Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 2009 & 2010

2009 was the beginning of Capcom’s golden age.  It was when the far superior console version of Street Fighter 4 came out and got more fans into the franchise, since digital distribution of classic games wasn’t quite as available as it is now.  This gave rise to the “09ers”.  The newbies.  Capcom was hitting big.
 
It wasn’t just Street Fighter 4 either.  Capcom was also making tons of master works around this time, such as Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, Devil May Cry 4 and Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes, the game with the distinction of having the single greatest English dub in the history of the gaming medium and one of the cornerstones of action gaming.  Capcom was the best company in gaming at this point in time.

However, that was all on consoles.  Another arcade version of Street Fighter 4 wouldn’t come until later on, giving SNK their chance to swoop in with their flagship franchise and claim themselves as the rulers of the arcades.  Once again Capcom has to play catchup and try to beat everything SNK comes out with with just one game.  Let’s see if they do that.

The King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match(SNK): This is another “last hurrah” game.  It’s the last KOF game to use the old sprite style and similar to KOF 98, it seeks to truly bring everyone from its story arc in addition to everyone in the original KOF 2002, including console-exclusive characters, but excluding K9999.  Add in the alternate movesets some characters previously had, like Kensou without his powers, and you have the biggest character roster for any KOF game ever.

Zamn!

What’s more, unlike a Super Smash Brothers game, where there are a fair number of moveset clones, or Mortal Kombat Armageddon, where no one felt distinct, every single one of these characters in KOF 2002UM has a wide set of moves of all kinds, including the new level 2 and Max level super attacks.  It’s staggering how much there is in this game.  There are so many new moves and modifications to old ones that some characters can feel different from previous games, but they always have the core experience of playing each of them so it’s not hard to adjust at all.

With all that said, The King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match is one of the most newcomer-unfriendly games I have ever played.  There are so many characters with so many moves and so many different commands and conditional situations to consider (wall bouncing) that it can be overwhelming if you aren’t familiar with the franchise.  If a newcomer wants to try out a King of Fighters game before getting into the story stuff, they should play KOF 98: Ultimate Match, where there are only a few super moves with 2 levels each, more manageable movesets and a smaller, but still massive character count.

Since in the original KOF 2002 there were so many cameos of characters that didn’t make the cut who are now present, SNK had to remake pretty much everything but the character sprites.  Every background is brand new, much higher resolution and is now jam-packed with tons of SNK cameos from Art of Fighting to Savage Reign to Neo Poke-Kun.  I have never seen as many cameos in an SNK game as I have in The King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match and that is saying a lot.

Every character got brand new character select and victory portraits with a new artist and they all look great, but also noticeably pixilated and lower-res than the artwork they’re taken from.  It’s strange because KOF 11, a game made 5 years prior, had high-quality scans of its character artwork.  What happened?

KOF 2002UM is probably the very best KOF game for multiplayer play and for some people it’s even the best KOF game ever.  It provides countless hours of fun and it’s definitely one of the best fighting games ever, but there are a few things that hold it back for me.  It’s another game where you don’t get an ending unless you fight a true final boss and the conditions of getting to the boss are so impossible and vague that I’ve only ever fought him once.  Players only get one chance to fight this final boss and unlike SVC Chaos throwing a bone by making it easier, the true final boss of this game is damn near impossible so no matter what players will get slapped with a lame credits sequence, which has nothing fun to look at, unlike either version of 98 or the original 2002.

I also find the music to be a little overbearing.  The music tracks on their own are good, but there’s so much heavy guitar and all the instrumentation goes hard at all times, like anytime someone had a fun song the music director kept telling them to make it rock harder.  In previous games there were songs that were whimsical, chill, jazzy or a mix.  In 2002UM all the music is grandiose, swelling and of course most are big on the electric guitar and sometimes what sounds like a keytar.  I like my KOF games to have more musical variety.

My annoyances don’t contradict my previous statement that it’s probably the very best KOF game for multiplayer.  It may not be the best at everything, but in that particular category it just might be.

The King of Fighters 12(SNK): SNK finally advanced KOF’s look with this one.  They stopped re-using character sprites and made bigger, better, more detailed ones for the new HD generation and the results are amazing.  It looks spectacular.  Smooth animations, sharp and lively backgrounds and neat visual effects for fire, smoke and energy blasts.  It looks even better than Street Fighter 4.  I get some people don’t like the way SNK’s oldest characters got new looks closer to how their appearances way back in their debut, but I think it’s a fun idea to bring back the old designs as a way to call back to SNK’s history.

The only praise I have is now out of the way.  Fuck this game.

KOF 12 has the lowest character count in any mainline KOF game.  The first game in the franchise has more characters than it does!  15 years later and THIS is all it can offer!  There aren’t even proper teams!  There are a few characters traditionally on the same team, but most of it is more like random characters with no actual teams for them.  Fuck this game.

Where's K'?

Gorgeous they may be, there are also only 6 stages.  Again, that is less than the first game in the franchise 15 years ago.  Knowing that, you might be asking how they made a proper arcade mode with only 6 stages when KOF games after 96 traditionally have you fight about 6 or 7 different teams before the boss.  The answer is they didn’t.

