When a new fighting game comes out, and especially a King of Fighters game, it’s inevitable that comparisons will be drawn to The King of Fighters 13. I used to give the title of “Best Fighting Game of All Time” to a tie between KOF 11 and 13, but after years of thinking I’ve tipped the scales onto 13’s side, even if it’s not as good without 11 and 2003 to establish its story. No fighting game since it came out has come close to its presentation, music, story and flowing, perfected gameplay. Not Guilty Gear Xrd, not Street Fighter 5 and not The King of Fighters 14.
The King of Fighters 15, however, comes close.
I would post the game’s opening here, but there isn’t one for some reason. The closest thing is a short animated music video from the guy who directed those crappy Fatal Fury anime specials in the 90s. It's pretty good.
In the previous King of Fighters tournament, hosted by Russian billionaire Antonov, things went pretty smoothly up until the very end, where Soul of Cinder showed up, wrecked the stadium made for the big finale and proceeded to explode and cause it to start raining souls across the earth. You might think that would cause a tremendous overpopulation problem and would require the Thanos finger snap, but it seems the only people brought back are ones that resonated with those whose gathered energy called him, that being the KOF participants. It’s speculation, but I think it only brought back characters of relevance.
As it turns out, that incident led to a surprisingly realistic fallout on top of the fantastical one. As depicted in Antonov’s ending, the public believes KOF was all one big setup, including the major public endangerment at the end, resulting in him being expelled from his own company. Strange, considering that’s roughly the third time that’s happened and nothing of such consequence happened before. In his place, the tournament is being sponsored by a woman named Anastasia, who is never seen or mentioned beyond that setup. She’s obviously being saved for a sequel.
The new problem is that now the fabric of reality is kind of shaky. There are gravitational anomalies all over the world and a supernatural power is ready to emerge at Ayers Rock, the place shown in Verse’s 14 ending.
The one with all the answers is Dolores.
Dolores is Kukri’s deceased guardian, who looked after him when he was young and knew about Verse and everything having to do with him. You can see the connection with how Dolores uses mud, not unlike Kukri using sand.
The key to Dolores’ plan to fix things lies in returning hero Shun’ei and his new rival, Isla.
Like Shun’ei, Isla has phantom hands to help her, albeit ones that seem to have a mind of their own, whom she calls Amanda. Also like Shun’ei, her abilities labeled her as an outcast, but unlike her male rival, a kindly old master didn’t take her in. Instead she grew up in an abusive orphanage and developed into a rebellious adult-hating youth and well-known graffiti artist. Seeing Shun’Ei in the last tournament, Isla is jealous that his similar powers didn’t make him an outcast and hates his guts. Dolores and Heidern, who of course also wants this problem solved, got her to come along with the promise of money, fighting Shun’Ei and answers to Amanda’s origins, forming team Rivals.
Shun’ei, meanwhile, enters with Meitenkun for much the same reason as last time, believing it will help him test and control his powers, since last time they went out of control. Tung isn’t joining them and Kyo is busy on his own team, so Benimaru steps up to keep an eye on them. The Ikari Warriors also join the fray with orders to keep an eye out for events like Shun’ei going berserk again.
That never happened in the last game. I think they’re lifting this plot point from the non-canon KOF: A New Beginning manga adaptation. Anyone going straight from 14 to 15 will have no idea what they’re talking about and it barely amounts to anything. If it was never mentioned, nothing in the plot would really change. Why do this retcon?
The team Kyo is busy with is the triumphant return of the Sacred Treasures team. The instability of reality is making the seal on Orochi shaky so the sacred treasures step up to ensure Orochi stays sealed.
It’s also concerning for them that the Orochi team is back. Chris, Yashiro and Shermie have been brought back to life and have taken an interest in the otherworldly power that seems to have brought them back to life, of which Shun’ei appears to be connected. Contrary to what the name implies, they do not have their elemental powers.
