King of Fighters XII

Art

Visuals aren’t everything in a game, indeed games that are pushing 20 years old can still be enjoyable; ultimately its the game play that settles whether the game is good or not. However, artwork can really make a title more enjoyable to look at, and therefore a more well rounded package; it’s not the be all and end all, but it is important. With that in mind let’s take a look at what King of Fighters XII has to offer.

From the get go, you can really see the detail that has been put into the game. All background environments are hand drawn along with all of the character’s sprites which have seen their first update from the originals in 14 years. This does give a very old school feel to the game’s visuals, giving you that nice mixture of retro with modern high definition.

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The backgrounds in the game do look impressively detailed. There’s often tens of spectators cheering on the fighters, with very different appearances to each of them. Further back you’ll often see fireworks, or jumping whales, animals running around; there’s always a lot going on. However, it doesn’t last long before simply repeating itself. Every single environment, despite it’s levels of impressive hand drawn detail, simply loop through the same 10-20 frames of animation, which becomes very obvious once you’ve played in any of the game’s sub-10 fighting arenas for more than 5 minutes. Often times also, the animated people watching the fight seem to be move far faster than they would naturally, creating some very strange scenarios that just pull you out of the game completely. In one map, a man is seen eating, rice, or noodles, but its done so fast that he’s shoveling pounds and pounds of it down his throat every couple of seconds, without pause, for the entire fight. It just looks odd, and the repetition is tiresome.

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In the foreground, the fighters themselves are animated beautifully. The attacks are all incredibly fluid considering their hand drawn roots, and you feel the punches as they collide in a swash of sparks, electricity and fire, similar to that of the Tekken series. Jumps look realistic to a point, and rolls, punches and chops are all smoothly executed with no judders throughout; the animators did a stellar job. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for those responsible for the character sprites – though I imagine they’re the same people. Every single character in the game, while like the environments are very well detailed, suffer from pixellation and aliasing at their edges, horrendously. This again, spoils the effort that has been made to make this game look fantastic. While you’re fighting at full speed you can’t really notice the pixels, but as soon as there’s a minor break in the action, your character pops off the screen with the jagged edges to them. I fail to see the point in updating the visuals and moving away from blocky imagery if you retain one of the main irritants of old school graphics.

A case could be made that this is to add to the retro feel of the title, but that’s a hard point to argue since this game is seen as somewhat of a series reboot. It may come down to a case of personal preference, but it irks me to see the animations wasted on poor looking character sprites.

Games