King Of Fighters general

What about K', though? I mean, I know he and his partners work with the Ikari warriors, but they can't do that all the time, can they?

I thought K' and Maxima became mercenaries.

If it pays well enough they could probably live off big jobs for a while.

Wouldn't be surprised if Foxy, Diana and co also have business ventures or other sources of income given they were at least decently ranked NESTS agents. They're probably the primary breadwinners.

edited 19th Oct '16 5:54:56 PM by Hashil

So it is safe to assume that anyone in the KOF roster can be a fitness instructor or mercenary.

I wonder what Kensou does...

Also it depends on the writer/game, but Ryo's family is either poor as f and needed to win a tourney to make ends meet (e.g. SVC Chaos) or wealthy enough to have dates in posh restos.

re:XIV patch

Wow they are massively buffing Choi.

It's even huger than the amount of Nakoruru or K' nerfs...

edited 19th Oct '16 6:55:34 PM by Malco

You know what I want to know, actually? What the hell was Goenitz doing the whole time when he wasn't doing bad guy stuff? He must have paid for that fancy outfit of his somehow. Rugal at least was an arms dealer, and NESTS was a whole organisation that probably had a myriad of front groups. What was Goenitz's excuse? :V

As far as I can tell, he was a Priest, preaching the word of God. (Which as far as he's concerned is Orochi.)

edited 19th Oct '16 7:59:55 PM by kkhohoho

Seems like in KOF the Kyokugen school is pretty lucrative. They've probably got a chain of schools throughout the states and Japan and possibly even South America, given Marco Rodriguez (and also the popularity of SNK south of the border).

Charismatic religious leaders can raise money pretty damn easily. He probably preached to wealthy crowds and pocketed some or all of the offerings.

According to XIV, the Sakazaki are having rough financial times due the competition and the apparition of "phony" doujos.

Oh, and XIV also has Maxima admitting he hacks bank accounts to have K' and Kula fed.

You know what I want to see? The rest of the Shiranui ninja clan/village. It can't be just Mai and her (now dead) grandparents, right? Hell, who are Mai's parents? At least gives names and pictures, dammit!

edited 20th Oct '16 12:35:29 AM by MarqFJA

Maximum hacks into people's bank accounts and siphons an infinitesimal amount of funds out of each one to gather enough money for him, K' and Kula to get by, at least that's what XIII's back story says.SNK also has a ton of backstories written for the other characters somewhere on their website, although they aren't always consistent with the in-game portrayal.

Anyway, I've been playing XIV for the last few weeks, and felt rather disappointed by it after the first 2 -3 hours. While I was pleasantly surprised with how little the graphics bothered me and how much kinetic and satisfying the fighting remained, the characters and story feel really bland and uninspiring. The new characters really don't stand out, and what little personality they convey in battle fail to grasp my attention, Verse is by far the worst offender, lacking both in having an interesting design of the more flamboyant characters or the charisma of a SNK boss character, being pretty much just an angry cave troll, and fighting him felt like fighting Doomsday from Batman vs Superman.

The music really isn't much to write home about either, apart from the intro song, none of them managed to stay with me. They do their job, I suppose, but it's still a shame given how the series' track record. 2001 at least has some memorable music, even though it's mostly due to their awfulness.

Okay... but how does it play? Because, no offense, but that's the most important thing in a fighting game than anything else, story be damned. (Which IMO stopped being good once the Orochi Saga was over and done with anyway, so it doesn't matter as much to me as it might to you.)

EDIT: Okay, sorry, you did mention how it played; I must have missed that. Still though, if it plays fine, then what the heck is the problem? It's a fighting game; what more could you ask for?

edited 20th Oct '16 8:36:58 PM by kkhohoho

I haven't played the game yet, but I'd agree with you on the music front... if it weren't for one thing. The Yagami Team's theme is catchy as bollocks, and it's found its way onto my list of music that I listen to on repeat when I'm bored. It's almost as good as the Yagami Team's theme from XIII, I'd say. Must be the saxophones.