Along with them, Ash Crimson returns from his cessitation of
existence. While many interpreted
Kukri’s ending scenes differently in the previous game (even A New Beginning),
Kukri was actually looking for his old master among the scattered souls, but he
instead found Ash Crimson and contacted Elizabeth to give him back, after helping
her remember who Ash is. It seems that
Ash’s presence causes the previous timeline to reemerge and have people start
to remember him again, which makes sense, since in 13 there were hints that
people felt like there was a hole in their memory that needed filling. A New Beginning dedicated a scene to this
idea as well.
For once, Kula does not join K’’s team, as she has been “kidnapped.” By that I mean she was bribed with ice cream into playing along with the former NESTS agents Angel and Krohnen, bothering them incessantly as they plan to get back at K’. In response, K’ has his own team with Maxima and Whip in tow.
Krohnen is a good example of how when you want to have a character in your game, but can’t have that character in your game, you need only slap some sunglasses and a coat on them and never use their real name.
If it’s not obvious, Krohnen is actually a cross dressing Momoko.
My favorite team has got to be the new Team GAW: Galaxy Anton Wrestling. After losing his prestigious position, Antonov was left homeless, but was given an apartment thanks to the little boy he saved during Verse’s attack. To get back into the heat of things, Antonov has formed his own modest wrestling federation and got the two best wrestlers from the last tournament to join him, forming a team with himself
Ramon
and The King of Dinosaurs.
I love this. Antonov
as a character is a total chad, I like that his selflessness was rewarded and a
pro wrestling team in KOF has been a long time coming. Team
Team Fatal Fury is back again, but there are some other notable regulars that are absent. Kim is nowhere to be seen and Kensou isn’t around for Team Psycho Soldier. King also isn’t in the women’s team and is instead with the Art of Fighting team again. Poor Marco really wanted to have his chance this time.
Yes, I typed Marco. SNK seems to be officially retiring Marco Rodriguez’s English name of Kushnood Butt. It’s not a translation error either. Takuma almost refers to him as Kushnood, but corrects himself, at least in the English version. They know.
Without her usual teammates, Athena instead forms team Super Heroine with Mai and Yuri. It’s an interesting combination since Athena’s never had much of a prior relationship with them.
Along with Kim, there’s no Chang, Choi or Gang-Il. The only returning Korean is Luong. It turns out there’s more to her than it seems and is in some kind of deal with Hein. She needs something from KOF, Mary needs intel on Geese that Luong can provide and Vanessa needs to enter for her own client’s interest in Isla. The three agree to, at least cautiously, help each other out by forming team Secret Agents, not unlike the one in 11, but it’s all girls this time and this series could use a few more all-girls teams besides the women’s team.
KOF 15 is only surpassed by Mortal Kombat 11 in having the best character animation I’ve ever seen in a fighting game. Yes, even better than 13, even though the sprite work in that is more distinctly appealing. Samurai Shodown 2019 was the first to use the Unreal Engine 4 for its graphics and I thought it looked absolutely perfect. It captured the colorful 2D style of the classic games with smooth, fluid animation in both faces and body movement with some creative texture designs to give it a bit of the old-school drawn look, so applying that to KOF was a no-brainer. It’s a major step up from 14. Even if I liked how that game looked a little more than most people, it didn’t do much to stand out visually, but the colorful style of 15 absolutely does.
While the modeling and animations are top-shelf, some of the visual flairs are a little underwhelming. Impacts and damage have that effective “oomph” factor to them, but the knockdown moves felt like they had more impact in the previous game and 15 took away the close-ups for super special moves, opting instead to save those for the climax super attacks, one of which is no longer the stylish slash Iori had. Instead the buildup to a super special move is a brief red effect, not nearly as good as a closeup or mini-explosion or even the background colors reverting for brief anticipation. I guess you can’t win them all.
