KOF Finales: 14

After defeating 8 teams in the tournament, yours is brought to the final challenge with the self-appointed champion, Antonov.  Antonov makes a grand entrance in a big fancy stadium, using pyrotechnics, smoke effects and a jumbo-tron as he rises out of the ground and the crowd goes wild.

It’s an entrance that brings to mind the flashy entrances for WWE wrestlers and I’ve seen people compare Antonov to Triple H.  I can’t confirm anything, but with Raiden being based on Big Van Vader, Gai being based on Kazushi Sakuraba and Ramon being inspired by Tiger Mask, it’s well within the realm of possibility a designer had Triple H or another pro wrestler in mind.

Antonov congratulates the your team on making it this far, but that you have to defeat him and he’s not going to hold back.

The fight takes place in the fabulous Antonov Super Arena, spectated by millions in the stands.  It gives the feeling that all eyes are on you and that this is the spectacular match everyone has waited for, truly fitting of a grand finale.  I think I’ve seen an arena like this before.

Antonov himself isn’t very hard by KOF standards, which is a disappointment.  He’s designed to be a viable playable character and thus doesn’t have the overpowered moves or AI patterns to predict like other bosses did.  His only advantage given is a larger health bar to make up for fighting alone.  Otherwise the challenge is his skillful AI.

However, as a character design, Antonov is great.  I love his visual design, his moves and his personality.

Antonov is clearly one of the richest people in the world, which is reflected in his design by his giant gold belt, gold watch and cigar chomping.  I’m against smoking and it should be hindering any sort of fighting ability, but cigar chomping can paint a picture of a character being wealthy, since cigars are expensive.  He tosses it out for his climax attack to show he means business, but he has a cigar holder in his belt so that doesn’t last.

Antonov has an intimidating physique to go with his wealth.  Ripped characters are all over KOF, but Antonov’s bulging muscles look like they could rip a tree out of the ground and smack you with it.

They also compliment his fighting style.  Antonov is a purely physical fighter.  His moveset is full of powerful punches and kicks.  For one of his supers he kicks into the air so hard the force kicks up chunks of the floor without scraping it.  His punching special attack he needs to wind up has a visible blur when he throws it out and it sends whoever’s hit by it flying.  That he hits like a truck is conveyed excellently.

Part of why Antonov’s attacks are made to look so powerful may be because he seems to have some level of showmanship.  In another pro wrestling parallel, some of the moves seem to have unnecessary movements just to show off.

And when he wins he holds out his arms as if he’s taking in the crowd’s cheers.

And there is indeed a lot of cheering.  Not just as background noise, but in Antonov’s music, one of my favorites in the game.  When fighting Antonov, a variation of the Antonov Super Arena music different from when you use it in other modes is used in which Antonov can be heard saying “I am the King of Fighters!” and the crowd chants “Antonov” to the rhythm a few times.

It’s a great guitar-squealing battle track in either version, but the version Antonov uses adds to his character.

He may not be a hard boss, but he’s a fun one.

Once you win, Antonov, impressed by your ability, prepares to hand you the championship belt, showing that he’s a graceful loser and sportsman.

But before you can say “then suddenly Cyber Akuma”….

The sky turns dark and Antonov is struck off the stage by a bolt of lightning.  No, this is not god smiting Antonov for his oversized mutton chops.  The entire stadium starts falling apart as panicked spectators flee for safety.

This of course is no ordinary storm.  After the stadium has been thoroughly trashed, a mass of souls in the sky converge at a single point over it.  They take a flaming human form with a voice saying it wants to destroy everything and violently discharges bursts of energy around the stadium as it tries to stabilize itself.

A little boy watching in horror is about to be hit by one, but Antonov throws himself in front of the blast to block it, meaning he’s not just sportsmanlike, but compassionate and heroic.

Antonov says he’s fine, but the boy is worried about his champion, to which Antonov claims that he’s not the champion anymore.  He was beaten fair and square.  The real champions are the ones that can defeat this monster that has appeared.  That would be the player.  The scene ends with Antonov falling unconscious to the screams of his assistant director and fan.

One might notice a distinct lack of any involvement of the player’s team in these events.  In previous games, specific teams usually had slightly altered dialogue for the final battles, particularly in the earlier games.  KOF 13 stopped that by having the player team’s dialogue be the same no matter what.  Now, since they can’t record a voice for every possible combination, the player’s team is completely offscreen and pretty much ignored until the last bit where Antonov points offscreen.

Thankfully there are a few exceptions to this.  If you play with the China, Japan, Official Invitation or Another Worlds team, a special version of this introductory cutscene plays in which characters talk about what’s going on.  I guess that’s a bit of a step up from 13.

