Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 2017-2019 (Final Round)

This was the period where both company’s arcade releases truly came to a near-close.  That this round starts in 2017 says it all.  Since 2011, neither company made a single game for arcades that wasn’t an updated version of a previous one.  As I stated last time, there were ports, mobile games and console games, but the previous round set a precedent for both companies moving forward: now the console versions of their fighting games would come first.

It’s a damn good thing Capcom followed that precedent in particular because holy shit.  The release of Street Fighter 5 can be debated for being worse than The King of Fighters 12.  Compmared to the low bar that is KOF 12, Street Fighter 5 had fewer characters, fewer features and fewer modes to play, all at the price of a full retail game.  Street Fighter 5 became the target of such mockery and ridicule that people almost forgot about KOF 12.  Almost.

As if to rub it in Street Fighter 5’s face, SNK brought out a new King of Fighters game with a massive 50 characters and a fully featured arcade mode with substantial story content.  I heard stories about Street Fighter players jumping ship to KOF 14 because of how much of a rip-off Street Fighter 5 was.  There’s footage of a pro Street Fighter player telling Capcom representatives to their faces that he was going to go play Guilty Gear instead of Street Fighter 5.  It was really REALLY bad.  It’s the stuff of legends.

That is not the version being judged though.  Capcom continually added to Street Fighter 5 with overpriced DLC until they finally got a feature-rich and complete game re-released as the Champion Edition, which is what came out in arcades.  SNK had already released KOF 14 for arcades with all its DLC included by that point, plus a little spin-off.  With the release of SNK’s 2019 Samurai Shodown game later, we’ll have reached the last arcade game released by either company.  We will finally see if Capcom will cement their lead as the best arcade game manufacturer or if SNK will tie the score.

Live and let die!  Fight!

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 2012-2014

Curious things happened in the aftermath of The King of Fighters 13 and Super Street Fighter 4.  SNK wasn’t coming out with a lot of new games except mobile phone ones and ports of previous games.  There were some good mobile games and good ports, mind you.  I still love The Rhythm of Fighters and had some fun with Metal Slug Defense, which led into Metal Slug Attack and apparently Metal Slug Attack had so much of an audience that just recently they came out with a complete console version of it called Metal Slug Attack: Reloaded.  For ports, the Code Mystics ports for KOF 98 and 2002UM were made available on PC with online play, which for me was a huge deal.

On Capcom’s side… Well a lot of people consider it Capcom’s darkest time period and would lead into them becoming the evil fan-hating company they are today.  There were already a lot of contentious decisions and games like the Bionic Commando remake, Dark Void, DMC: Devil May Cry (it’s not THAT bad, guys) and of course Street Fighter X Tekken.  Street Fighter X Tekken was a disaster for Capcom because of on-disc DLC due to a deal with Sony and a gameplay customization system essentially kind of being pay to win.  I play Street Fighter X Tekken on the Vita, where all the characters are included, so I didn’t get as much withheld content and I think it’s a pretty fun crossover, but I am in the minority.

Capcom had one possible saving grace with Sengoku Basara 4, a game that was shaping up to be the end all be all for action gaming once it came out in English.  As long as Sengoku Basara 4 came out, Capcom would become immortalized as the greatest game company in the world that could do no wrong.  Everything hinged on that one game as far as console games went.

Both companies were either too busy or didn’t care enough to make new arcade games after their last ones, but both of them did throw arcades a bone and released updated versions of their best, most recent fighting games.  Now we’ll decide which of the company’s best of their best is THE best.

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.

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 2008

SNK had an overall good few years for the arcades while on handhelds and consoles it was more of a mixed bag and very few of what they were putting out, like the Days of Memories visual novel games, were coming out in English.  What's more, after Capcom's complete and total absence in arcades for a good while, they at last came back to challenge SNK this year in 2008.  Will their new arcade games be enough to make up for all the strides SNK had already been making while they were gone?  Let's find out.

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 2005 & 2006

2004 was the end of an era for arcades.  The Neogeo had an astonishing 14 year run, a true testament to its power, but after Samurai Shodown 5 Special, SNK decided that it was time to move forward in their arcade technology so they started using Sammy/Sega’s Atomiswave, an awesome system that allowed for an excellent fusion of 2D and 3D visuals, not unlike the NAOMI system.  Outside of the games SNK would make for it, it had games like Dolphin Blue, Arc System Works’ Fist of the North Star game and DIMP’s The Rumble Fish.  All in all it was a great home for SNK to make bigger and better arcade games.