The battlegrounds are a mixed bag. I read that they had to be cut down to make the game run at 60 FPS and as a result there are less spectators in the background and some characters in them, like in team Orochi’s stage, only have a few frames for choppy, looping animation. To be honest, I find the choppy animation in those kind of like a charming throwback to the older game’s backgrounds and wouldn’t be surprised if that was partially intentional. It never comes anywhere near the ever-changing character-filled, detail-rich backgrounds of 13 though.
In KOF 14, every character got 3 special introductions with other characters. In 15, only a few get more than 2 and some only have 1. 14 was already a step down from 13 having an exchange for every character combination and now it’s cut down even more, making story mode substantially less interesting.
The story itself doesn’t go the extra mile either. Once again, there is no detailed story mode like KOF 13 had, which was understandable in 14, but would have helped here. 15’s story is instead much like in its predecessor: an introductory scene (albeit a much better, detailed one), a mid-game cutscene and then scenes to set up the final bosses, both of which are some of the better ones in the series.
Bonus endings for beating the game with specific character combinations are back with a vengeance as well. There are over twice as many as 14 had and with the added bonus of having some voice lines to accompany it. It’s a great evolution of the classic content.
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| The second one of these. |
Rush combos have gotten a drastic upgrade to make them more fun and viable to use. In 14 you mashed light punch for a simple combo finishing off with a super attack. In addition to not being very optimal most of the time, that kept requiring me to drop my rush combo before I got to the super attack just to save it for a better attack. Now in 15, the usual mashing light punch will finish it off with the strongest move you have enough meter to use, even your climax attack. If you don’t want to waste meter, 3 hits of light punch for a rush combo can be finished with one of the other 3 buttons for a different finisher, putting you much more in control.
The newest mechanic introduced is the shatter strike. Shatter strikes are similar to the focus attacks in Street Fighter 4, but since KOF players subsist on a diet of Moutain Dew and Aderall, it’s a lot faster. At the cost of one meter, a shatter strike gives a brief moment of stun immunity before striking the opponent. If the opponent is on the ground when a shatter strike hits them, it stuns them to leave them wide open for attack and if they’re hit in the air they bounce off the wall, also wide open for attack. It’s used for counter strikes more than anything because it doesn’t break guards, despite what the name might imply. It’s kind of like a close-range version of Maxima’s vapor cannon, really. It’s another fun additional tool for mixing things up in the heat of battle, but I don’t think it’s as big a game changer as people make it out to be. A whole super stock is too costly for me and I get by fine without using it, but every once in a while someone can bust one out to throw the opponent for a loop, so it has its place.
Beyond all these positive changes, everything in The King of Fighters 15 feels just right. It has just the right amount of hit stop, just the right timing for stringing attacks to be easy without being too easy and a game speed similar to 98 mixed with Mark of the Wolves, two of the best fighting games ever made. I can’t put it down. It is KOF at its finest. For the cherry on top, THEY BROUGHT BACK TAUNTING! It’s not KOF without taunting! It’s not a fighting game without taunting!
It would also not be a KOF game without an awesome soundtrack and 15 has a better hit-to-miss ratio than 14. I love music like the Art of Fighting theme’s dance-worthy jive, the GAW theme’s guitar riffing and I love even more that Antonov gets another theme exclusive to him.
The Art of Fighting team and Krohnen themes are some other standouts, with Krohnen’s almost sounding like a callback the NESTS team’s 2001 theme, but once again the show stealers are the new arrangements of classic songs you get when specific characters face each other.
Kyo and Iori have their KOF 99 themes and since there was already a remix of K’’s 99 theme in 14, SNK made one of his 2000 theme for this one and it’s just as great.
The soundtrack is adequate, but not enough of it stands out for me. 14 had fewer memorable tracks, but when they were good, they were really damn good and 15’s soundtrack is largely “fine” all across the board. If I had a choice, the game’s soundtrack would be a combination of music from KOF 11, 13, 14 and maybe a few standouts from 15.
And forced segue into…
In KOF 14 SNK went ham in dumping their artwork into one big gallery, with every artwork for every single KOF character not named K9999 up to that point and a few others thrown in. In KOF 15 they’ve gone ham in dumping all their KOF music up to that point into the game, with a few others thrown in, in the form of the Neogeo DJ Station.
