RETRO REBOOT | The King of Fighters '96 (Neo Geo)
The annual SNK crossover tournament gets a little bit bumpy in this mediocre sequel
RETRO REBOOT
"ColonelFancy" Mike Lind
8/4/20264 min read
Developed by: SNK
Publisher: SNK
Released date: July 1996
Back in the 90's, fighting games were a giant part of my video game playing. Street Fighter II's revolutionary gameplay changed the field forever. Another series that was near and dear to me was SNK's Fatal Fury series, and to a lesser extent The Art of Fighting. Both games took place in South Town and the stories loosely converged. While lacking the polish of Capcom's tournament fighter, what I always loved was the lore and characters. Through 16-bit ports to the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, I was able to play it. But one day while waltzing through my local arcade in the mid-90's, I saw the Hungry Wolves, Terry, Andy, and Joe Higashi battling it out against characters I had never seen before.
KOF 95, I was at least able to play on the PlayStation. It kept the same team-based battle philosophy intact, though sped up slightly and had more fluid combo accessibility. Then there's King of Fighters 96, which was an interesting entry. A game that may not have had a ton of improvements, it wasn't completely awful, but it was just...there.
The King of Fighters 96 wasn't accessible to me. We weren't avid video game buyers, so a meager household that already had a Super Nintendo, a Genny, and an Atari 2600 wasn't going to find room or finances to support a $700 system, with games that cost almost half of that. The opportunities to play KoF 96 were scarce, but had some interesting advances in the lore.
The penultimate entry in the Orochi arc introduced some popular characters that would be staples forever like Vice and Mature. Chizuru Kagura was a welcome addition as a foil between Kyo and Iori. Kasumi Todoh from the fairly obscure and overlooked Art of Fighting 3 swings by to take Yuri's place on the Women's Fighters squad to join Team Art of Fighting in place of her dad Takuma. There was also the Boss Team, a nice idea, that they never really did again. Not to mention Leona Heidern.
Roster is fine. But the gameplay is a slog by comparison to the previous entry. Gone is the influx of timing and precision, and in its place appears to be an effort to make a more grounded style of combat that's thrown out of whack by the new moves introduced. Projectiles feel sloppily implemented, I'm guessing in an effort to make 96 feel more "close up" and rushdown-centric. Even that doesn't work, as the inputs are noticeably inaccurate, and the action becomes very monotonous.
The game is a gimmicky mess, as the C+D attack, which is a hard knockdown, can be spammed into oblivion, devaluing the purpose of many normals and projectiles. Invincibility frames while rolling or dashing don't have imprecise windows. I suppose it can be considered an experimental game, as it was a bridge between the old and the new KOF titles. And I guess it's more technically diverse than 95 (one of my favorite entires), but I just never found this appealing and unbalanced. Especially when trying to fight the game's boss, Leopold Goentiz.
King of Fighters 96 does have pretty good music, and the sound effects are crisp. Another area 96 is great are the visuals. I don't want to come off as that pocket of Neo Geo fan that swears they should have stuck with the pixels, but they certainly were a technical marvel for the time. Being real, around the time of stuff like Darkstalkers, Tekken, and Soul Edge the KOF pixel art was starting to look dated. One of the cool things about this series has been observing the mountains of activity taking place in the backgrounds of stages, and the animations from all the...fans(?) are pretty eye-catching.
Something else I miss about the older King of Fighters games was the teammates sitting on the sidelines cheering their respective partners on as the fight continues, either defeated or waiting for their turn at action. That's something I always wished they had brought back. It's not integral in the gameplay in any way, but it really conveyed a nice touch of comradery.
Going back to aspects of the gameplay, you can see the traces of what would be featured in later KOF games, like cancelling into Super Moves, and counter-attacks. Returning fighters like Athena and Kensou are nerfed, due to the weakened emphasis of projectiles. As a result, the grapplers like Clark and Vice will be tough to play against. Iori, naturally, is top tier. But goddamn, Vice is unstoppable. Again, it's probably too much of the "FGC" guy in me, but it drove me nuts.
The King of Fighters 96 is an okay game. Just not an overly fun one. It's unfinished, the production was rushed, and the unbalance is frustrating. The lore was fascinating, of course, but this was a game that needed to take a broader leap to keep up with the contemporaries of the time period. While 97 and 98 would be vast improvements, 96's chunky design did little to broaden the appeal of KOF, at a time when other fighting game franchises were getting faster and flashier.