Those special intros also show the monster taking its physical form in an impressive visual display and better hint as to just what in the hell it is, but not by much.  That’s all explained in the endings.  Here, it comes right out of nowhere.

Its name is Verse, a name Heidern gives it for the word it always seems to be saying.  Apparently it’s a big mass of lost souls from the timeline that got messed up due to Ash’s meddling at the end of KOF 13.  I’m not entirely sure how that works.  I guess he’s like a big space-time distortion personified…. With dead people.

Visually verse looks like he doesn’t belong in a KOF game.  I said the same about Jivatma in Maximum Impact 2, but it’s a different kind of not belonging.  Jivatma fittingly looked like an alien and Verse fittingly looks like a being from another world, like he came right out of Dark Souls.  And as we all know, KOF is the Dark Souls of fighting games.

Verse is decked out in plated armor with an empty torso containing a flame he lets burn out of his open chest.  His head looks like it’s supposed to be a vase that got cracked open with a glowing outcropping of crystals.  The flame is likely meant to be representative of the souls he has contained, so being a big empty shell to carry it in works from a thematic standpoint and the head is indicative of the power he contains exploding out of it.

While it all looks sound from a design standpoint I don’t think Verse has a very good look to him.  The armor lacks any kind of nice details and it the human-like mouth makes it look more like a monster from Power Rangers.  That isn’t helped by the way he fights.

I would expect a big mass of souls to fight like some kind of energy being like Pyron from Darkstalkers or even like Orochi in KOF 97.  Verse fights much like any other character.  His only unique attack style is in utilizing two extra flaming hands he has floating next to his shoulders.  I don’t know what they’re supposed to be.  If they’re supposed to be a couple of souls helping him there should have been some visual indicator.  Instead it looks like awkwardly placed hands the designers tacked on at the last minute because they had to have something else.

There’s potential in that idea.  If they had some kind of dexterous way of being used that only the computer could use effectively like Magaki’s moves in 11 they would be pretty neat, but no.  Verse can work just as well when a player controls him, although you could make an argument about his teleporting ability.

If they were used only for certain combination attacks while Verse folded his real arms most of the time he could have gone for the “no hands” style that would make unfolding them have more significant, but again that’s only an idea in my head.

The fists are utilized primarily as projectiles, for his super attack, climax attack and for an admittedly pretty cool special attack he uses by slowing walking while they rapidly punch for him.  There’s little else to his style.  Although he’s a challenge, it’s still rather repetitive to fight him because he uses the same 3 or 4 highly damaging sucker punch combos with little variation on them.  The practically undodgeable move where he traps you in a bubble is almost always the start of those sucker punches.

It's inescapable.

Even with that he can be beaten like any other enemy and traditional tactics do, for the most part, work.  As I said about Antonov, that kind of takes the fun out of it.  Finding and exploiting patterns to fight overpowered opposition was one of my favorite things about final bosses in the other games, even if it results in anticlimactic leg sweeping like in 13.  With this, there’s no need, and without a proper introduction Verse feels like just another enemy.

He does have a nice battle set-up, at least.  He’s fought in the destroyed stadium, which is an intimidating backdrop for a climactic battle.  Probably because that’s been proven already in a certain other game.

His battle music is also intimidating and compliments his look.  It further adds to his otherworldliness and the intensity of battle with ominous tribal chanting and light stinging guitar notes.  It reminds me very much of Orochi’s theme in KOF 97, which I think was going for a similar vibe.  In Maximillian Dood's words, "The soundtrack is so Akira it hurts.  I kind of love it."

All in all, Verse isn’t terrible as a final boss, but he ranks kind of low in my book.

With his defeat, Verse combusts.  The souls he contains shoot up into the air in a tremendous explosion of purple fire and explode into hundreds of pieces across the sky like fireworks.

The local news reporter, having caught the event on camera, reports that Antonov is ok and the monster has been defeated thanks to the efforts of the King of Fighters champions.

It’s not much of an ending.  The final boss comes and goes without much of any establishment, but I wasn’t kidding about the endings.  The traditional sequel hooks are all in them.

It’s established that when Verse exploded in the sky, all the lost souls of previous KOF characters scattered around the world and are starting to take physical form like he did.  I won’t spoil the characters that are hinted at, but SNK seems to have big plans for the sequel because now they can bring back whoever they want.  It is a big deal for the KOF story.

Geese also mentions that according to the Jin Scrolls, Verse wasn’t actually fully formed, meaning we’ll probably be seeing some kind of true form of Verse and possibly learn more about him..  Yes, they seriously brought up those scrolls from all the way back in Fatal Fury 3.  I wonder how many KOF players, even ones that have played every game, know about those.

With Geese’s little hint and the potential for an unexpected lineup of characters, I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.