The King of Fighters XII

Photo by Dan Siney

THE KING OF FIGHTERS XII

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: SNK Playmore, Ignition Entertainment

My problem with

The King of Fighters XII

is I can’t think of a reason to play it.

We are in the middle of a 2-D fighter renaissance.

Street Fighter IV

and

BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger

are fucking excellent, and now it looks like we’ll be getting new versions of both those games with balance tweaks and new characters sometime soon. It’s like the early 90s all over again.

The King of Fighters

series was good back then. Lower budgets than Street Fighter, but they made up for it with large casts, each member of which had a much larger array of special moves than the Street Fighter characters and remained balanced despite this. If

KoF XII

occupied that niche now, it’d be great. It does not.

It’s got the smallest cast of any KoF game, and every character has a vastly abridged special-move set compared with their past appearances. Characters have lost about half their special moves, and the remaining moves have been simplified—stuff characters used to be able to do in the air or the ground, they can now only do on the ground, etc.

I think I understand why. First, in most fighting games, each player picks one combatant and then they fight for the best two out of three matches. In KoF, each player picks

three

combatants, and when one of your characters gets knocked out, you switch to the next. Whichever player loses all three characters loses the match. That means you need to be proficient with at least three characters to be good at the game. Second, each character is hand-drawn, but they move fluidly enough that you could mistake them for 3-D models at times. I’m sure it would have been a phenomenal pain in the ass to fully animate as many special moves for each character as they had in earlier KoF games. But just because I can understand SNK Playmore’s reasoning for doing this doesn’t mean I want anything to do with the result. (Especially since, on top of these problems,

KoF XII

has bad, laggy netcode, so the online matches here aren’t nearly as good as they are in its two major competitors.)

If you’re tired of

Street Fighter IV

and want something that’s kind of like it but with different characters, and you play primarily on the couch with your friends in the room with you,

KoF XII

will do you perfectly. If you want something meaningfully distinct from

Street Fighter IV

, though, or if you want to play online, go for

BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger

instead. If you already have SF IV and

BlazBlue

and want something on the same level as both of them, I can’t recommend this.

On the other hand, there’s another easily available King of Fighters game that does deliver the goods. It’s on Xbox Live Arcade and it’s called

The King of Fighters ’98: Ultimate Match

. It’s eleven years old and looked like ass even by the standard of the times when it was new, but it

plays

great.

DISSIDIA: FINAL FANTASY

Platform: PSP

Publisher: Square Enix

Dissidia: Final Fantasy

is the most fun I’ve had with my PSP. I don’t play my PSP very often, and even games I like I tend to set down because I have to like them

a lot

to make them worth the bother of keeping the battery charged and staring at the tiny screen, but

Dissidia

kept me coming back and has gotten me used to the system enough that I’m actually enjoying my other PSP games more now.

For those unaware,

Dissidia

is a 3-D brawler that brings together one hero and one villain from each of the first ten Final Fantasy games, plus two unlockables. The whole thing is strung together with a flimsy narrative justification—Cosmos, goddess of harmony, and Chaos, god of discord, have summoned champions from many realities to aid in their endless war, fought among the broken shards of wrecked worlds. Pretty standard, really.

Largely it’s an excuse for Cloud and Sephiroth to fight each other. I assume you know who those are; if you don’t, you won’t care if I try to explain. The game itself is a series of short one-on-one duels in 3-D, destructible environments, with the stated goal of reproducing the visuals found in the movie

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

—again, if you don’t know what that is, I cannot make you care. The important thing is, there’s a lot of running up walls and swording through scenery.

Whether

Dissidia

succeeds or not depends on how much you enjoy flashy fights and, well, spreadsheets. The game is full of numbers. Each of the 22 characters is customizable. You can unlock special moves and supply characters with new equipment, which you will need to find or buy or craft, all expressed in a series of menus. It’s a bit daunting, but the game does a decent job of presenting its mechanics one by one, so someone with a basic familiarity with CRPGs shouldn’t have trouble grasping it.

The graphics are beautiful, the fights are intense, the game is addictive, and I can forgive the often crap storytelling and menu density. And I love it for the way it made me like my PSP.

MURAMASA: THE DEMON BLADE

Platform: Wii

Publisher: Ignition Entertainment

Muramasa: The Demon Blade

is one of the most attractive games I have seen on the Wii, and I would probably pay in blood to play it in high definition. Gameplay-wise, it’s pretty simple—it’s a side-scrolling, platforming brawler, where you play a ghost-possessed princess or an amnesiac swordsman and must cut your way through huge numbers of psychotic ninjas, evil monks, and bizarre demons in a fantastically drawn and animated ancient Japan. Along the way, you collect and/or forge up to 108 new magic katanas to fight with.

The gameplay mechanics are

neat

. You attack with the A button, but you also block by holding the A button, and

also

also, you attack by holding the A button and hitting a direction. It’s simple and satisfying to zoom around the map attacking every dude around you. Beyond actual fighting, the game has a

cruel

food mechanic, where you power up your character by eating delicious food. I call it cruel because the game lovingly animates each meal, and to eat it you actually have to hit buttons to advance through the process of eating. More than once after playing I actually

went out and ate sushi

because the game made me want it so much. Bastards.

The story is often incomprehensible unless you have a working knowledge of obscure Japanese myth, so

I’m

fine but many people may be left in the dust; fortunately, this doesn’t actually matter. You don’t need to know what’s going on to appreciate the graphics and the gameplay—huge bosses look awesome and you’ll feel badass for beating them regardless of whether you get why you’re fighting them or not.

It’s really hard to come up with reasons not to recommend this one. It’s kind of repetitive? That’s the worst I can say about it. It’s an excellent game. Try it.