entire cast minus the characters in use. It works well for team battles, except -- sometimes you don't get to see all the characters during a fight. That is to mean -- sometimes you can't see for sure that your character is really missing. Because: it's in 3D. Sometimes you really just don't get around to fighting while facing all four background planes.] [I guess that stage is locked because it's not in Southtown. I, however, don't see anyone from this game in the crowd; I just see Daimon and Ramon and someone I don't remember.]
Between fights, some red-nosed weasel of a fight promoter tells you, "Alright, your next opponent is . . ." as the camera spins around your Terry Bogard in his red baseball cap and red jacket. Should you choose Soiree, Alba, or Lien [As your character, I assume? Can you choose your opponent?] [A mostly valid question. No, you cannot choose your opponent. I'm talking about choosing them as your character.], you'll get some story materials -- and rightly so; they're the guys on the front of the box. Sometimes, before a fight, as is expected, Kyo and Iori will lock eyes and spit and sputter at each other. For King of Fighters fans who aren't busy feeling bitter about the present and the future, these touches are a nice treat. For newcomers -- I take it you're going to get a few of them, friends; be nice to them -- it serves as an explanation: "Whoa! I guess these guys don't like each other!!"
KOF: Maximum Impact has a simple, small, fist-sized heart somewhere inside its single-layer DVD. The characters it borrows from another game come to life well, in a way that makes me want to see more of their games remade in this style. Why not make a tenth-anniversary KOF with this 3D engine (fuck NeoWave -- there, I said it), once they've hammered out all the kinks, like the kinks that push an honest fighter like myself to crouch at a fallen opponent's side and quick-kick repeatedly just because I want the fight to continue? [Something bothers me here. I feel like you forgot to come through with something you tried to set up earlier, using this detail.] And why not keep this going as a series, as well? I rather like Alba and Soiree. Hell, I like Lien, too. I've never warmed up so quickly to three fighting game heroes before. They beat the hell out of anyone in Soul Calibur (I find myself warming up to Soiree even more as I write this, while looking over the character profiles; his "favorite thing" is listed as "Big Bro," and his "precious thing" is also his "Big Bro") in terms of heart. And I love the tattoo those boys have. It's a good design. I want to see Falcoon let loose, and design a whole cast of these Jojo rejects for the next Maximum Impact. [I'd argue that I'd prefer more original characters as well; that's mostly because I'm not sure the old characters work as smoothly. This ain't their context. It's not what they were made for.]
I've reached the end of my first week of thorough play with the opinion that this game is a successful experiment. It is by no means perfect, with regard to basic fundamentals. Everything wrong with it can be fixed with simple fine-tuning.
[I feel like you're just looking for a way to wrap up the article now, after stumbling through various details, rather than resolving your earlier questions.] [That's interesting. I feel kind of the same way. Be aware that there was a LITTLE editing before I showed this to you.] In the meantime, I encourage SNK fans to, by all means, buy the game, if just for the speed of the battles. Get yourself a good joystick, and go nuts. Hell, get two joysticks. This game is a fresh spin on King of Fighters that's more than just more palatable to the mainstream. While not as deep as Virtua Fighter 4, which no two people play the same way, it's fast as hell; though its shallow combo systems and time-worn special moves are easy to learn, and not-so-hard to master, the raw energy of the game is what comes between two rivals when they sit down to play a round. [There's also the detail that the game is just so darned different from anything else out there.]
How well will it do, though, in the world? A better question might be what does it need to do? It needs to appeal to kids with money, and then get their money, and put the name SNK in enough household homes so that they can sell out, be on the cover of every fashion magazine, get too big for their britches, get hated by all the fans, pass out near-dead on a toilet, and then wake up, ready for a comeback tour that will kick some serious ass.
Can Maximum Impact launch that course of events into motion?
The frank answer: no. Not enough bouncing breasts. No weapons. Not easy enough to pull off a sixty-hit combo when drunk. (Hell, it doesn't even have sixty-hit combos, and one of the characters is a vegetarian!) The circus animals in the background don't roar when characters are thrown into them. (Hell, there aren't any animals! There's not even a circus!!) [That's your answer? Not enough tits and swords? Hell, is the tits-and-swords audience even what SNK is going for here? What about people like Drew, who just aren't into fighters? Or what about the audience that plays things like Tekken, but that would have shrugged off King of Fighters in the past, just because of what it looked like, or because of how hard it was to get into? Is the game still perhaps not appealing enough to the non-obsessive?] [I'm shocked that you felt the need to ask such questions. Of course it's the tits-and-swords audience they're going for. That this game is even BEING released in America -- hell, that it was ANNOUNCED as being released in america at E3 should say something. [It's even got TV ads, now. On Comedy Central, even.] Soul Calibur is the dominant fighting game in America. If you want to be the king, you have to defeat Soul Calibur. It's the fighting-fire-with-fire angle. Though a true SNK fan will buy this game anyway (and probably with a few grumbles, because, as I understand, many SNK fans like 2D legitimately more than 3D), a person who doesn't know KOF needs something to get him into the game. What I'm asking in this paragraph is "does Maximum Impact carry enough to get a non-KOF-believer into the game? The answer is, for the most part, no. Drew Cosner was awakened to the game because the shiny 3D graphics presented him with an angle wherein he could understand that he was the kind of person to like Iori Yagami. Does that make him, necessarily, like this game, as a game? Not Really. Does it make him like all KOF games? Not at all. What I'm questioning here is the game's reach. Is it instantly and brilliantly interesting enouggh to hook everyone, or even, at least, sell a million copies? My answer is no. I'll still keep playing it instead of Soul Calibur, though.]
Oh, well. At least it's still a damn good play. As such, it has put a significant down-payment on research for a better future of fighting games. You people do your part, make your donation, and enjoy the freshest thing SNK's done since Mark of the Wolves. [I feel like cutting this paragraph out right now. Though I must not, for it makes me remember Mark of the Wolves. that's a hell of a game.] [It's a good thing to mention. This is the most intriguing game SNK has put out in a long while. On a certain level, whether or not it works on all cylinders is almost beside the point. As long as they keep trying, anyway.]
--tim rogers
is ready to getto shiriasu
Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
is so groovy. He's such a groovy gus.
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