Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1994: Part 2

It's still 1994!  Let's goooooo!

Darkstalkers(CAP): I can’t knock Darkstalkers for its style.  It’s a big monster mash of classics like a sasquatch, vampire and zombie, all done in an expressive anime style with impressively animated character sprites.  That is where the praise ends.

Darkstalkers is Street Fighter, but worse.  There is too much hit stop for my liking that keeps the combat from flowing like a fighting game should and there’s a stiffness to executing special moves that never goes away.  The game seems to want players to do combos more than in Street Fighter, but even with the addition of dashing it’s hard to get into the perfect position to actually do them and super attacks are so impractical that they’re useless.  This is made even worse by the computer.

The computer in this game borderline cheats! If you try to do ANYTHING, the computer knows exactly what to do at that moment, even before you actually do it!  You can’t fake them out!  You can’t even manipulate them to leave themselves vulnerable! They will instantly guard while they’re walking forward, counter your projectile with a command move at point blank range and will hit you with practically every whiff you do the instant you do it!  The most consistent way to actually get hits on the computer is to mash jab because SOMETIMES they aren’t fast enough to beat you to the punch with a jab and isn’t near-exclusively spamming one button exactly what you play fighting games for?  The game was already unimpressive, but playing against the computer makes it outright unfun!  Did Capcom learn nothing from Super Turbo?!

Aggressors of Dark Kombat(SNK): This game has good ideas.  It’s a fighting game by way of a beat-em-up, where you can move freely around the stage with items and props to take advantage of, making it something of a precursor to Power Stone.  It has the standard stuff you’d expect from a fighting game, like backdashing, command inputs and a super meter that acts a bit like Samurai Shodown’s rage gauge, but since you can move up and down there is no high and low mix-ups, jumping is done with a button and controls are simplified to one punch, kick and grapple button. For fighting game veterans it takes a while to get used to.

It’s simplified and lacking in the finesse of other fighting games up to this point, but it could’ve been a fun experiment if the computer didn’t kill the enjoyment.  Even on the easiest difficulty the computers don’t actually get harder so much as they do cheat more and more until they’re moving faster than you and perfectly countering anything you throw out before you even do it!  Hell, they can beat you to the punch using THE SAME MOVE WITH THE SAME CHARACTER!  Not to mention times when they used super attacks without fulfilling the prerequisites required to use one!  Fuck this game.  It’s a curiosity at best.

The King of Fighters 94(SNK): Oh boy!  The King of Fighters!  The best fighting game franchise there is started right here!  People are going to play this game, laugh and have a good time!  It has to be great!  It’s The King of Fighters!

“Hello and welcome back to The Worst Fighting Game!”
-Matt McMuscles

Virtually everything about this game hurts me.  Everything.  I’m not even sure where to begin with how much of an abomination KOF 94 is, but I’ll start with the visuals.

KOF 94 is pretty ugly.  Not a lot of people comment on that, but the game has a dark grain to both the stages and the characters.  Without the color contrast, characters sometimes almost blend in with the backgrounds visually in addition to looking drab and unappealing, most notably the Mexico stage.  Animations are also stiff and jank as all hell, with very few frames of animation, making for the herkiest, jerkiest, most unwieldy and stiff fighting game yet (Street Fighter 1 doesn’t count).  Takuma doesn’t even have an idle animation!  When he stands still he's just an image!  Not even character portraits look right.  Most character’s faces just look off when compared to the official art and the darker shading style they were going for just makes some characters look like they’re caked in dirt or something, though I will say they look a bit better than in Fatal Fury 2.

The sound fares only a little better because some of the background music is decent, but the audio quality for the sound effects and voice acting is grainy and don’t give that satisfying punch that hit sounds in a fighting game should have.

So The King of Fighters 94 falters in the presentation department, but actually playing the game is where the real misery starts.  This is the stuff of nightmares.  The actual controls with 2 punches and 2 kicks is fairly standard for a lot of fighting games of the time, but when you get into how the game feels it’s a fucking disaster.

This game breaks the most conventional rules of making a good fighting game.  So much of the game is unbalanced that several things it gives you are obsolete, including some characters clearly being better than the rest of them, even to anyone who doesn’t play a lot of fighting games.  The disparity in damage between light attacks and heavy attacks is so big that light attacks are almost useless by comparison.  Special moves, in addition to being underwhelming, are incredibly inconvenient in practically every situation and you’re much better off keeping your super meter maxed for the damage boost it gives you.

Even if you find yourself in a situation where you want to use your super attack, actually inputting the motion for most super moves is next to impossible to do even when you practice!  Many inputs are absurd, often wanting you to do some combination of forward, backwards and awkward diagonal angles, like SNK was so proud of the Raging Storm motion that they just had to do it a few more times!  When you do manage to hit your opponent with a super attack, the amount of damage they can do might as well just end the round on the spot, which makes everything else almost obsolete if you're lucky enough to get one with a reasonable input.

“And this game has a LOT of wonky hitboxes.  It feels like if both players swing their attacks at the same time, it’s a rock paper scissors game to see who actually hit, with some clear hits just going straight through the opponent!  Or you’ll find yourself getting hit from attacks that didn’t even feel like they were close to you!  Like an opponent can hit you with a high anti-air attack while you’re doing a leg sweep and boy was I shocked to learn there are attacks in this game that are unsafe on hit!  You connect with the attack and they still get to punish you for it!”
-Thorgi’s Arcade

What a shitshow.

