The SNK Thread

[Nester the Lark]

So, here's the compilation of Neo Geo Pocket Color games:



It includes all of the games released on the eShop so far, plus both Metal Slug games, Dark Arms: Beast Buster, and the one I hoped would get included, Big Tournament Golf/Neo Turf Masters.

It's labeled "Vol. 1," so I guess there could be another collection. Also, it's available digitally right now, with a physical release to come later. The price is US$39.99, which is half of what it would cost to by each game individually (if they were all available digitally, that is).

[nocturnal YL]

Too bad there isn't an option to play the system without a game!

I'm actually kind of serious. NGPC has one of the best system menu music, and the horoscope feature is pretty neat.

[Nester the Lark]

I haven't been keeping things too up-to-date here, but I just wanted to post the reveal trailer for Hibiki in Samurai Shodown.

I believe this is the first time she's ever appeared in 3D, but I think she looks great! Very faithful to how she appears in The Last Blade 2.

[Nester the Lark]

Well, a turn-based tactical Metal Slug game isn't quite what I was expecting.



Currently only confirmed for Steam.

[Nester the Lark]

News roundup:

- Effective August 1, SNK has a new CEO: Kenji Matsubara, former president of Sega, Zynga Japan, and Koei Tecmo.

- In other news, it was confirmed that King of Fighters XV is not planned for a Switch release. Not at all surprising, but still unfortunate.

- And on a personal note, the trailer for Athena was just released. She will be on "Team Super Heroine" with Mai and Yuri. I guess that means no Psycho Soldier team this time, making it the only other time since KOF2003. If that also means no Kensou, then that's really disappointing.

[Nester the Lark]

Update on the Saudi SNK buyout: the Mohammed bin Salmon Foundation now owns 96.18 percent of shares in the company. That's a lot more than the 51 percent initially reported.

[Nester the Lark]

In unexpected (and non-April Fools') news, SNK has announced The King of Fighters XIII Global Match for Switch and PS4.



This is pretty cool news, actually! Too bad I've given up fighting games. (And also still feel a little weird about buying stuff from SNK.)

[Nester the Lark]

Last year during EVO, SNK announced that they were developing a new game in the Fatal Fury/Garou Densetsu series. Just yesterday during this year's EVO, they revealed the first teaser trailer (though, it does not contain actual gameplay footage).



The game appears to be a direct follow-up to the previous game, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, released in 2000 for the Neo Geo. Based on the voice samples heard in the trailer, it seems that most of the characters are from Mark of the Wolves, with a few legacy characters from the older games, and possibly even Alice Nakata from KoF14.

Personally, I think it's pretty cool that a new Fatal Fury game is in development. Despite being the Neo Geo's premier fighting game series, it always seemed to take a backseat to more popular series' like The King of Fighters and Samurai Shodown, and is often dismissed as a Street Fighter clone. (Fun fact: both the original Street Fighter and the Fatal Fury series were created by the same person: Takashi Nishiyama.) But I think it has its own charm, and I have some nostalgia from seeing the original Fatal Fury so often in Neo Geo cabinets back then.

No platforms have been announced, but it's almost a given not to be coming to Switch.

What is coming to Switch, however, is The King of Fighters XIII: Global Match. A new trailer has been released for it, as well, and it confirms the release for November 16, 2023.

Of course, I don't play fighting games anymore, but I'm glad to see SNK still supporting the Switch in some capacity.

[nocturnal YL]

I was always under the impression that KOF is their flagship series even though FATAL FURY came first. And I also never thought the destinction was that important since everything that takes place in the various SNK games seem to happen in the same world. I know as games they're different, but I don't know how are they different. I don't play fighting games.

I imagine a new fighting game that just recently started development would primarily target PS5. That's where the genre's leader (SF6) is.

[Nester the Lark]

Well, you're right that King of Fighters is SNK's flagship series. (Ironically, I rarely ever saw KoF games in the wild.) Fatal Fury was just the first, and it led to everything after. Even the full title of the first game is "Fatal Fury: King of Fighters."

As a series, though, it maybe didn't stand out as much as some other games. KoF had team battles. Samurai Shodown was a weapons-based fighter set in 18th-century Japan. Even Art of Fighting had a unique mechanic for special moves.  Fatal Fury's only real gimmick was the multiplane stages where characters could sidestep between two, sometimes three, planes. However, even the series, itself, never knew quite what to do with it, as the mechanics changed a lot from game to game. Eventually, it just did away with it altogether for Mark of the Wolves.

Fatal Fury also followed the Street Fighter series' beats. Fatal Fury 2/Special very blatantly takes its cues from the SF2 games. Real Bout could be seen as the counterpart of the Street Fighter Alpha series. Mark of the Wolves directly takes its inspiration from Street Fighter III.

But like I said, the series still had its own charm.  Its got SNK's unique personality and character designs, and I like that most of the games take place in and around the same area: South Town.

It'll be interesting to see what the modern SNK does with it to make it stand out.

[nocturnal YL]

Matt McMuscles (the YouTube channel of What Happened? and The Worst Fighting Game fame) walks through some of the hilarious SNK translations.

(Note: video contains profanity (the narrator, not the games))

Here it is:

[Nester the Lark]

^ One inaccuracy in the video is that SVC Chaos was not the last game of the original SNK. IIRC, it was The King of Fighters 2000. SVC Chaos came out during the SNK Playmore era.

SNK's bad localizations were quite infamous back in the day. The explanation I once heard was that SNK knew their games would be niche in the West, so they didn't want to spend a lot of money on localization. Who knows what the real reason was, but the awkward English persisted well into the '00s until other publishers, like Atlus, began localizing SNK's games for them.

