Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 2001

If 2000 marked the sharp decline of Capcom and SNK’s arcade days, 2001 practically marked the end of it, or at least the near-end because there’s more years to go.  SNK officially went bankrupt and was bought out by the South Korean company Eolith while Capcom put even more focus on console games, which worked out well considering they made Devil May Cry.

SNK’s dire financial situation meant they were only able to put out one game before they went bankrupt (presumably already long since in development) and then just one King of Fighters game in collaboration with Eolith, who had their own ideas and their own game developers on the scene, for better or worse.  Capcom’s new strategy meant they only put out two games as well.  I mean I guess it was that or be

It makes sense that arcade gaming would be on the decline.  I guess rising manpower requirement played a hand in it, but part of what made most of these arcade games so amazing when they came out was that they were on hardware much more powerful than what was available on home consoles and most ports of them were imperfect.  2001 was the year of the Xbox, Gamecube and PS2, and the Dreamcast was already on the scene.  All of them were not only capable of running both company’s latest and greatest games, but enhanced versions of them, which was a good thing for them to take advantage of, and I’m sure as hell happy with my PS2 copies of KOF 2000 & 2003, but it also showed that arcades no longer had quite the appeal they used to.

That doesn’t mean it was all over.  Through all the odds SNK was still able to make another yearly addition to The King of Fighters and Capcom made another game to throw down with SNK for cross-company grudge matches.  With two games from each company, both have an equal opportunity to win 2001!  Who will it be?!

Progrear(CAP): This is a different circle of bullet hell than Giga Wing.  Instead of being bombarded by what can be described as constant clouds of enemy lazer fire, there’s a duality approach to how Progear does things.

The player ship, of which there are two selectable components, have the usual spread shot bombardment while it navigates the screen full of instant death shots, but unlike other shooters, holding down the fire button doesn’t charge a shot, but instead concentrates fire in a straight line, allowing for focused, high-damage assaults that add a layer of forward thinking to the moment-to-moment gameplay.

The enemies have a similar dynamic, where their attacks come in waves of indiscriminate fire and clouds of targeted fire that keep the player from staying in one spot and only occasionally dodging like you see players do in a lot of other bullet hell games.

Compared to those other bullet hell games, Progear is on the easier side.  It’s still a really difficult game you’ll die a lot in, but like Giga Wing there’s a deflector shield in the form of bombs for a lifeline.  Attack patterns are also slow enough to map out what areas are safe without being blindsided and the player ships have surprisingly generous hitboxes.  I swear you have to be hit dead center to die.  Progear is a good game to start trying out the bullet hell genre with if the more notorious ones look a little too intimidating, but you’re still going to be using a lot of continues.

Sengoku 3(SNK): Naming this game Sengoku 3 is misleading.  It has nothing to do with the previous Sengoku games, has a different art style, different mechanics and even a different developer.  It’s so disconnected from Sengoku 1 & 2 that it’s the only one that seems to get attention from SNK; it was the only one of the three released on the Wii virtual console and is the only one on the Neogeo Mini.

As a beat-em-up, Sengoku 3 doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel and a lot of it is standard stuff, with a light attack, heavy attack, throwing weapons, throwing enemies and special move inputs.  Stages look pretty, but they’re mostly just window dressing while you beat up waves of baddies.  Like many of Capcom’s beat-em-ups, there are also several characters with their own moves and attack properties and since you can change them every time you continue, you can switch them up so the core combat doesn’t get stale as easily.

What sets Sengoku 3 apart from other games of its type is the super smooth animation and bright, detailed character sprites.  SNK once again shows off the Neogeo’s technical prowess with some character animations straight out of Mark of the Wolves that give slashing up enemies a satisfying sense of impact.  This would’ve been incredible in the early 90s, but after a decade of innovation in the genre there isn’t a lot to make it stand out and there are some problems that keep it from being up there with the best of them.

Enemy variety is low and some can take considerable punishment, which can lead to slow pacing, not helped by times where the game drags on and won’t stop throwing enemies at the player, particularly in the final level preceding a very annoying and frustrating final boss.  It takes about an hour to beat the game, but unlike Metal Slug 3, which has a similar play time, Sengoku 3 doesn’t switch things up consistently enough to justify it.

Compared to all the beat-em-ups I’ve played for this series, Sengoku 3 is above the likes of Knights of the Round, Warriors of Fate and Mutation Nation, but definitely below Captain Commando and Battle Circuit, putting it in the respectable “ok” rating range.

Capcom vs. SNK 2(CAP)

After SNK’s take on a crossover with the Neogeo Pocket Color’s SNK vs. Capcom, Capcom took 2 shots at their adversaries with the duology of Capcom vs. SNK.  The first one only had a good port on the Dreamcast and a bad one on the PS1, but Capcom vs. SNK 2 had some great ports to the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube.

