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Review: The King of Fighters XII (PS3, Xbox 360)

Posted by Jesse Gregory
on August 3rd, 2009
Filed Under: Reviews

"2D is back in business!"

We are seeing a glorious return of the 2D Fighter genre lately. Games like “BlazBlue”, “Street Fighter IV” (the graphics may be 3D, but it’s the gameplay that counts), the upcoming “Tatsunoko vs. Capcom”, the digital release of “Marvel vs. Capcom 2″, and “The King of Fighters XII” are breathing new life into what seemed like a diminishing genre.

The King of Fighters XI (ps2) was relatively well received when it released in 2007. It had a variety of modes, both single-player and multiplayer, and had a very large character roster. But, just as Marvel vs. Capcom 2 ripped a large portion of its assets from previous fighters (like 1995′s Marvel Super-Heroes), KOFXI was able to pack in so many characters by taking their assets from a combination of previous entries in the series and other SNK games.

This leads me to my first point of discussion: The King of Fighters XII, though it is the latest entry in the series, has less than half the number of characters that XI has. Why this is surprising to anyone is beyond me. Every character had to be painstakingly redrawn in High Definition from scratch, since ripping sprites from previous entries was no longer an option. Yes, there are a lot of characters not present in KOFXII that I miss, but the characters that made the cut feel as solid as ever, and there are already talks to add more via DLC.

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