What did Capcom have?

Capcom was doing very well for themselves on home consoles and came out with some of the greatest games of all time, like the Viewtiful Joe franchise, Resident Evil 4 and Haunting Ground.  The arcades didn’t get any of the action from them during this time, partially for reasons I’ve already explained regarding home console hardware catching up and partially because as much success as Capcom saw, this was also an era of Capcom idiocy.

“People didn’t like our half-assed asset recycle bin fighting game?!  Clearly the people don’t want arcade games!”
“People didn’t like our already mediocre game about Japanese warlords?!  But we edited the entire setting with no context to replace it, made the music worse, changed the gameplay and even cut content!  Clearly those stupid Americans don’t want it!  What they want is Beatdown: Fists of Vengeance!”
“Hey, Hideaki Istuno!  I have some stuff here left over from the guy who bailed!  Make a sequel to Devil May Cry in a few months, will you?”

SNK didn’t release anywhere close to as many games as Capcom did, but since games on the Atomiswave were able to be ported to the PS2 and Xbox very easily (not sure why not the Gamecube), this means they could cover both fields..  With the increased memory capacity of PS2 discs, SNK was also able to dip into their arcade game library and make compilations like the Fatal Fury Battle Archives and Art of Fighting Anthology.

Finally and most notably, SNK made the King of Fighters: Maximum Impact games, console-exclusive 3D KOF games with their own continuities that for once actually got proper advertising and merchandise in English.  Ads for Maximum Impact appeared in magazines, there were TV commercials, the Hong Kong comic was released in English (as was KOF 2003’s) and Maximum Impact 2/The King of Fighters 2006 got its own sets of trading cards for the Universal Fighting System card game alongside Samurai Shodown 5.

Capcom would eventually make a big comeback to arcades with one game in particular, but that wouldn’t come out until 2008, so until then we got 4 different games on the Atomiswave for SNK to build their portfolio with for this stretch of time before Capcom entered the picture again to challenge SNK’s arcade dominance.

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 2002 & 2003

I’ve reached the inevitable problem I expected to run into when I started this series.  During the 7^th console generation, SNK was able to recover from their bankruptcy and continue making arcade games for a while longer alongside some home console-original games and home ports of their older games.  Capcom went even further ham on the console games and set themselves up as quite possibly the best game company there was until they took to meth and thought making Devil Kings was a good idea.

"Y'know that cool Japanese game about Japanese historical figures in Japan? What if they WEREN'T?"

This means that in the arcades, SNK was largely uncontested from Capcom for several years, although other companies like Namco were still around with Tekken and Soul Calibur.  SNK did go uncontested for the first few years of this series before Capcom games started getting into arcades, but I obviously didn’t count those years as SNK victories because Capcom wasn’t there to be victorious over.  Now that we’re at the point where both companies are still around, it’s fair game, but it wouldn’t be fair if I were to give SNK default victories because a game company can use those years of absence to make something so incredible that it’s better than any game the competitor made before it.

Therefore, for the rest of this series, I’ll be judging each company by a stretch of time between Capcom’s years with arcade game releases.  That means 2002-2004, 2005-2008, 2009 & 2010, 2012-2014 and then it will finish off with 2016 all the way to 2019 with the release of the arcade version of Samurai Shodown 2019.  Though they’ll have far fewer, if Capcom’s games manage to be amazing enough to blow everything from SNK out of the water, they can get the points.  By the end of this, only one company will be declared the King of Arcades!  We’ll get started with SNK’s games of 2002, where they were still getting help from Eolith post-bankruptcy.

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?!

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 2000

At last we reach the turn of the millennium.  The big triple-0.  Home console gamers that survived the Y2K virus were eating good.  The Dreamcast had a solid library built up with Resident Evil: Code Veronica now added, the Nintendo 64 got Banjo-Tooie, a bigger and better sequel and all the Pokemon fans like me were playing Gold and Silver while they went to the theater to watch Pokemon the Movie 2000.