With the Neogeo DJ Station you can make your own custom music selections for the stages with your choice of songs from across SNK’s history, including every main KOF game.
Since its announcement, I had only one question about it: “will it have the arranged music?” In a livestream it was stated that members of SNK’s sound team were still with the company, so there would be arranged music.
There is not.
Fine, that’s not 100% true. Only 90%. Since the soundtrack for 14 is included, all the arranged music of older tunes from it return and they’re just as jammin' as they were in that game. There is also an arranged track that is a medley for, of all things, an old SNK claw machine. It’s unexpected and I love it.
That’s pretty much it though. As disappointing as that is, the DJ Station is still pretty awesome. Even if they aren’t arranged, having the near-entirety of every soundtrack at your disposal, including the character select themes, is pretty wild and they’re still classic tunes.
It’s only music that loops though, so it excludes the ones for credits and cutscenes plus music from remakes like 2002 Unlimited Match, but even then the vocal themes from 14 and 15 are there. Its menu music being the same one from The Rhythm of Fighters gave me a pretty good nostalgia hit too.
I think these tracks are remastered so as to remove and compression the Neogeo might have caused because the Neogeo music doesn’t even sound that out of place when used in this HD-era game. Even if they did, the soundtracks for KOF 11-14 can match any game soundtrack in technical fidelity even today.
There is a weird spot on the list between 11 and 13 that’s a jumbled static and gives me headaches when I look at where the title should be though. Everyone I ask about it gets taken away by men in black suits, then come back a day later and see the static like I do so they can’t tell me anything. At least the music in it is alright.
There are also a few other soundtracks thrown in. A few from Fatal Fury, some Art of Fighting, classic pre-NeoGeo themes, the aforementioned claw game medleys, a few space shooter tracks, Samurai Shodown music and Metal Slug music is all there to add a bit of spice. That claim of “over 300 songs” wasn’t an inflated number, unless you count a few things like having several different versions of the Psycho Soldier or Geese songs, but I don’t.
They make you work for all those songs though and, frankly,
it can be a chore. The game starts you
off with the soundtracks for KOF 14 and, the worst fighting game ever made, KOF
94. KOF 15’s music is unlocked as you
hear them in story mode, but the rest of the soundtracks are unlocked by
beating story mode with specific combinations of characters, most of which are
also tied to special endings. There’s
marginally less guesswork involved in figuring out what the character
combinations are than in previous games.
The game gives you two of the three team members you need to unlock
their special artwork and/or a new soundtrack and the player is supposed to
discern the third one based on a common connection. Some of them are kind of obvious or tie into
previous games, like the
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| KOF 13 Ikari Warriors even moreso. |
Unlocking the endings and music is the main source of single player content for this game, which is its biggest weakness. Since the gameplay is so magnificent it’s not like I don’t have fun with it. In fact, the computer opponents in story mode are surprisingly good and know how to use their movesets for many diverse situations to the point that they can feel as challenging as a human opponent. Those looking for more to do than that won’t be finding it here, however. There are combo trials that are about as difficult as the ones in 14, but that’s it. There is no time trial or survival mode.
The multiplayer options take up a large part of the game’s main menu so that’s clearly what it wants to push, what with the touted rollback netcode and all, but I think KOF 14 did its online play better, if you can believe it. Game lobbies no longer have multiple rooms within them for players to shuffle around in and play against other players while others in the lobby play their own matches, which is a step back to me. Now it’s more like there’s only one of those and the room host can either have everyone line up to fight them or do a “winner stays” king of the hill series of matches while everyone else watches. I do like the fighting against the host type. I have fun fighting different people without having to worry about not playing again while using my custom soundtracks to spice things up, but I miss the elimination matches where each player got to keep fighting until they got a win and then give someone else a turn instead of one really good player predictably beating every single other one until everyone left.
