Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1996: Part 2

Continuing from the first half for this year, there are a couple games I was unable to play or couldn't include.  I was going to include SNK's Ironclad, but it was made for the Neogeo CD, a home console, and never got an arcade release.  To counterbalance that, because of health complications, I haven't been able to go to the arcades I need to, which is the only way for me to play almost all of Capcom's Marvel licensed games, meaning I can't include X-Men vs. Street Fighter.  If only the lawyers would let us have those games on home consoles again.

Yeah while I was getting this post ready, Capcom announced a new fighting collection with every Marvel fighting game and their Punisher game for good measure.  It's kind of cheating the premise that I'm playing each of these games by order of release, but once I get that collection, I'll edit my thoughts on each one into previous posts and try to get back into the mindset of their respective year when playing them.  I doubt any of them are going to change any of the winners of the year.

For now, we're in 1996 and SNK brought back their crossover fighting game idea in a big way.

The King of Fighters 96(SNK)

This game is very important to me.  For me, this is THE game.  The game that started it all.  The game that got me into fighting games as a genre after the first 2 KOF games almost drove me away from them with their shittiness.  KOF 96 changed everything.  It was with this game I learned the motion inputs, learned the subtleties of fighting game fundamentals and it was the first fighting game I ever played through to the end.  For the first time SNK made a truly good King of Fighters game.
 
Even though the stories were apparently untranslated at the time for god knows what reason (though the Orochi Saga manual gives a little bit of context), I was enamored by how much of it there was.  All the characters had such life, all the stages had such detail and all the music was so multi-layered and masterful.  At the end of the game there were dynamic cutscenes with an exciting story and special dialogue depending on your team.  I was an ignorant teenager who didn’t know the history of fighting games, but it showed me a whole other side of them that nobody showed me before because they were too busy fighting each other with the same few characters.  There was story!  Real story!

Translation still needs some work.

The gameplay saw a huge overhaul in the graphics and gameplay to make it smoother and more exciting, introducing the different jumps, dodge rolling and running, giving it maneuverability that further separated it from other fighting games.  The way this game plays would come to define the franchise’s overall gameplay moving forward because it works so damn well.

 
This is the perfect KOF game to play first, in part because it’s not a train wreck like the first 2, but also because it’s not too difficult.  Admittedly, that’s because it’s unbalanced and the jank of previous games was only 80% removed.
 
There are several moves in the game that are outright busted.  Robert’s long-lasting low-cooldown Ryujinken, Mature’s instant blowback attack and Andy’s new long-range heavy damage Hishouken are some standout examples.  The boss team of previous SNK villains is also the best team in the game, which would be fine if they were still bosses, but they’re part of the default roster.
 
Now that super moves have reasonable inputs, they can be spammed infinitely once your health is low.  Making things even easier is that instead of being cheating assholes that ruin the game, the computer opponents tend to be really stupid.  Depending on the difficulty they’ll sometimes just stand there like an idiot to let you get a hit in or they can get so defensive that you can spam the same attack over and over again in quick succession and they will just block it indefinitely.  I have run out the clock so many times just spamming them into submission even when there was 30 seconds left, if the chip damage didn’t get to them first.  If you watch Shoryugames’ video on the top 10 dumbest AI in KOF, KOF 96 takes 2 spots and another Youtube user found an AI exploit that can make the final boss go from one of the hardest in the series to one of the easiest.
 
I was almost ready to call Street Fighter Alpha 2 the game of the year, but even though that game is better from a balance and gameplay standpoint, KOF 96 beats it in every other way.
 
Sure the backgrounds in Street Fighter Alpha 2 look great, but the backgrounds in KOF 96 look phenomenal with even more depth and more crowd shots to really sell the tournament’s new worldwide popularity in the plot.

Yeah the music in Alpha 2 is some of my favorites in the franchise, but KOF 96 has one of the very best fighting game soundtracks of all time.

Naturally the character portraits in Street Fighter 2 look very nice, but they use the same art for the character select screen.  KOF 96 has bigger, hand-drawn portraits of each character’s win pose separate from the character select screen artwork.

 
Indeed the character conversations to detail relationships and expand the Street Fighter story are nice, but KOF 96 has extensive cutscenes with detailed artwork and framing in conjunction with a plot that ties it to the previous game, sets up an epic climax with one of my favorite final bosses ever and leads into the next game’s plot.
 
Even if I’ve become more beholden to its flaws over the years, I still love the hell out of KOF 96.  It is the turning point for the greatest fighting game franchise there is and I got hyped for the next game both when I played it for the first time and when I played it for this series.  It’s the game of the year hands down.
 