In arcades, things could’ve been better.  Third Strike was Capcom’s last game on their short-lived CPS3 board and at the time it didn’t get the kind of recognition it gets today.  Capcom put a higher focus on console games, like the aforementioned Resident Evil: Code Veronica, meaning arcade game production greatly slowed down and they largely switched development from their own arcade systems to Sega’s NAOMI arcade board, which made porting games to the Dreamcast easier, though it looks like they had just one or two more games on their old reliable CPS2 system in the pipeline to put out.

One of these games happened to be another game in which oursettle their differences: Capcom vs. SNK.  This time it was actually in arcades and developed by Capcom instead of SNK, but as much as I would like to include it, I don’t have any version of it nor does any arcade have it.  My local theater used to have it many years ago and I remember thinking it was awesome, but that’s too far back for a proper analysis.  I’ll make up for that with the sequel.

SNK wasn’t doing so hot thanks to the abject failure of the Hyper Neogeo 64 and various instances of overspending.  This resulted in them being bought out by a fairly vile company that wanted nothing more than to shut the company down and use their properties for pachinko games until SNK would officially go bankrupt the following year.

They weren’t out completely just yet though!  Before the original SNK could go under, they had a few games already in development they finished up and released.  That means we only have 2 games from SNK this year versus Capcom’s 3.  That these companies used to make 6-8 games a year previously shows how down bad arcade gaming was at this point, but that doesn’t mean the games themselves are bad.  Capcom and SNK were still going at it and now we will determine who was the best arcade company of the year 2000.

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1999

In the real world, not a lot of note was going on in 1999.  I think there was a guy who said he did not have sexual relations with a woman and some kids shot up a school, but the big impacts were being felt with our friends/enemies Capcom and SNK.
 
Late in 1998, SNK put out the Neogeo Pocket, a handheld system of their design not unlike the Game Boy.  SNK had already done some portable work on Nintendo’s handheld with a port of Samurai Shodown as well as KOF 95 and 96, but this time they made their own system to put their games on.  By that point, however, the Game Boy Color was out so it wasn’t long before they upgraded to a color system as well, the Neogeo Pocket Color.  The Neogeo Pocket Color had a selection of miniaturized SNK games that were effectively ports of their Neogeo games, retaining the core gameplay experiences with only 2 buttons.

It had all the SNK essentials like Fatal Fury, Samurai Shodown, KOF and even a few sports games plus its very own Sonic game.  In fact, the Neogeo Pocket Color games are where the Japanese game developer Dimps got their start, who would go on to make the outstanding Sonic Rush games on the Nintendo DS.  That’s all great, but one of the biggest and best games on the Neogeo Pocket Color was the one that would finally let Capcom and SNK settle things personally.

For the first time, SNK and Capcom would truly go head to head, as M. Bison and Geese team up to run a fighting tournament where all their company’s fighters would fight as a part of their evil plan!  Finally you could show those Street Fighter peasants or KOF losers that your company is better and use your skillz with your favorite character!

 
Technically SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash came out first, but that game isn’t a head-to-head crossover of SNK and Capcom as much as it is a game where Capcom and SNK’s characters and creators come together in a friendly little card game where Capcom and SNK characters are able to support each other, which is just wrong!  Capcom and SNK are enemies!  I would review those crossovers, but neither were in arcades.  I will say both are absolutely fantastic games though.

This manpower being put into their handheld system is presumably why there aren’t as many SNK games for this year.  Capcom’s reason for fewer games was because apparently not doing as hot in the arcades and they put more effort into releasing just a few big games instead of the numbers they were pumping out in previous years.

That may have paid off because holy smokes is 1999 one hell of a year.  This year has both companies at their best and there is not going to be a lot of negativity  The year’s winner might be down to the wire.

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1998

1998 was another big year for gaming.  Some of the greatest games of all time that are still revered to this day were coming out.  Resident Evil 2, Banjo-Kazooie, Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life and Spyro the Dragon and of course The Legend of fucking Zelda the fucking Ocarina of fucking Time.  It was a great time to be a gamer, particularly a console gamer.

Near the end of the year, Capcom and SNK would be introduced to one of their best friends: The Sega Dreamcast.  The Dreamcast was an incredible machine for the time, capable of 3D and 2D graphics neither the Playstation nor Nintendo 64 could pull off.  It’s best known for Soul Calibur, but the Dreamcast was practically a fighting game machine by all measures.  While the Playstation would struggle to run certain Capcom and SNK arcade games, the Dreamcast was able to handle enhanced ports of those games, including some packages with 2 games in one!  It was the only console that could run Street Fighter 3 at the time and some of Capcom’s 3D games like Power Stone would also get their Dreamcast port down the line.