Arcade mode is a time trial mode.  The main mode is what any other game would have as a SIDE mode.  You fight across the stages to try to get the fastest time.  There is no story, no boss and no unique endings.  You see everything the game has to offer in less than an hour.  Fuck this game.

At the very least you would think the combat delivers, but no.  I hate this game’s combat.  It’s not unplayable, but it feels simplified and dumbed down, closer to the first 2 games; y’know, the ones that suck and one of which is the single worst fighting game ever made.  I hate the way the camera zooms in and out on the combatants like it’s an Art of Fighting game because spatial awareness in a game franchise with different kinds of jumps and space-controlling attacks is really important.  I guess there aren’t as many of those attacks to worry about though because most characters in the game only have one super attack in a franchise where having at least 2 has been the norm since 1997!  This is right after all the different super attacks everyone in KOF 2002UM had!  There is also no guard canceling or super canceling and for god knows what reason grabbing suddenly requires 2 buttons because if it ain’t broke, try to fix it!  Fuck this game!

I hate the critical counter system unique to this game too.  It feels like something that belongs in a slower-paced game and the fact that it’s triggered with a basic heavy punch means there’s not a lot of control on when to use it.  The idea of a move that leaves your opponent wide open for a combo when you catch them with their guard down is a good one, which is why Street Fighter 6 did it with Drive Impact and KOF 15 did it with Shatter Strike over a decade down the line.  They work well in those games because there’s a deliberate command for them so they aren’t thrown out on accident and they use up a meter resource so they can be used anytime to mix up the combat instead of in KOF 12, where you have a limited amount of time to use it with a simple punch button after a dedicated gauge is filled.  Maybe critical counters were the start of the idea for those better systems, but in this game it’s underbaked.

There's also clashes, which prevent cross-hits.  It's something.

Compounding the underwhelming combat, pathetic character count and lack of super moves in a short time trial mode, the computer opponents suck ass.  Like with KOF 94, the youtube user Thorgi’s Arcade sums it up well:

 
“This game has some of the worst AI in the franchise!  Not because it’s incredibly difficult.  No no no.  The computer isn’t hard.  It’s just annoying.  The computer is constantly jumping and rolling around.  It’s like it’s hopped up on sugar!  Even when I’m not doing anything the AI is still freaking out and eventually I realized ‘oh.  It’s bouncing around like a wild man not because it’s trying to beat me, but because it’s trying to run down the clock and give me a worse score.’  Everything the computer does is designed to stall.”

So you don’t even get to properly fight computer opponents.  Fuck this game.

To be fair, Street Fighter 4 also had a rough start in arcades with even fewer characters than KOF 12 and lame endings.  It didn’t have the weak combat, awful AI or a side activity used as the main game, but it didn’t have a lot of characters either.  Street Fighter 4 came into its own with its tremendously improved console port, so KOF 12 had the chance to do the same with its home version.

KOF 12’s console version added 2 characters, so it still has less than the first game, and it added an English dub from the single worst localization company in gaming at the time.  It’s a tragedy Ignition Entertainment didn’t go out of business fast enough to save KOF 12 from their abysmal English dub.  In a time after Persona 3, Odin Sphere and Street Fighter 4, someone still thought the English dub of this game was ok.  Fuck this game.

In the Japanese version Raiden is voiced by Daisuke Gouri right before he died.

The King of Fighters 12 is the biggest disgrace in the history of either company.  KOF 94 is the worst fighting game ever made, but how bad KOF 12 is is worse because of how much higher the bar is set after 15 years.  To this day, anyone playing games at the time still remembers the sting of SNK coming out with some alpha build and trying to sell it at full price.  Why would anyone be playing this crap when The King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match did everything better in the same year?  Every time I see a trailer for an SNK game that points out the new features, I see it as them desperately trying to assure everyone “It’s not KOF 12!  It’s not KOF 12!  Please don’t leave!  It’s not KOF 12!”  How anyone thought KOF 12 was ok to release is one of the biggest mysteries of the universe.  Not even a completely insane madman who engages in coprophagia would think this game was ok to put out!  Let us never forget that SNK let this happen!

EPIC FAIL!

Moving on to 2010, my expectations are low.

The King of Fighters 13 (SNK)

How?  HOW?! How how how?  There is pulling a 180 and then there’s this.  This game had to have been created by a team from a mirror dimension or Bizarro World, where everyone knows what they’re doing and nobody looks at a crappy alpha build and says it’s ok.  That’s the only way I can think of how in one singular year SNK was able to go from making the worst fighting game of the millennium to THE GREATEST FIGHTING GAME EVER MADE!

It’s perfect.  Every single thing about The King of Fighters 13 is perfect.  The story is perfect, building upon the previously established plot points from the last 2 canon games for an explosive and emotionally satisfying finale.  Best of all, it takes the best part of SVC Chaos by having every single combination of characters (including the bosses) have a unique pre-fight conversation, giving the game even more story content!