I've been playing some wonky-feeling fighting games for this series, but even for me it’s difficult to handle how broken the game is at its base level.  Any enjoyment I could potentially have gotten out of it anyway is killed by THE FUCKING COMPUTER!  The worst computer opponents I’ve ever seen in ANY of these games!  I set the difficulty to 1 and yet you’d swear it had the Super Turbo glitch because it doesn’t seem to make a difference!

“Do not jump at your opponent.  They will anti-air you.  Do not shoot a projectile.  They will jump over it.  If you stand too close to your opponent, they will do a 0 frame grab on you that stops almost any attack and does major damage.  Heck, I won’t lie.  If I played through this game and the final team I went up against had Benimaru on it, one of the quickest characters in the game, I would be tempted to just quit and start all over again because the moment I hit a button, he can just get his attack out first.”
-Thorgi’s Arcade(again)

The computer will ALWAYS beat you to the punch!  They don’t react or use any strategy or test your skill!  They just cheat!  Ralf and Clark can snatch you out of the air and Heidern is able to use an attack you have to hold back for a moment to use while walking forward, which of course he’ll use the very instant you try anything before you even start the animation of your fucking attack!  I’m also halfway certain many of the computer opponents cancel into moves that you can’t.  Even when you look up gameplay footage of the game, nobody is consistently winning by actually playing the game the way it’s supposedly meant to be played.

“I’ve seen people arguing that it’s not that bad and you just have to do a very specific sequence of combos to confuse the AI and then hit the opponent while they’re glitched out and jumping and then spam that set of moves until the match is over.  Bull.  Shit.  That’s not fun.  That’s not based on skill.  That’s just trying to out-cheat the cheating.  I shouldn’t have to bug out the AI and use the same repetitive 4-step solution to win every fight.  I can’t believe someone thinks that cheating the AI in order to win every single fight is A: good game design and B: fun instead of just repetitive.”
-Godzillamendoza

I know how to beat this game.

KOF 94 is an accomplishment.  SNK really did it.  They created the single worst fighting game in the history of the medium.  A game with practically no redeeming value whatsoever!  It’s a game that is antithetical to the very concept of fun from beginning to end!  The king of the crap!  They did it!

“Fuck this game!  Fuck it to hell!  Fuck it to the abomination of mankind!”
-The Angry Video Game Nerd

“Y’know, if a demon ever wanted to take revenge upon this world, you couldn’t ask for a better way than this because this isn’t a game!  It’s fucking punishment!  It’s the most accurate simulation of a burning eternity in hell ever made!”
-Thespoonyone

“KOF is the best fighting game franchise there is EXCEPT THE FIRST 2 GAMES!  Exceptthefirst2gamesexcepttheirst2gamesexceptthefirst2gamesexceptthefirst2games no no no no no NO!  NO!  NEVER AGAIN!  I DON'T WANNA PLAY SOME KOF!  NO!”
-Shonen Otaku

It’s nothing short of a miracle that there were any sequels after the backlash this game got.

No wait.  It was supposedly the third or second most popular arcade game at the time, got high reviews from critics and even won Electronic Gaming Monthly’s Best Fighting Game of 1994.

Armored Warriors(CAP): Another smashing beat-em-up in Capcom’s impressive library.  With 3 robot parts to equip you effectively have 3 weapons at once, each of which have different handling and command inputs for dealing with the armies of enemy robots.  With the 3 different parts you can change on the fly through taking them off of fallen enemies, the gameplay never gets stale and there’s even a story with quite a lot of dialogue, which each of the 4 playable characters have their own sets of.

The gameplay is just as excellent as this year’s Capcom licensed beat-em-ups, but the only thing keeping it from being better is the lack of actual cutscenes.  The story is told entirely by animated mugshots of characters talking without ever changing expression.  They’re nicely animated mugshots, but it’s a noticeable downgrade from the close-up, dynamic storytelling of the previous beat-em-ups.  That means instead of being really great, Armored Warriors is just great.

Samurai Shodown 2(SNK)

Take everything that made the first Samurai Shodown lame and upgrade it so there isn’t a hint of lameness left and you have Samurai Shodown 2.  With more movement options, more balanced characters and the addition of weapon-breaking super attacks, the combat is more in-depth than ever, plus the computer opponents are far more fair.

The toy transformations are a wonderful easter egg.

Backgrounds are gorgeous, all the music is atmospheric and fitting of their stages, characters are full of life and getting the big hits in has a visceral impact with blood and hit stop.  Once again the story is nicely told through well-drawn cutscenes and much longer, satisfying character endings.  Yeah the translation is crap, but you can still understand what the game is trying to convey and no amount of piss poor translated dialogue can hurt the visual storytelling.

Outside the translation, Samurai Shodown 2 is a masterpiece.  I would go as far as to say that until the 2019 game, it was the best Samurai Shodown game in the franchise and to this day it’s one of the best fighting games there is.  Everything about Samurai Shodown 2 is timeless.  It looks, plays and sounds as good now as it did when it came out and it is easily the 1994 game of the year.  The only thing that could possibly cause SNK to lose this year is if they made the worst fighting game ever made as well.

The Winner

Capcom didn’t make The King of Fighters 94.  They win.  Yeah SNK made Samurai Shodown 2, but they'd have to make a game that good 5 times this year to make up for KOF 94.  Maybe they'll get it right next year.