3D backgrounds!

I sure hope that doesn’t mean home console gaming is going to supplant arcade gaming because there are some great arcade games this year, mostly from SNK.  Capcom seems to have slowed down their arcade game production, possibly because of the cost of making games for that beast the CPS3, and were putting more manpower into their console games, such as the aforementioned Resident Evil 2.  SNK meanwhile was still chugging along with the Neogeo while the Hyper Neogeo 64 dragged its feet.  Let’s find out who put their efforts on a winning horse.

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1997

In the real world, 1997 was the year of Princess Diana’s death and the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong from the U.K. to China, resulting in Bruce Lee’s relative Chin wiping out all 1.2 billion of the incoming Chinese immigrants.

In gaming, 1997 was cementing the dominance of home consoles and PCs in gaming.  With polygons and storage space further evolving, we got games like Diablo, The Curse of Monkey Island, Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy 7, one of the worst games I’ve ever played, but would become synonymous with the Playstation because I guess standards were that low.  SNK translations may be bad, but holy shit Final Fantasy 7’s is even worse.  IT WAS THE MOST EXPENSIVE GAME MADE AT THE TIME?!

Anyway, Capcom and SNK apparently figured they had to up their game with brand new arcade hardware, both of which… Could’ve gone better.

Capcom came out with the CPS3 system, an arcade board that would allow for even more sprites and higher capacity memory.  It was a super powerful system that could outclass the Neogeo’s ever-increasing cartridge sizes.  It came out at the tail end of 1996 with Red Earth, but of course what they really needed to sell people on this thing was a new Street Fighter, leading to one of the most fascinating disasters of the era.

SNK made the Hyper Neogeo 64, a 3D system to try and replicate the success other companies were having with this new dimension of play.  From what I understand it was only marginally more powerful than the Nintendo 64.

Both of these new systems had almost no games for them.  The CPS3 only had 6 games made for it (half of which are updated re-releases) and the Hyper Neogeo 64 only had 7.  Both their miniscule libraries were also difficult to port to home systems.  In fact, only one Hyper Neogeo 64 game has ever seen any re-release and it’s rare, so I won’t be able to play any of them.

 
Regardless of the quality of the games, the fact is that neither company got a lot of mileage out of their new hardware and they made safer bets continuing to make games for their existing hardware.  Which company came out looking the best as a result will now be put to the test.

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.

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1995: Part 1

Much like in 1994, 1995 kept a lot of the crazes of the era rolling with continuing advances in both game design and technology.  On the Super Nintendo, Chrono Trigger came out with its intricate time travel plot, Donkey Kong Country 2 wowed audiences just as much as the original did and Yoshi’s Island put new spins on the Mario series with an origin story spotlighting the dinosaur sidekick from Super Mario World.

The big game changer of course came from Sony with what would become their CD-based juggernaut, the Sony Playstation.  With the 3D graphics possible on the PS1, the 3D gaming explosion got even bigger, with home consoles now being able to run their own versions of the latest Tekken and Virtua Fighter games, as well as console-exclusive games like Battle Arena Toshinden.  The possibilities offered by the extra CD storage space opened all kinds of possibilities for game developers, like Full Motion Video, something the PC had already been dabbling in.  In fact, on the PC side of things FMV games were at their peak, with Phantasmagoria, Psychic Detective and The 11^th Hour delivering experiences players had never seen before.

In the fighting game space, Capcom and SNK had possibly even stiffer competition than last year, thanks to the PC and console-made fighting games you didn’t have to go to the arcades for.  This was the year of Xenophage: Alien Blood Sport, Kasumi Ninja and a game still considered one of the best fighting games of all time, Expect No Mercy.

Neither Capcom or SNK was any worse for wear as there were changes coming this time, with each company’s biggest franchise making a major shift after their own periods of re-releases.  Let’s see who pulls off those shifts best and came out as the better company of 1995.

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

It's still 1994!  Let's goooooo!

