The King of Fighters XIII Review

Starting in the late 1990s the fighting game genre slipped into decline despite an amazing surge in popularity in the years prior. Thankfully it's seemed to regain that footing, thanks to recent hits such as Capcom's Street Fighter IV and the visually stunning sprite-based Arc Systems Works' BlazBlue series. However, one key player in the old guard, SNK Playmore, was left behind and faced with the choice of evolving or dying out entirely. Their answer to this was 2009's The King of Fighters XII. However as you can see in our review it was an utter disappointment.

After years in development and tons of incurred costs the company decided that the game had to be shipped to consumers. Those buyers found a game that was essentially a half-finished beta with a next-gen $60 price tag. Because of this it did little to win the attention of both casual and hardcore fighting game fans who didn't know about the series nor the longtime SNK fans who had kept with the series over the years. Thus, SNK Playmore knew they only had one more shot before the King of Fighters brand would be tarnished forever in the minds of players. Laid with the daunting task of repairing all of the damage KoFXII did to the series they set out to make a new sequel: The King of Fighters XIII. And repair they did.

At its core, The King of Fighters XII wasn't an entirely bad game. It had some of the best sprite-based work at the time and great underlying gameplay mechanics, but the severe lack of content and exclusion of a number of key KoF characters soured the moods of fans. The King of Fighters XIII is the exact opposite of that. The same excellent sprite-based characters and wonderful battle backdrops return alongside a fully-featured story mode, an extensive character color customizer and training mode and even a strenuous mission mode. And that annoying zooming-in of the characters during matches added in KoFXII has been removed this time around.

For most fans, however, the real additions come in the plethora of new characters. Complimenting the somewhat random 22 characters found in KoFXII is 12 new characters (bringing the total up to 34) including some fan-favorites such as Mai Shiranui and K', both of which were sorely missing in the series's previous outing. The series standard of dividing participants into three-person teams is back again as well as could be seen in the number of trailers that Atlus's North American branch supplied leading up to the game's release.