Party versus mode returns, if you can find enough players, and newly added is draft versus, which introduces a special means of character selection. In draft versus, neither player can use a character the other one is using. The first player chooses one, then the second chooses two for going second, then they alternate choosing one for the rest. It’s meant to prevent competitors constantly choosing the same characters dictated by some tier list and diversify competition, which sounds good, but I’m always using whoever I feel like (sometimes with random select) and I’m not big on the competitive scene so it doesn’t do much for me except sometimes test the other player's adaptability (hope you didn't exclusively practice with only 3 characters). Similarly, there’s a system in place for ranked matches where you reach thresholds on your rank so you don’t need to worry about it going below a certain point, but I’m also not big on ranked matches.
The online play itself works most of the time, but matches
of slowdown and stutter are more common than I would like. It happens more frequently on specific stages
and on that note DO NOT
For all the people claiming a fighting game has to have
rollback netcode to be any good, I’d like to point out that in KOF 14 I have
played matches against players in
The online play works for me 70% of the time, but I think buyers should be aware it’s not perfect like a lot of critics seem to believe, at least not in my experience on PC. The PC version is also missing some features I would think are a given at this point, after the last two main installments. There are no player icons. It does not use your Steam player icon and there is no selection of in-game icons to use, making every single online player have the same default icon. Communication is also restricted in this one. You can only use the pre-set phrases in the chat, when 14 let you freely type out messages.
The online play still largely functions even with that in mind, and with more content to unlock than in 14, especially once the DLC starts rolling out, and its super smooth, gratifying gameplay at the base level, The King of Fighters 15 is very close to matching 13 as the best fighting game ever made. The kicker that makes this one just a notch below 13 is both its lack of a more cutscene-heavy story mode when it could really use one and its lacking translation.
Once again there’s no English dub, despite the heavy voice acting, but given how many English voice actors these days have been revealed to be Qanon conspiracy kooks, sex offenders, doxxers, abusers, NFT peddlers and/or coddlers of such people, I’m not too sad about that this time. Besides, the announcer gets a lot of English dialogue and all the vocal music is by English-speaking musicians, which is pretty neat.
My problem is with the dialogue translations. It has the Senran Kagura problem where what the subtitles say get the general idea of what’s being spoken, but it’s not actually what’s being said. Characters will mention other characters’ names in their spoken lines and the subtitles translate it without such and vice versa, the subtitles will have characters saying two words when they only say one (without the justification of added language context) and at times the translations seem to communicate a different tone from what’s actually being said, like Benimaru calling Elizabeth "Miss Blanctorche" in Japanese, but calling her by her first name in the translation.
I don’t know what happened. KOF 14’s translation only occasionally did that and it was overall a very solid, direct translation that only minimally changed up the dialogue when it needed to. That is how a translation with no dub should be. This probably seems like a petty tangent, but as someone who has a moderate understanding of the language, it irritates me to hear one thing and read another.
Besides that, it gets sloppy. There are occasional typos and grammatical mistakes and I think they corrected it with the first patch, but I found that if you beat Kyo with Chizuru, her win quote’s subtitle was one really long line of text that ran off the screen! How did that even make it past the beta?!
Translation gripes aren’t enough to deter how much fun the game is though and I can still confidently say that The King of Fighters 15 is the second best fighting game ever made, but that's coming from a longtime fan of the KOF series in particular. Unlike with 14, this one is worth the full price for me. The massive music selection for the player’s use alone is worth a good chunk of its asking price and the game itself is KOF at its peak, taking all the best parts of the franchise, including some of 14’s ideas, and refining them. Depending on what gets added, DLC and updates might nudge it into officially being the best fighting game of all time. Everyone who has played KOF 14 should absolutely play this. Everyone who hasn’t should play that one first, since 15 revolves around its plot and a lot of great characters are currently exclusive to it, making the storyline experience of 14 and 15 more complete, much like with 11 and 13. I give The King of Fighters 15 a 9 out of 10.
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