Just over two years ago, The King of Fighters XII released with a great fighting system, a hopelessly broken online experience, and an almost complete lack of single player modes. Today, the latest entry in the series releases with the intent to right the missteps of its predecessor.

The expanded roster of The King of Fighters XIII doesn’t have much new for the series, but it brings back a lot of the fighters missing from XII including Team Women Fighters members Mai, King, and my personal favorite, Yuri. With over 30 fighters available, the amount of choices are once again approaching the levels of its decade-old asset ripping, last generation entries.

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Have you been scared off by the complex nature of the fighting game genre, but intrigued by its resurgence in recent years? Atlus is planning on replacing that fear with knowledge by dishing out a new series of tutorial videos leading up to the release of The King of Fighters XIII.

This first video featuring Dream Cancel community member, Metaphysics, starts with the basics. And I mean the very basics. While the first half is more of an introductory course on fighting games in general, things get a little more interesting when character archetypes and play styles enter the discussion. (more…)

"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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