The King of Fighters 15 Review Addendum: The Updates

It’s been well over a year since The King of Fighters 15 came out and right from the word go SNK has been adding update after update to sweeten the deal, to the point that looking back on it, some of the information in my review of it is dated. Some of my comments and complaints from back then have been addressed and there has been so much added to the game that I think it’s worth updating my thoughts on the game's content a bit and addressing what has changed so that people reading about the game today have a better understanding of its current state.  Consider it an addendum of sorts to my review.

Steps on How to Get Gud at Fighting Games

In fighting games there are fundamental rules that carry over into each other.  Things like light attacks being quick and weak, heavy attacks being slow and strong, super meters being used for super attacks and overhead attacks hitting crouched opponents.

Thinking within these fundamentals is the right way to quickly latch onto the different fighting games there are in tandem with the kind of things that go without saying, like reading your opponent and reacting accordingly, but there are many techniques that go beyond the basic rules of the game and can elevate a player from being simply “good” to being “gud.”  These are the methods utilized both in and out of the games that give a player that extra push into mastering fighting games as a genre and earning the respect and admiration of their peers.  With this post, I hope I can lead players into that push so that we can all enjoy playing fighting games at the highest levels of play.  These are my tips and tricks on how to get gud at fighting games.

The King of Fighters 15 Review

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.

NeogeoNow's King of Fighters: The Story So Far: Comments and Additions

In preparation for The King of Fighters XV, Youtube user NeogeoNow collaborated with SNK to create a trilogy of videos recapping the story of the games in the mainline KOF series, presumably to give possible newer players some background and older players a refresher.

The videos get the job done and the guy has played KOF even longer than I have so he knows what he’s talking about.  That said, it’s clear that he was trying to be concise.  Obviously he wasn’t going to go through every little plot thread, but even focusing on the important stuff he really sped through the story of those 10 games.  As a result, I think there are points in the videos in which casual viewers not in the know might do a double take and/or there is some context that’s skipped over I feel is necessary to understand the story better.  I also have a little criticism about the videos and some insights of my own, including a few parts in which I don’t want to claim the guy with decades of KOF experience working with the company itself is wrong, but it seems at odds with the official material.

I will go over NeogeoNow’s plot recap of each game from his videos in order.  I won’t be going over every little thing, because they’re largely fine and the majority of my reaction is nodding my head saying “yep.”  It’s not exactly bad enough to clown on.  There are other videos for that.

When I reach a particular part in which I have something to say, the quotation will be highlighted in bold followed by my comment.  Occasionally, such as for the first one, I will comment on certain parts wholesale instead of on a single line.  I hope this will at least partially act as a little supplementary piece to his videos for more comprehension into the KOF story because I too love it and want people to enjoy it.

The Wonderful World of King of Fighters Ports

The King of Fighters is my all-time favorite fighting game franchise hands down, but I’ve never been what some would call a purist. Some fans spend a fortune trying to get original Neogeo hardware to play games on, but I have always played pretty much anything but the original hardware unless I come across it at an arcade.  KOF 11 has a great PS2 port and 13 and 14 have solid multiplatform releases, as KOF 11 is when SNK really started upping their game in bonus content for home versions.  The games before 11, however, have been all over the place over the years, with many different ports that can give a player a noticeably different experience and range of content despite the core games remaining, be it in presentation or bonus features.

I very much want people to play all the KOF games that don’t make you want to ram a nail through your skull (i.e. not KOF 94 & 95) and there are so many different ways to get them now that it can be tricky to know which ones gives you your money’s worth and is the best way to play them.  For the sake of helping with such decisions, and for an interesting little look at the differences, I have written this little guide on a few of the different ports available for the KOF games before KOF 11.

The Fighting Game Character Shonen Otaku Awards

Characters are the lifeblood of a fighting game.  They are the means by which the players engross themselves in the game through their varying fighting styles and personalities as they clash in combat. From Mexican wrestlers to masked karatekas to flawed super soldiers, the guys you see in fighting games get wild.

Fighting game characters often shine in their own particular way.  Some are made to look cool first and foremost, some are meant to be the most fun to play with and others are made to be extremely difficult to use, but incredible in the right hands.  Over the years in the many many different fighting games I’ve played, I’ve identified some fighters that excel in certain ways that no other has ever matched.  To recognize those standouts, I’ve made this list of awards to celebrate the best of the best in fighting game history, the Shonen Otaku Awards!

The only criteria I have for these awards is that they cannot be from fighting games based on a license.