 
In addition to a massive character selection of fighters from both companies, what makes Capcom vs. SNK 2 such an excellent game for both SNK and Capcom players to fight it out is the groove system and the way it effectively turns a player’s game style into a certain game’s from each company.  With Capcom’s grooves you can play it like Street Fighter 2, the Alpha games or Street Fighter 3 and on SNK’s side you can play it like KOF 94 & 95, KOF 97 & 98 or Samurai Shodown.  These grooves not only change the super meters, but they also add smaller abilities from their respective games, like dodge rolling, countering and the ability to block in the air.  The only thing not one-to-one for the SNK characters is that Capcom vs. SNK 2 uses Street Fighter’s 6 button style, but the additional punches and kicks the SNK characters got work well enough.

The groove system is an ingenious way to put the gameplay of these different games in one crossover, but it does have the inevitability of imbalance.  One of the most infamous groove-specific tricks is roll canceling, where characters can perform moves out of a KOF dodge roll without consequence.  Great for cheesing bosses, but not fair to use against other players.  Thankfully the “EO” console releases of the games fixed it.  The KOF 94 & 95 groove also brought back the ability to spam super attacks when the player’s health is low and there’s a reason the updated version of KOF 98 put an end to that.

Maybe it could’ve used some tweaking, but Capcom vs. SNK 2 really has it all.  It has fast-paced gameplay that’s something of a mix of turbo speed in Street Fighter and normal KOF speed so it satisfies both parties, new Capcom-style sprites for the SNK characters, special character intros, 3D backgrounds filled with cameos and a memorable, pumpin’ soundtrack.  I’ve yet to see a game with the kind of visual and audio dynamic seen in Capcom vs SNK 2.

It even has something of a story, where depending on how many points you get during the arcade run, you get to witness a rivalry between Rugal and Akuma as well as fight them.  If you beat one of them in their badass super forms you get a nice, flashy ending followed by an ending for every character you played as in the form of plain text describing what happens.  That might sound lame, but that’s more than Marvel vs. Capcom 2 had.

Capcom AND SNK players have their hardest bosses get stronger.

I’ve played this game for over a decade and it’s still one of the greatest fighting games of all time I always go back to and never ever get sick of.  This absolute masterpiece is the game of the year hands down.  I hope I’m right in believing that Capcom is getting ready to put out a re-release of the duology for modern systems,

The King of Fighters 2001(SNK)

Compared to the previous entries in this amazing series, KOF 2001 is rough and apparently had a rushed development because of everything happening with SNK’s new ownership.  A lot of what made the previous games stand out are pared back.

Backgrounds have washed-out colors and short, looping animations, as opposed to the memorable stages with lots of detail and depth from KOF 99 and 2000, the music is mostly synthesized techno beat crap and all the unique strikers from 2000 are gone.  2001 has a system where you can have more team members as strikers in exchange for a higher max super meter and more health, but it’s unbalanced because you objectively get more health from the end of a round when you have 1 or 2 characters be playable.  It was an interesting idea, but I don’t think it was thought through.

This is also the game where famed artist Shinkiro left SNK and in his place was Nona, whose weirdly proportioned artwork I never liked in KOF and some of it has even led to a few memes.  Ending artwork looks downright amateurish, even compared to the cutscenes used for the bosses in the same game.

The art feels rushed.  The GAME feels rushed.

The gameplay is at least as good as it should be.  It’s still better than the first 2 KOF games in that it’s playable, but there’s something about it that feels looser than usual and there are some who even treat it as a kusoge, finding infinites, abusing the multiple strikers and taking advantage of some weird hitboxes to do wack shit.

The hitboxes can get crazy sometimes.

I can’t even say the story is worth it.  It does conclude the NESTS saga, but even for someone like me who follows the plot, what exactly is going on in this game is vague and very poorly conveyed.  Future games don’t even follow up on the plot besides allusions and basic acknowledgements of NESTS downfall, but characters introduced here do get some character development later and are welcome additions to the KOF stable, so it at least has that.

KOF 2001 isn’t bad, but it is unpolished.  I think that even if a lot of what makes it different is to its detriment it’s still a unique experience still fun at its core, but I don’t blame anyone who decides to skip it.

The Winner

I think the winner is pretty obvious.  Progear and Sengoku 3 were both ok, so the deciding factor is which company’s fighting game was the better one.  I called Capcom vs. SNK 2 one of the greatest fighting games ever made and said KOF 2001 can be skipped, so that answers that.  Capcom wins.

After this, Capcom’s contributions to arcades went from at least two games a year to maybe one or two games every once in a while.  In fact, you can count on one hand the number of arcade games Capcom put out from here on out.  They were practically out of the arcade trade.  Rather than inflate SNK’s score by declaring them winner by default for multiple years, I have another idea to make the competition fair moving forward to give Capcom a chance to maintain their very slight lead.  See what it is in the next post.