King of Fighters 2002 & 2003
SNK needs to get out more.
Tags: King of Fighters 2002 & 2003 Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Brad on Mar 14th, 2005
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| King of Fighters 2002 & 2003 (title page) | 1 - 2 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Fighting (2D) | No | ||
There’s a bit of a criminal joy in snatching up a copy of SNK’s King of Fighters 2002/2003. For less than $40, you get two discs of old school fighting goodness, and that sweet bargain only loses a slight bit of its keen edge when you pop the games into your PS2 and realize that it’s really the same game twice over.
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SNK has got a long running horse in the King of Fighters series, originally releasing all of the games in the series on the Neo Geo system and gradually porting them over to other home systems. The Dreamcast had a good run when it came to 2D fighters and King of Fighters played a strong part in building that reputation. Still, the franchise, while wallowing in a deep history of characters, never really got out of the 90’s, being passed up by old competitors like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and being challenged by newcomers like Guilty Gear and the 3D powerhouses, Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive. Not only do the King of Fighters games progress through the years slowly in terms of artistry, but they’re slow to evolve in gameplay, making major changes slowly and across many yearly updates.
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Between the two discs included in this bundle, King of Fighters 2002 comes off as the better game, steeped in the traditions of the series. Three fighters from a list of 40-plus are chosen and battle an equal team on the other side. Once one of your fighters is knocked out, another leaps into the battle to pick up where they left off. It’s very much the same sort of play that we’ve seen out of King of Fighters ’99, ’00, and KoF: Mark of the Wolves.
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2003 has got a slight twist to the system, one that appeared in arcades nearly a decade ago from other game makers. Finally players are allowed to switch out teammates at will, creating a tag-team play that is hampered by little actual benefit. Offscreen characters don’t recover any health and the freshly tagged characters don’t launch any kind of offensive as they enter, meaning that there’s little good reason not to just finish your fight with the character on screen and let the next roll on when the first is knocked out.
These sorts of little advances that have been tested extensively in 2D fighters for the last decade are duly missed in King of Fighters games. SNK’s stubborn aversion to really overhauling the series and putting some good gaming weight behind their impressive cast is puzzling. Every year we seem to get a few new faces, but no new moves.
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I say that with tongue partly in cheek. Individual characters are handed new moves from time to time and there’s nothing like a 2-game pack to show those tweaks off, but apart from the very cosmetic change in who does what, you’re left with a very large crowd of characters that essentially all play alike. There’s very little variation between so many fighters, and it’s a given that if you know how to control a couple of them, you’ll stumble across the moveset of the new guy in such a short time it seems to relieve you of the pride of mastering your new ally.
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One other drawback to the cast is that it has become so large that the story teeters upon being unwieldy. Without an advanced degree in SNK, there’s very little a new player can do to actually understand who all these characters are. The laughably bad dialogue between certain fights and at the end game doesn’t go a long way to delivering specific characters’ plots, so unless you’re caught up on every game that came before or have snatched up a bit of King of Fighters anime, you’re not going to know what in the world is going on.
The series, as presented in this bundle, is about as bare-bones as you can get with a fighter and still have a reasonably good time. The graphics are looking quite long in the tooth and the animation lacks the smoothness needed to keep up with the new fighters on the block.
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Outside of the diehard SNK fan, I can’t see someone picking this title over any of the newer, fresher fighters. Perhaps some year SNK will come through with a blockbuster update and take us all by storm again. This, however, is not that year. Apart from the 2-for-1 bargain, there’s little fight left in King of Fighters.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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+ Huge cast of lovable, huggable beating machines. + It's... King of Fighters! You like King of Fighters, don't you? |
6.5 |
| What Doesn't | |
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- Who are all these people? - Didn't I play this last year? No, maybe it was the year before that. Or the one before that. Or... |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| This series doesn't just need a new paint job. It needs some work under the hood. | |
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Tags: King of Fighters 2002 & 2003
Posted by Brad on Mar 14th, 2005 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
