You don’t have to decide once and be done forever. The Super Special moves are definitely a game changer if you can execute them at the right time, and giving up that option to turn on the Armor Mode doesn’t always seem worth it, but that’s the great part. KoF99 doesn’t let you choose stances prior to battle but, rather, you can change into either a Counter Mode (high offense but higher damage taken) or Armor Mode (better defense and HP but no super attacks). This is at the pinnacle of 2D, 16 bit style fighters, and the controls are as smooth and fluid as you could hope for with a rom port to the Switch. King of Fighters 99 is all about people who were comfortable with mixing straight hits with special attacks and brutal combos that you had little hope of breaking out of.
You can’t rotate your striker between full matches, so you need to really decide who’s gonna be the best person to only kind of hit on occasion and not just either a.) leave your side entirely or b.) do most of the regular fighting.Īnd you will fight. It may reset between matches, but I often forgot to activate my striker, which is probably why I died so much. Each fight is actually a four on four team battle, with three people entering the arena and the fourth being a “striker.” The striker’s job is to jump in and do a super attack when the right buttons are pressed, and you can only do the striker attack as long as you still have a “bomb” credit at the bottom of the screen.
King of Fighters 99 will reward those who take the time to get to know their fighters, because you can’t just pick one: you gotta make a team. You have a whopping 30 characters to choose from, and you will see tons of familiar faces if you spent any time in arcades prior to picking up this game. You could have the whole backstory written by Tolstoy and if the fighters handle like dead fish then it ends up in the dollar bundle. I mean, King of Fighters has like 14 entries and the main storyline has to do with the characters made specially for this game, but it’s a fighting game. It honestly doesn’t matter, and I feel bad for saying that, because someone took the time and effort to craft these story lines. Some shadowy dude you don’t know but suspect is evil has sent out invitations to fighters around the world to beat each other up for reasons that are also probably evil or something.
Here, in 99, the King of Fighters series has already been going on for five years, and this one is marking the end of the century. SNK, which already had an unparalleled edge with fighting games to begin with, took a bunch of characters from their popular franchises (Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting) and mixed in a bunch of other characters (Ikari Warriors, Psycho Soldier) and then even made a fistful of new characters that grew steadily over the years. King of Fighters 99 is hailed as one of the best in the series and, more specifically, the best fighting game on the Dreamcast, which is high praise for one of the greatest systems of all times. Who had literally been doing it for years prior to the first Smash Bros. “Pikachu can fight Samus, it’s so awesome!” Yea, no one had ever thought of mashing up different characters from other games to hit each other. But everyone who even casually has seen or played it always salivates like crazy about how it’s original in Nintendo bringing together all their characters into one game to fight each other. The way it handles the arena type battle, the nuanced fighting style, and the hilariously dedicated player and fan base is something to behold. I’m not gonna pretend it’s not a great game, it really is. Everyone always frigging lauds over Super Smash Bros.