Review | King of Fighters XIII

When you want to apologise to a loved one you give them flowers, some gift they always wanted, or take them out for a fancy dinner. If you want to apologise to a vast audience of fighting game fans- you make King of Fighters XIII. After their previous and nearly universally reviled entry, SNK Playmore is working to make amends. While it isn’t the most adept definition, it certainly is on the right track.

As with most fighting games, you won’t be getting this for the story mode (which I would like to take a moment to mention that I would appreciate if more fighting games took cues from the latest Mortal Kombat offering) but unlike XII this at least has a story mode. King of Fighters XIII marks the final installment in which Ash Crimson plays the lead protagonist. You’d think with something that started 8 years ago in King of Fighters 2003, the creators would help catch up players new and old to the story. Instead, it starts out with a vague idea of what’s occurring only to become a series of vague choose your adventure textual choices that results in multiple ways to get to the final bosses. In each path, you’re given small snippets of the over-arching story. The overall plot is ambitious and the ending unfolds in fantastic fashion, however the disjointed in-between scenes seemingly does it’s best to obfuscate this. To its credit, regardless of characters, it ends in the same way. Allowing a more easy to understand canonical story.

Once you reach the final bosses, you quickly discover the game continue the tradition of “SNK Boss Syndrome”. While it never reaches the proportions set by Rugal of past games, they are cheap and absolutely frustrating. I wanted to avoid using the term ‘cheap’ but there are several cases during the fight where the boss is just flat out better or I feel I have no absolutely any answer for. There are patterns and methodology to the fights but it can quickly spiral when a hop your character does is almost instantaneously followed up by a full screen attack by the boss. Making the difference between victory and defeat a matter if the computer decides to use a particular move or not. Which is a shame really. The story, visuals, and music build up in an ominous and exciting way. It just loses its appeal if you’re forced to replay it over and over again in hopes of beating the boss.

With that out of the way, let’s get on to the good stuff.

Visually the game builds off of XII, which is to say, gorgeous. The gigantic sprites are beautiful rendered and easily set the bar of what pixel art can be in video games today. Expanding on the roster to a substantial 33 characters to include fan favorites such as King, K’, and Billy Kane. Mai bears special mention as the outcry of not including her in the previous iteration was something I saw quite a bit of in various corners of the Internet and the developers seemed to want to compensate with some less-than-modest animations.

The gameplay is as smooth as an marble orb, covered in oil, rolling down a steep hill, on black ice. The controls, animation, and strategy provide and ebb and flow that has to be played to truly appriciate. It brings a lot of traditional trappings from older King of Fighter games that bring a large variety and strategy to the table. If you were a big fan of King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match, you’ll feel right at home. The online multiplayer isn’t always ideal but it does work. It’s possible to maintain some semblance of an offline combo timing though your confidence in it may wax and wane as the matches progress. Recently they did announce they plan on patching the online experience- so fingers crossed- it’ll help players to continue practicing for the long haul.

The mission modes provide useful bread and butter combos as well as flashy impractical combos. If you ever wanted to test your execution skills, this is the game for you. Here in the states there seemed an innumerable number of streams of professional players trying to chew through missions to no avail. Mission mode videos are still cropping up. It is humbling but the practice and precision needed helps not only helped me in this game but I saw noticeable improvements when I went back to play other fighting games. If you get stuck, you can watch a demo of the combo being performed. Allowing you to better understand the timing involved.

If you’re new to fighting games or you haven’t played in a long while, King of Fighters XIII will break you. Form you up again, to immediately re-break you. The game does very little hand holding and if you’re up for the rough ride, you’ll be rewarded with one of the best King of Fighter experiences to date. Apology accepted SNK Playmore.   [8]