kof

load-bearing personalities

  • Reading time:3 mins read

terry bogard may be the only main character of any fighting game whom i’ll gladly spend a significant time playing.

ryu? lol, no. akira yui? the kazamas, sophitia alexandra, kasumi mugen tenshin, haohmaru, amongst my last choices.

(weirdly, morrigan isn’t the central darkstalker until game 3. 🦇🤓)

even kyo kusanagi, i enjoy his shitty personality and the bleary antagonism he bounces off everyone in his life—iori, chizuru, shingo, saisyu, even yuki. it’s fun for a long-suffering central character to actually be a total asshole who needs to be dragged into doing anything that could look heroic.

i like how drastically his moveset and play archetype have changed over time. i kind of like the overly complicated, distinctive core of his move list since 1996. i like his changing outfits. the musical evolution of “esaka” is one of my very favorite Video Game Things to go back and fuss over .

i like how deep kyo’s original actor masahiro nonaka’s voice slowly grew, year after year. i liked seeing his character teeter toward totally losing himself over the course of the nests saga; how he began to borrow iori’s moves, a darkness would fall across his face, and his animations grew alarming

as with morrigan and darkstalkers, kyo’s popularity has long been eclipsed by his rival iori—and iori is my precious grumpy snarling gumdrop, who first got me interested in kof, snk, and fighting games in general back in the neogeo pocket/dreamcast days. i absolutely will play iori.

but kyo? ih. 🤷🏻‍♀️

i’m all over his successor kaydash, and take a fae sort of delight in ash crimson, both of whom technically count as central characters even as kyo, like ryu, remains squarely in the middle of things, anchoring each new era in familiarity and kind of taking the steam away from whoever it up for lead

it’s like, “main character energy” tends to exert on me this unconscious magnetic repulsion. why on sub-con would i pick mario, when the princess and toad are *right frickin there*, you know.

it’s not a thing i think about or intend; it’s just, my mind bounces right off any sort of guided decision.

terry, though?

he’s terry. he’s the guy. why would i not want to hang with such a good bro? one with such a strange yet effective playstyle, at that.

he’s just wander around, doing his thing, and we can come along if we want. or not. no biggie.

the same goes for the wolves games, despite rock.

Corrosion and Sparks

  • Reading time:5 mins read

(The following is based on my portion of a Twitter conversation with John Thyer, Amandeep Jutla, and Thom Moyles.)

Weirdly, I think The King of Fighters is another half-decent example of this sort of design. There is a huge, multifaceted story underneath each game, going back years; dozens of perspectives. Most of that comes out through the way the characters animate, how they respond to each other, and little bits of action and dialogue scattered through the series, with only scant exposition.

As with Phantasy Star II or Riven, your part is to take what you’re shown and work out all the implications; figure out how we got here from there, and what that may mean for the future. Thinking about the logistics of who is paired with whom; who has stayed out this year, and why… It’s this really complicated, dramatic scenario that actually is in there, yet just barely narrated.

All of it is told by your looking a character in the eyes and saying, “Whoa, what happened to you?” And then you look for the evidence, and you find it. And it’s this whole, intense thing that feeds back into how you read the game, and how you look at the next character, and the next. Which may in part why I find The King of Fighters ’99 — which clears the decks and introduces a new story, new hero, at the expense of the old, now-resolved plotline — so rewarding, and… why it may have irritated others. Because the answer to how we got here is so intense, takes so long to work through successfully.

This may also be part of why a game like its follow-up KoF 2000, though very well-made, fails to satisfy me as much. The answer to how we got here is… well, a few more (very cool) characters have joined, and things are moving along. Its intricate web of endings provides a deep well of speculation for the future. But the past? It’s basically, “Okay, you’ve played ’99? Well, good. You’re up-to-speed. Here’s another game.” Which may in turn partially explain why other people tend to like 2000 so much more than ’99 or 2001. It’s giving them what the average person who plays fighting games, even SNK games, is looking for: stability.

I am a weirdo in this regard, I guess. There are many things that I like about (the third and final game in that arc) KoF 2001 in particular. One of them is where it brings all of this. You read into (the old protagonist) Kyo’s psychological state in that game — what his moves are, how they parallel with (his rival) Iori. Knowing what he’s been put through the last few years, it’s kind of chilling to see. Nothing talks about it overtly, but you see him coming apart, turning into something dangerous. There is a sort of dramatic culmination in so many aspects of the game. It’s chilling in how logical, yet messy, it all is.

I just want to soak in the world of 2001, and what it means. Right off the bat, there’s so much coded meaning. One of the first things you see is (current hero) K’ putting his red glove on. This is really important. Later on, you see (new rival) K9999 coming out of his cloning chamber. His first action? Show us his glove. The game makes an immediate parallel and contrast here, showing their relationship; the glove is his identifier, whereas K’ has to make the conscious decision to put his back on in order to meet this new danger.

In 2000 it was a mark of victory for K’ that he ripped it off, no matter the pain he felt. What he’s faced with now is that important, that he’s choosing to wear it again on his own terms. Whereas before, he decided that he’d prefer to burn uncontrollably than to be defined by the thing and all it represented.

Granted, future games don’t really follow through on the stuff in 2001. But that’s nothing new. Likewise 2001 doesn’t follow up on all of the interesting implications of 2000‘s web of endings. But in it own right, taken as an independent thing, 2001 is just so heavy with significance.

Even the game system in 2001 follows this. It’s a brutal, simple logical conclusion to the disjointed scraps introduced in ’99 and refined without question in 2000. It’s not balanced well, but, what do I care? I’m not playing it competitively. I’m just appreciating it. The systems are violently elegant in their conception, which, considering, every other aspect of 2001, is so appropriate. The way it looks, the way it sounds, the way it plays — it’s all part of the narrative.

The crude, jagged-sounding, obsessively repetitious music — it’s overtly ugly, and that enhances the message. It sounds angry, dangerous, a bit deranged. It makes you uncomfortable to hear. Whereas ’99 is all chrome and gel lighting and blippy electronica, 2001 is corrosion and sparks. It’s like… we’ve come to this, now. Flesh is decaying. Metal is decaying. Minds are decaying.

And look at this; we now have a NESTS team, led by K9999. And Kyo and Iori are back for real now? And can you even tell the difference between them anymore? Everyone is falling. All is going wrong. With all of this happening, of course all of the character portraits are going to be grotesque. How could they not be?

But… I suppose most people don’t approach a versus fighting game the way that I approach Riven. If people who actually like Myst are so upset by Riven, I suppose I can see how SNK fans view 2001.