Megaman 2: The Power Fighters(CAP): The sequel to the wonderful little Megaman game from last year follows the tried and true sequel formula of doing the same thing, but with more.  Once again there are 3 different scenarios with 6 robot masters each and one unique sub-boss before a fight with a new Wily Mech.  There’s a new character, Duo, ahead of his proper introduction in Megaman 8, and every playable character except Duo has their own unique support mech power-up to differentiate themselves (Duo copies Proto Man’s).

The presentation is largely the same and reuses many sprites from the first one, but the few robot masters returning from the original game have some new moves and new animations to go with them.  Everything still looks really nice and there are some flourishes like a unique animation for being hit by a weakness that add just a little extra polish to what was already good enough.  Every character has voice acting too and thankfully all in Japanese instead of whatever the fuck Megaman 8 would later get in English.

It’s a simple formula: great game + new stuff = greater game.

Kizuna Encounter(SNK): In concept this is a sequel to Savage Reign, but in practice it feels more like a spin-off or a whole new game that reuses its assets.  Despite having most of the same characters, Kizuna Encounter has very little in common with its predecessor.  There’s no more dual lane system or stage hazards nor are there character-specific stages.  It plays much faster, combos are easier to do, the computer doesn’t cheat as much and now the game is a 2-on-2 tag team match, which to my knowledge wasn’t a common feature in 1996.

Kizuna Encounter is more fun to play, but it sacrificed a lot of the smaller things I enjoyed in Savage Reign.  There’s no longer character-specific intro dialogue, there are fewer stages, none of which are as fun as the previous games’, there’s less emphasis on the weapons (they’re more like another punch now) and there’s even less story.  All this makes Kizuna Encounter stand out even less than Savage Reign even though it’s objectively better.  It’s still a fun, fast-paced fighter well worth a play if you come across it, but it’s largely just… There.
 
Samurai Shodown 4(SNK): After the disappointment of Samurai Shodown 3, this game comes in to bring the series back to a level of quality approaching the second game.  Now there’s more story, with each character getting their own rival fight (not unlike Street Fighter Alpha 2), and there’s a fun little twist regarding the main final boss at the end that I won’t spoil.

Samurai Shodown 4 goes for faster-paced gameplay.  There are now two health bars, heavy slashes no longer take off half your life and there are chain combo slashes you can do if you manage to land the opening hit.  You think that’d be antithetical to the slower-paced series that is Samurai Shodown, but it doesn’t lose the “oomph” factor in landing a good hit, thanks to the blood and hit stop, and the more aggressive options it now has are situational so trying to play it like a KOF or Street Fighter still don’t usually work.

New innovations like the fatal flash, finishing moves and taunting the opponent by throwing your weapon to the ground are also welcome additions.  Samurai Shodown 4 innovates and leads into the plot of Samurai Shodown 2 very nicely.  It deserves more attention.

The translation still blows.

Twinkle Star Sprites(SNK): This is SNK’s equivalent to Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo.  2 players in a bright and cutesy setting go head to head in separate lanes and using only 2 buttons destroy colorful obstacles in order to attack the opponent and muck up their side of the screen until the pressure overtakes them and they lose.  In Twinkle Star Sprites’ case, it’s a shoot-em-up.
 
Take the fast-paced nonstop dodging and shooting action of a shoot-em-up, add a layer of strategy and several characters with their own weapons and you have Twinkle Star Sprites’ gameplay.  Just like Super Puzzle Fighter, it’s so simple and yet so elegant.

The shooting aspect alone is already solid, with the onslaught of enemies bursting and exploding into glitter and stars, but with the competitive aspect a new dimension is added because you have to be aware of what angle your opponent’s special moves come from and when their basic attacks are coming on top of the usual challenges of knowing when to take a moment to charge your shot and when a situation is enough of an emergency to use your limited supply of screen-clearing bombs.

What really impresses me is how heavy in content Twinkle Star Sprites is when it could’ve just had its unique premise and stopped there.  The variety in characters and stages alone offers hours of fun, but there’s also a full-blown story mode with numerous cutscenes, complete with dialogue and expressive artwork to tell a charming story of main character Ran saving the world with the power of the Twinkle Stars.  There’s another mode where you can play through the framework of the main story with the other characters, but with no cutscenes.  It's still more than the short animated skits Super Puzzle Fighter 2 had.

While it doesn’t have the legacy Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo does, Twinkle Star Sprites is still a fairly big name for arcade gamers, often cited as one of people’s favorite Neogeo games and it even has a competitive scene.  It’s deserving of its reputation and is a must-play.

The Winner

Not to put Capcom down, because everything they put out was aces, but SNK’s own aces outclassed theirs.  KOF 96 was the game of the year, Twinkle Star Sprites matched Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo in the unconventional head-to-head game category and of course both Metal Slug and Neo Turf Masters are the masters of their respective genres.  SNK had all bases covered and earn their victoly for 1996.