Another week, another SNK fighter hits the Xbox Live Marketplace. This time it’s an entry from what is perhaps the most well known SNK franchise, The King of Fighters. The series started off with King of Fighters ’94, which was a compilation of sorts of other SNK fighters including Fatal Fury (the same series that Mark of the Wolves is part of), Art of Fighting, and even characters from non-fighting games like Ikari Warriors. Among the most loved and well known of the series was The King of Fighters ’98.

King of Fighters ’98 Ultimate Match (KOF’98) is a port of the original of the same name, the very first ‘Dream Match’ game in the King of Fighters series that combined all the characters that had appeared in the series from ’94 through to ’97 into one huge roster. The Ultimate Match edition (first released on PlayStation 2) adds in even more content including extra characters, a challenge mode and some tweaks and balances.

For long time SNK fans, this game is going to be like some huge celebratory fighter to end all fighters, but if you are new to the genre, or even to SNK or the franchise, all this content is going to be pretty overwhelming. Just choosing your characters will seem a daunting task, since the roster is positively enormous with over 60 characters to pick from. Unlike the majority of fighting games, you don’t just choose one character, but rather a trio of them. Instead of ‘Rounds’ you will fight with one character until they are defeated, and they will be replaced with your next character. Any damage you sustain with a character will carry over to the next fight (you cannot ‘tag’ out to change characters mid-fight) until all three members of either team is defeated. 

The characters have already been organized into teams of three (Fatal Fury Team, Art of Fighting Team, Team Japan, Team Korea etc) but you don’t have to stick to any pre-set selection. You can mix and match individuals to your choosing. If selecting a character is like getting thrown into the deep end, then when you see the move list it might feel like you just had your life vest slashed, too. The move list for most characters is bigger than most 2D fighting games, and some of the Desperation Moves (the King of Fighters version of Super moves) can be quite difficult to pull off. As you would expect with a roster this big, it does mean that some characters will begin to play pretty similar to each other with a couple falling into similar roles and move sets. There is still enough to differentiate every character, but they aren’t all as quite as unique in play style as they might look from their appearance.

SNK has once again shown their flair for character design with a lot of really great and varied combatants making appearances. Due to the sheer numbers it does feel a lot more eclectic than a gmae with a smaller roster like Street Fighter or even SNK’s own Mark of the Wolves. To be fair to SNK, it is a compilation fighter so we should expect to see varied styles all coming together. The game is well balanced, or at least as balanced as a game with 60+ characters can be, and it’s rare to get stonewalled with anyone to the point where you won’t want to use them anymore. While bosses from previous games like Geese Howard, Mr Big and Wolfgang Krauser (as well as King of Fighters original Rugal) are all playable and pretty well balanced in multiplayer, two other unlockable, and quite frankly utterly broken characters are not able to be selected in online matches (you can use to play single player however, which makes some achievements much easier to swallow).

The graphics are what you would expect from a Neo-Geo game, and as such it has an old school look about it. I don’t think it’s the best looking example of what the hardware was capable of, but it does have a lot of charm about it with the usual nice art direction and well designed levels.

King of Fighters ’98 sports 3 different fighting systems available to the player, you can choose Advanced, Extra or Ultimate. Each one contains some significant differences that will affect your play style and the mechanics of the game. The main differences between the two modes are mobility and Super ‘Stock’ charging. In Advanced mode, you can run towards opponents and your Super Stock will charge via dishing out and taking damage. In Extra mode, you can only do a forward dash rather than run and your Super Stock has to be manually charged by holding down the corresponding buttons. Ultimate mode allows you to mix and match components of Advanced and Extra to form your own customized groove.

No matter what mode you choose the overall play mechanics will be the same, and like most things in this game, it might seem a bit alien if you are not used to SNK fighters. The game has four different types of jumps, a short hop (tap the jump direction), ‘hyper’ hop (tap the opposite direction, then tap the jump direction), a regular jump (tap the jump direction longer than a tap) and a Super Jump (tap the opposite direction, then press the jump direction). If you are furrowing your brow at this point, then don’t worry about it too much, it does take some getting used to, especially differentiating between a jump and hop, but you will probably get the hang of it, after some regular play. Even if not, you probably won’t really suffer for not being adept at it if you are just playing with friends and not taking the game to a serious competitive level anyway.

Another of the consistent play mechanics that you will want to know about is the use of Super Stock. Your Super Stock is the bar that builds through the fight that lets you use your super moves. When you start the fight, and all three of your team members are still in play you can store up three ‘stocks’ of super moves only, but for every character you lose to a KO, you get another stock that you can store. By the last fighter, you can have five Desperation Moves stored up. In addition to using the bar to just pull off a Desperation move, you can also hit the R button to go into ‘Max’ mode. Similar to Garou’s TOP system, for a small amount of time you will have stronger attacks and defense. If you do a Desperation Move during Max state, it becomes a Super Desperation Move which does even more damage and looks even more impressive. Alternatively it is also possible skip the Max state and do a Super Desperation move by using both punch/kick buttons to activate the Desperation move in a normal state, but this will cost you three stocks at once. Did you get all that? Like I said, this game can get deep.

Well we’ve seen that this game can get pretty complex the further you dig into it, so it might come as a bit of relief that the various game modes are mostly standard fare. You have the arcade mode, an option to play through arcade with just one character instead of teams, a mode called ‘Endless’ which is basically a one character survival mode,  and excellent practice mode where you can set your opponent to act accordingly to what you want to practice, and finally Challenge Mode. The standard difficulty for Arcade Mode is quite unforgiving for newcomers, prepare to get your ass kicked. A lot. Thankfully SNK have again implemented a system to help you out. When you lose a fight, you are given various options to make the next round easier. Challenge mode is perhaps the most interesting of the modes, as the name would suggest it offers a series of challenges to help you improve your game. These will teach you the finer points of combat like tech-rolls and counter attacks. It’s not terribly exciting, but it will be very handy if you want to get into the nitty gritty of the game.

Like the XBLA release of Garou, the game does suffer from some hit and miss net code. I’ve had days where I’ve had nothing but great matches and days where I couldn’t find a smooth match for ages. Custom matches and Creating matches are the way to go, and make friends with people who have good connections are all I can recommend.

King of Fighters ’98 is a game that I can’t recommend to everyone. It’s really a game where what you get out of it will depend on how much you put in. Depending on your outlook the game is either frighteningly overwhelming or deliciously content packed and deep. A staggering roster of characters, big move lists, tough difficulty, customisable and complex fighting systems can really be seen as something great that you can dive right into, or it might just seem like far too much to swallow.

Although it’s a very good game, it wouldn’t be my first recommendation for if you aren’t a big time fighter fan or haven’t played an SNK game before. On the other hand if you do enjoy fighters, or are looking for something you can really sink your teeth into, this is a wonderful example of the genre, and along with Garou is one of SNK’s finest hours that’s well worth picking up.

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