The King of Fighters XII Updated Hands-On - In-Depth With the Console Versions

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you're familiar with the King of Fighters fighting game series, and we're going to assume you're familiar with head-to-head fighting games in general. So, you know that the King of Fighters series from developer SNK Playmore has been around for 15 years, starting in 1994, as team-based fighting games that let you pick three different characters and let you play as all three in a single session against other teams of three. We recently had a chance to hunker down with the console versions of The King of Fighters XII and have some new details to discuss.

Even though the KOF series has been around for 15 years, the appearance of its characters has remained more or less constant. Yes, all character sprites were made larger in KOF '96, and many of the characters have had other visual retouches, but they've otherwise still been the same old sprites with tweaks made here and there. KOFXII has the distinction of being the first game in the entire series to have a complete visual overhaul. It replaces the original 2D "sprites" (the two-dimensional graphics that represent each game character) of the series to date with all-new, much-bigger, more-detailed, well-animated sprites.
The game also has brand-new background stages that are very busy and have tons of animated characters milling around. Unfortunately, this visual overhaul comes at a price. Though recent games in the series have typically more than 30 playable characters, the original arcade version of KOFXII has only 20 characters, and the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions offer a total of 22. The console versions of the game have two exclusive characters, the evil secretary Mature and the riding-crop-wielding Elizabeth Branctorche (yes, that's actually how her name is spelled) from KOFXI. The single-player arcade version of the game has no "boss" character to challenge, either.

The art has been designed by SNK artist NONA, whose previous credits include the more-recent installments of the KOF series, from about 2000 onward. If you're a longtime KOF player, you'll probably pick up immediately on NONA's strong use of contrasting solid colors and sometimes-exaggerated character sizes, especially for the characters Ralf and Clark (the Ikari Warriors, who originally debuted in the arcade game of the same name), who are huge, bulky musclemen now. And like previous KOF games that bear NONA's artwork, KOFXII also has a darker, more-shadowy color palette than its brighter predecessors, such as KOF '95 and KOF '98.
But you probably already knew that, assuming you've been keeping up with the new releases of screenshots, trailers, and arcade gameplay videos trickling out of Japan and the precious few other locations in the world that have the arcade version of the game available for public play. So you probably also know that most of the game's older characters have had their list of fighting maneuvers changed and in many cases have been bumped back to older versions of themselves.