Keeping fans waiting for three years, the King of Fighters franchise gets a shot to what could lead to its definitive end or rise.
The long awaited video game (King of Fighters 2014) had a presentation in Tokyo Game Show on mid-September in Chiba, Japan bringing more questions than answers to their fans.
For an upcoming title that will compete against other modern fighting games, it lacks high definition visuals that may turn many fans down and hoping that this may not be the final look of the product.
What most of the audience forgot is that SNK Playmore (the company behind the game) faced a big fall by the end of the 2000s and with no many options at hand it founds itself selling the franchise to Chinese company, Leyou Technology.
This explains the change of animation in the last two games, which did not make enough sales and did not fulfill the expectations of many players; such as a lacking of new characters and an unusual gameplay for the story mode.
One of the complaints by many fans was the fact that Kyo (the main character of the franchise) had been rebooted to a more younger look than in previous games.
This design follows the same ways of Athena, which is a female character that has been facing a de-aging process over the years making the fighter look more like a middle-schooler rather than a college student by now at least.
This kind of rebooting techniques does not allow the characters to grow up along side the fans and can be quite risky enabling the storyline to be affected.
Still, the biggest doubt regards on the game fighting system.
Will it feature the traditional 3 versus 3 characters fighting mode or will it go back to its rare one versus one version from the Maximum Impact spin-off?
But what really bothers the oldest fans of the series lays in the story mode, wondering if it will be another of its famous “Dream-match” installations or if it will continue the storylines from Maximum Impact and XIII, which leaves the audience in two big cliff hangers with potential.
The final results will only define the fate of SNK audiences to either keep on hoping for their favorite fighting game to adapt to a modern video game culture or to finally consider the King of Fighters dead for sure.