And since you brought up 2001's music, I actually quite like Igniz's theme from that game, too. It's unbelievably short and repetitive, to be sure, but I don't really care as long as the actual melody is fitting for a boss battle. And it is. :V

I disagree regarding the music. XIV has plenty of good songs in its repertoire: the Fateful Fight ones, Team Mexico's song, Antonov's, and all the epilogue songs.

I'm not saying I didn't have fun, but to me KOF has always been the characters, and while the older games didn't have much in the way of story either, their characters are a lot more memorable to me than KOFXIV's, who despite having a 50+ roster, half of which being new characters, still escapes me after I've set the controller down. While I agree that the gameplay is the most important aspect of fighting games, and am glad SNK retained KOF's signature style of fighting, I was hoping they could have done the same with the character dynamic side of things as well, and it's a shame that they didn't.

It's definitely better than the other songs, but to me Arashi no Saxophone 2 is still the best Yagami theme.

2K1 does have a few good tracks, it's just most of them really don't match up in quality.

No offense, but are you kidding? Lulong, Hein, Xanadu, fucking Antonov; nearly every one of the new characters is awesome and badass, and most of them fit right in with the rest of the cast. Now if you don't feel that way, well, I don't know what to tell you, because they're all pretty kickass to me.

edited 21st Oct '16 7:57:47 AM by kkhohoho

There are a couple of stinkers (not a fan of Slyvie, and while I like Nelson I'll admit his character design is overcrowded), but yeah, most of the new guys look great. Mian is probably one of my favorite concepts for a fighting game character and Meitenkun manages to pull off the whole cute boy thing without being annoying about it on top of having a good design.

Well, I dunno, maybe I'm just spoiled by XIII's extensive use of pre-battle dialogues, they did a much better job at fleshing out the fighters and give insight to their personalities, whereas in XIV you only get limited exchanges between certain characters (which are awfully animated btw). I am interested in where they are gonna go with the new characters, but in this game they really aren't introduced well at all.

The fact that almost none of them are actually antagonistic does work against them. I know the sand guy is rude, but he's not actually a villain. Heck, Slyvie was kind of played up as one in pre-release and even she does nothing particularly noteworthy. And Xanadu is just a weirdo. It would of been cool to get a villain with a face, (ie, the New Faces Team, pun not intended), instead of... whatever the heck Verse is. But for what they are they're a mostly entertaining bunch and I look forward to seeing them develop some, even if I'm sure most of them will go the way of the Sports Team and 80% of the extended cast from the NESTS and Ash saga.

edited 22nd Oct '16 12:01:46 AM by Hashil

This is precisely why they should take advantage of all the characters Back from the Dead and bring back a load of old villains. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if Verse was just a Starter Villain whose whole purpose in-story was to enable these resurrections.

Before KoF XIV actually came out, I was idly speculating to myself that, since it wasn't a dream match game, the story would revolve around Rugal Bernstein somehow coming back for real, thus setting up a dramatic confrontation between him and his son Adelheid, who would become the new protagonist.

Obviously no such thing happened, but now that Rugal and a whole bunch of other characters, including fellow SNK Bosses Krizalid and Igniz, are presumably back anyway (as implied by Verse's winquotes), there's much potential to be had.

Or maybe I'm just making excuses because I really want to see Rugal back and playable in the modern age. I'd love to see how they'd update his appearance, for one thing.

edited 22nd Oct '16 9:50:05 PM by PresidentStalkeyes

I figured you just really wanted Adel to be the Hero for once

Well, I certainly wouldn't mind. I mean, They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character. :V

I'd personally look forward to the possibility of Ambrosia-powered Rugal, since Mizuki is one of the souls hosted by Verse. Yeah, Orochi-powered Rugal is bad news... Ambrosia-powered Rugal would be even worse.

What about Orochi and Ambrosia powered Rugal?

If he comes back, shouldn't he have learned his lesson already from "exploding" in '95 from absorbing too much power? One power source already rekt Rugal, what more two?

edited 25th Oct '16 9:00:44 PM by Malco

That's because Orochi eventually got sick of Rugal's overuse of power. He kinda had this Blue-and-Orange Morality going. Ambrosia on the other hand is full on God of Evil. It's more than likely to let Rugal run to town with infinite evil power.