The King of Fighters XV Battles with Its Past
The King of Fighters XV (or KoF XV) lives up to the series’ standard by delivering blazing-fast fights, vibrant character designs and an electrifying soundtrack. In fact, its biggest battle is against the past.
Fighting games are a walled garden, even within the oft-unapproachable medium of videogames. Steep learning curves and second-rate online play frequently drive players looking for competitive games towards more popular genres like MOBAs or first-person shooters.
The ways fighting games subvert those roadblocks will define their longevity in the modern era of fighting games. They’re also the best indicators of a game’s quality. That’s not the case with KoF XV, for better and for worse.
That’s partially because SNK seemingly knows newcomers are all-but guaranteed not to give King of Fighters a shot. It just doesn’t have the recognition that Tekken, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter and Dragon Ball Z all do. In fact, Terry Bogard’s appearance in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s first line of DLC and SNK’s prominence on the Switch’s eShop in its early days are probably the most press the franchise has seen in a long time.
That’s not to dismiss the series’ legacy of influence and quality, but in the last few years, a number of small and big-budget fighting games alike have released complete with detailed tutorials and tips for on-boarding new players. KoF XV feels downright archaic in comparison.
Booting up the game, players are encouraged to check out a quick tutorial that breaks down the basics of the franchise. Actions as basic as light and heavy attacks or blocking are presented the exact same way as more complicated actions like cancels and movement tech like short hops.
The game expects players to have every individual action, input and move down pat after just one try. It serves as a solid introduction to the barebones basics and the button layout, but funneling players from tutorial to tutorial at a breakneck speed instead of allowing them to take time to make sure they know the difference between a hop and a jump (a vital mechanic in KoF) is bad for a number of reasons.
From a competitive standpoint, this encourages players to develop bad, or at least one-dimensional, habits. In a series that’s as dependent on game-specific tech and strategies as King of Fighters, that can be debilitating for a player trying to break into a competitive scene.
Unfortunately, the game’s missions have the exact same problem. For the uninitiated, most fighting games have missions, trials or challenges tied to each character that helps teach players some dependable, simple combos to give them a better chance against AI or human-controlled opponents.
Other games, like Guilty Gear Strive or Injustice 2, make an effort to teach players the combo by not just plunking them in a training mode with a list of inputs. Instead, players can look at a diagram of the controller they’re holding with each button being pressed in real-time. They can also watch a brief demo of the combo or string performed by an AI. Some will even require players to perform the action multiple times over to ensure they don’t forget, instead of being rushed through each trial.
Beyond the mode’s lacking implementation, KoF XV’s offering of missions also feels barebones. Nearly all of them start with something very simple: usually one normal attack strung into a special of some kind. That’s not inherently a problem. In fact, it’s one of the few examples of the game easing players into something to make it more approachable. What does make this a problem, however, is the fact that each character only has five trials, meaning that simple two-attack combo suddenly occupies a big chunk of that character’s individual trial.
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