The graphics are perfect.  There are 31 characters, each lovingly detailed with the best spritework ever crafted on top of a variety of gorgeous and lively stages with SNK cameos to spot.  Stages not only look good, but there’s even lighting and shadow effects used on the sprites, something I don’t think even Blazblue does.  The story cutscenes are fully animated, but in such a way that it still resembles the still image cutscenes of the previous games only now in sharp HD glory.

The music is perfect.  This might have the very best soundtrack in any fighting game ever.  It’s loud, triumphant, blood-pumping and varied, with saxophones, piano, guitar and combinations of all 3 for the different moods of different teams.  All the music is perfect for fighting to and ingrains each battle into my memory.

Finally, the combat is perfect.  It has the perfect amount of feedback and control.  Not too tight, but not too lose.  You can feel the flow of the combat, where every hit feels like it hits hard and yet it’s still fast and exciting.  EX attacks and overdrive mode add a big new dimension to what every character can do and now everyone has a crazy powerful, screen-filling Neo Max move that adds an even bigger explosive light show, but without needing a long animation for any of them.  Landing the finishing blow to the sound of god’s shotgun firing in an echo chamber after a brilliant trading of high-powered blows is the most satisfying thing one can experience in a fighting game and that is how KOF 13 does things on a regular basis!

I can’t even criticize the requirement to get a certain score for the true final boss like with some of SNK’s other games because the score requirement isn’t that hard to reach if you know what you’re doing and in the console version you can just set the time to 99 to boost the score so it’s a non-issue.

There is no zooming in and out with the camera, everyone has more than one super move, there’s no critical countering, no English dub, which means no godawful acting, and time trial mode is a side activity in the console version of the game and not the main mode.  I should not have to point any of that out because it’s a given in a KOF game, but the disaster that was the previous game necessitates it.  Fuck that game.

The King of Fighters 13 is a game without flaw.  They did it.  SNK made a flawless fighting game.  That they made this in one year after the irredeemable pig vomit that was The King of Fighters 12 makes my head feel like it’s going to explode!  This game doesn’t just get game of the year!  It gets game of the decade!

Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition(CAP)

The swell in content from the original arcade version of Street Fighter 4 to Super Street Fighter 4’s arcade edition is madness.  Compared to the first version of Street Fighter 4, it practically quadrupled the content!  Not only has the character roster more than doubled, but every single one of those characters now has 2 ultra attacks for players to choose from!

The story is even better presented for this one.  Just like the first Street Fighter 4 there’s an animated prequel movie introducing one of the brand new characters and every single character has an introductory cutscene and ending, with all of them now being epilogues to the original Street Fighter 4 story on consoles, similar to Street Fighter 3: Third Strike.  If that wasn’t enough, every character also got a rival fight like in previous games, with well-animated in-engine cutscenes, or at least almost everyone did.  The 4 characters added to the arcade edition of the game do get rival battles, but Capcom must’ve gotten lazy because there no cutscenes for them.

Adding to the presentation is a voice cast of the biggest, most talented voice actors in the business, many of whom would go on to immortalize Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes as having the greatest English dub ever made.  Peter Beckman, Laura Bailey, Travis Willingham, Christopher Corey Smith and Kyle Hebert make their characters come alive with their energy.  They even replaced the announcer with Jamieson Price!  You can never go wrong with Jamieson Price!

The gameplay is largely the same from the original Street Fighter 4, which didn’t need any drastic changes, but the various balance adjustments made over time make the game feel a little cleaner, for lack of a better term.  Street Fighter 4’s original arcade version had its combat down and just needed more content, which Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition provides to an astronomical degree, making for one of the finest, most polished fighting games of all time.  That’s stiff competition for The King of Fighters 13.

The Winner

You would think that with The King of Fighters 13 being the greatest fighting game ever made SNK would have a slam dunk win, but they just had to also make KOF 12.  If KOF 12 didn’t exist, SNK would win with practically no contest, but KOF 12 was so bad, such a disaster and so much of a permanent scar on SNK’s reputation that all KOF 13 does is undo the damage it did instead of carry SNK to victory.

That leaves The King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match and Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition as the deciding games.  Even though KOF 2002: Unlimited Match has more characters and arguably better gameplay, I much prefer Super Street Fighter 4 on the whole.  The visual style is more striking, the characters have more expression, there’s a lot of story to be had, the music doesn’t ever bother me, the character count is still very impressive and now that all the characters have 2 ultra attacks there’s even more replay value.  KOF 2002UM is great as a multiplayer game, but Super Street Fighter 4 does it all and it brings home victory for Capcom.

Maybe next time SNK will have the common sense to say “No.  This game is absolutely unacceptable.  Do not release it.”

With Capcom’s victory, the score is tied.  It’s crazy we’ve gotten this far in and both companies have had so many good and bad games that they’ve been neck and neck through the ages.  There are 2 more rounds to go and in the next one, the best games of the era from both companies will be judged.  In the final round, either the winner will clench the ultimate win or the loser will make it a tie.

Even if one of the companies were in an unwinnable situation I would still continue to the end just for the fun of it, of course.