I used to wish that modern SNK games would include a "bad English" option just as a self-reference, but I realized that that would probably be in bad taste.

[Nester the Lark]

Capcom revealed during Summer Game Fest that Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui would be DLC characters for Street Fighter 6.

Here's the teaser trailer, but it does not contain any gameplay.



This is notable because it's the first Capcom-SNK crossover since SVC Chaos in 2003, the first time SNK characters have appeared in a Capcom game since Capcom vs. SNK 2 in 2001, and they're the first non-Capcom characters to appear in a mainline Street Fighter game ever.

I also wonder if this could mean Street Fighter characters might appear in the new Fatal Fury game or King of Fighters XV.

[Nester the Lark]

I finally revisited SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy for the first time in a few years, and since I never wrote detailed thoughts about it back when it came out, I've decided to go ahead and do it now. (*This got a lot more detailed than I intended.)

First of all, I had completely forgotten how to play it. I had to go through the tutorial again to relearn the basics, but it didn't take long for me to get back into the swing of things. The gameplay is completely different from that of a traditional fighting game, which I think is why it didn't catch on with the fighting game community. The controls were designed around a regular game controller. They later patched in support for arcade sticks due to demand from fighting game fans.

Basically, you get a weak attack, a strong attack, a special move button (used in combination with the analogue stick, a la Smash Bros), a throw button, a block button, a tag button, and a button for "Dream Finishers." There are also items you can collect and use in the game, and they're activated by simply flicking the right analog stick.

As the title indicates, it is a tag team game, but it's different from other tag team games in that both characters share a single life meter. However, each character has their own "spirit" meter, which is depleted when using special moves, Dream Finishers, or doing an evasive roll after blocking. The spirit meter gradually refills automatically, but the meter for the inactive character refills faster, so this encourages you to swap characters. Also, the life and spirit meters occupy the same bar, so as your life goes down, your spirit meter gets larger.

It is a combo-oriented game, but basic combos are pretty easy to pull off. Basically, you can mash the weak attack button to do a simple three-hit combo. You can also cancel into a strong attack or special move. Some moves bounce the opponent off the side of the screen, allowing you to juggle them for more hits. You can also tag your partner in during a combo if you really want to get fancy, but it costs a bit of your partner's spirit meter. You can also combo into a Dream Finisher, but only from a special move.

Speaking of which, you might be wondering what a Dream Finisher is. Basically, it's this game's version of a super move. You can do them at any time, but they drain a lot of spirit meter. However, they are required for defeating an opponent. Simply depleting their health meter isn't enough, and only causes them to get dizzy. You have to use a Dream Finisher when their health is very low and turns red in order to win the match. This is one of the more controversial aspects of the game.

Another detail that's controversial is that there is no crouching. Your characters are always in a standing position. I guess some people feel this simplifies the gameplay a bit too much. (Even Smash has crouching attacks.)

Anyway, those are the basic fighting mechanics. I honestly think they're pretty clever and well-balanced, even if they aren't super deep.

The funny thing to me, though, is that SNK went out of their way to create this robust casual fighting experience that anyone could easily get into, and then completely undermine it with the fan service theme, which inherently gives the game a very niche appeal. I'm not personally offended by it, and I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm anti-fan service (Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, and it definitely has its fan servicey elements), but it's not exactly my cup of tea, either. I can feel a little uncomfortable with it if it's excessive or gets too exaggerated. It can also be distracting if it's off-tone.

As far as fan service games go, SNK Heroines is relatively tame. It certainly isn't on the same level as something like Dead or Alive, or Senran Kagura. The game's tone is also very lighthearted and self-aware, and some of the dialog is quite funny.

Speaking of which, one of the more interesting aspects of the game is that there is unique dialog in the story mode for every possible tag team (not counting DLC characters). For example, Athena will have completely different interactions with each of the other 13 characters that you team her with. This affects the prologue cutscene and the pre-final boss cutscene. Not all of it is that interesting (some of it definitely feels phoned in), but it's impressive that the devs went through that much trouble.

Finally, there's the customization mode that allows you to customize your characters with various outfits and accessories. This sounds cool in theory, but I don't think they quite nailed the execution. Some of the accessories seem completely random, and don't feel flexible in terms of creativity. (I can put a ringing telephone on my character's head, but what does that really amount to?) It feels oddly limited. I get the feeling that they intended to expand on it a lot with DLC, but that never came to fruition.

To go with it is a photo mode. Each character has 30 preset poses, many of which recreate iconic poses from earlier games or official artwork. There is also quite a large number of backgrounds to choose from. (There's an entire category devoted to real life photos taken inside SNK's office. I find that kinda funny, for some reason.) Photos can be used to create in-game avatars, presumably for the online mode (which no one plays anymore).

That's about it. I wouldn't say my thoughts have changed from when I first played it. I think it's a pretty fun casual fighting game, even if I feel a little weird about the fan service. As I said in another thread, I think SNK was on to something with the gameplay, and I'd like to see them revisit it, but they might need to reconsider the theme if they want a broader audience to find it.

[Nester the Lark]

So, SNK just announced that they're re-releasing SVC Chaos with online multiplayer. It's available on Steam now, and will be on Switch, PS4 and GOG on July 22.



Also, as I mentioned in the shoutbox, SNK very casually mentioned during their EVO developer panel that they're working on a new Art of Fighting and a Samurai Shodown action-RPG. They also said they were hiring a lot of new staff to work on several other projects that they couldn't reveal yet.