The King of Fighters: Allstar Review

Every big franchise seems to have a licensed “gacha” game these days.  There’s one for Senran Kagura, Fire Emblem, Marvel, Love Live and Castlevania.  While some decry such games for being exploitative and microtransaction-ridden, I’ve always thought the collection aspects combined with a solid core gameplay looked fun, but both the licenses and core gameplay didn’t hook me most of the time.  There just wasn’t a gacha game I could get into unless you count Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links.

KOF Allstar got all the hooks to catch my interest: it’s a beat-em-up with collectible characters utilizing the KOF license developed by the mobile company Netmarble.  Obviously I’m a huge KOF fan, I’ve enjoyed action mobile games with touch controls in the past and I’ve read both good and bad things about Netmarble.  The idea of a beat-em-up based on a fighting game franchise where only two fighters are going at it at a time may seem like an odd idea, but KOF has always had characters fighting gangs of enemies, it was just rarely shown.  I had some careful optimism.

In preparation for the global version, I played the Japanese version for a couple of weeks, both because I was excited to play and so that I could write about any possible differences between the two.  I couldn’t utilize every one of the game’s features as my Japanese isn’t expert level, but from what I can tell the only substantial difference is that the new content for the global version is coming out much quicker because it has a year of updates from the Japanese version to work with.  Now that I’ve gotten to play the global version, this review can be written proper.

The King of Fighters-i 2012 Review

Back in my retrospective of The King of Fighters 13 I briefly touched on The King of Fighters-i 2012. At the time I only knew some of the details about it from associates who owned it, but having gotten an iPhone of my own I’ve gotten much deeper into it to allow for a full review.

[Note that The King of Fighters-i is the name of the iPhone version of the game.  The Android version is titled The King of Fighters Android, and as far as I can tell it is the same exact game.]

An update from their previous app game simply titled The King of Fighters-i, KOFi 2012 is a portable app version of the core of KOF 13, the installment tied with 11 as my favorite in the series.  Even though I was looking forward to playing a portable KOF 13, I set my expectations a little low.  I had difficulty playing KOF ‘97 back when I played it on my sister’s iPhone, and porting a multi-gigabyte HD game to an app without cutting a good amount of content seemed like wishful thinking.

To my surprise, even though compromises were indeed made, KOFi 2012 is an extremely impressive replication of the KOF 13 experience that’s fun regardless of whether or not you’ve played the console edition.