King of Fighters Collection: The Orochi Saga Review
By Dana Vinson - Posted Jan 05, 2009In this review, X-Play takes a look at the 'King of Fighters Collection: The Orochi Saga' for the PlayStation 2.
The Pros
- A big slice of 2D fighting history for $20
- Hefty archives of music and artwork
The Cons
- The occasional graphics glitch
- Some of these games have aged better than others
Five games for 20 bucks is a hard deal to argue with. True, most of these games probably don’t have much significance to a younger generation. King of Fighters ’98, as the title suggests, is just a shade over 10 years old now, and it’s the newest game on offer in this collection. If you go to a good-sized arcade in Japan, though, or one of the remaining hardcore gamer destinations in places like San Jose or Pasadena, you might still see ’98 in a cabinet drawing business.
Plenty of fans will loudly argue that SNK never made a better three-on-three 2D fighting game, not in a whole decade of trying. It’s definitely the gem of this collection, to the point where some players might take a pass on Orochi Saga entirely. (If all you want is ’98, after all, it’s already available for the PS2 in souped-up Ultimate Match form.)
It’s worth spending $20, though, to be able to enjoy the series’ entire first five years of evolution. Each game has its strong points and weird bits of historical significance – ’95 is very well-balanced for its time, ’97 has an amazing collection of bosses, and even the not-much-loved ’96 edition has the Deadly Secretaries.
Violent Fighting to Come Again
In 1994, someone at SNK had a bright idea. At the time, the company was cranking out at least two or three different series worth of 2D fighting games – Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, Samurai Shodown, and a couple of other oddballs like Kizuna Encounter and World Heroes from third-party developers. It seemed like a good idea, then, to take all those characters, along with a few from deeper in the SNK back catalog, and throw them all into one game.
Since the result would have a ridiculously large character lineup, along came another bright idea – let people use more than one fighter at a time. King of Fighters ’94 was the first major fighting game to introduce team play into the mix. Instead of using one character for the entire match, players fought with a three-man team in a best-of-five format. Team Italy came from Fatal Fury, Team Mexico from Art of Fighting, Team China was made up of throwbacks from an ‘80s platform game, and so on.
A year later, KOF ’95 introduced “Team Edit,” so players could mix and match three fighters instead of picking the same trio every time. KOF ’96 brought in a grab-bag of new characters, including some original creations and some surprising guest stars from other SNK productions. By KOF ’97, the series had developed a demented backstory to explain why all these people were fighting each other, so that game tried to give the plot something vaguely resembling closure. Finally, KOF ’98 billed itself as a “Dream Match,” with as many characters from the last four games crammed in as humanly possible.
Thin Black Lines
This collection presents all five games in something pretty close to their original arcade-born form. The older releases, like ’95, still have the familiar old Neo Geo boot-up bumpers in front of them, and the graphics are almost – if not quite – perfectly faithful to what we played back in the bad old days.
The most obvious problem, which has popped up in some other retro releases of old 2D games, is an interlacing glitch that happens to certain sprite animations. When the game’s displayed on a high-definition TV through component video cables, the sprites will sometimes briefly break up in mid-animation, with lots of jagged thin lines sticking out on the left and right sides. The worst example is the character shadows -- instead of a flickering, transparent gray overlay, they turn into a weird-looking matrix of solid black lines, which shows up especially badly on a stage where they’re laid over a light-colored background.
To make up for that, the collection includes a ton of bonus material. You can unlock complete soundtrack collections for every game – both the original in-game music and extended versions of several tracks – and listen to them in between browsing several galleries of promotional artwork. It takes a bit of waiting through load times to get through the menus, but in general this is no worse than a lot of Neo Geo console releases in the load-time department, and a heck of a lot better than some. (Playing KOF on the PlayStation or the Neo Geo CD, you could get up and fix a sandwich in the time it took the disc drive to grind away between fights.)
Times, They Change
Of course, the games themselves still have their leftover flaws as well. ’94 feels very much like what it is – a first attempt at making a new idea work – and it’s hard to go back to after being able to play the later games, which have a far broader selection of different characters and fighting styles. ’96 added Vice and Mature, the infamous Deadly Secretaries (a subtler pair of sex symbols than Mai Shiranui and her in-your-face assets), but it’s not nearly as well-balanced as the games that came before and after it. ’97 looks and plays pretty well, but for one reason or another, half the stages have no background music. Hindsight has always reckoned ’95 and ’98 to be the class of the series’ early days. After some time with this collection, that seems about right – especially when it comes to ’98, which has the best balance, the biggest character lineup, and the smoothest animation.If King of Fighters doesn’t already mean something to you, is this set worth picking up? ’98, at least, still stacks up pretty well compared to more recent 2D fighters. Although it doesn’t have the super-sharp sprites or absurdly dense gameplay of something like Guilty Gear, it’s good for a fair amount of friendly and not-so-friendly competition. You could get that from the Ultimate Match re-release as well, but 20 dollars isn’t too much to pay for a little historical perspective in the bargain.
Article By: D.F. Smith
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