I am so bad at this: King of Fighters XIII Steam Edition

No seriously. I don't just mean I am bad at the game, I am bad at playing the game. My left thumb starts to ache up bad from playing. Doing the charged special moves - which have some ridiculous name I can't even remember- starts to cause me pain pretty quickly. I feel like I'm wrestling a porcupine and I'm pretty certain I'm not winning the fight.

And yet man, I really love King of Fighters.

I really don't know a great deal about advanced fighter mechanics; I don't enjoy watching people play fighters, I don't really know much about EVO or salt or being salty or any of those things. I watched a little saltybet, which exemplified the actual Best Of Twitch chat in a weird role reversal of the natural order, but I've never installed Mugen, I haven't played a street fighter game in a decade and I know very little of Capcom's fighters. Divekick makes vague sense to me.

I am the person who is reviewing a fightmans game in the sense of not really knowing a great deal about the art of the fightmans. When I was a kid, I found doing a fireball in SF2 kinda difficult. I was not good at fightmans, and I did not like fightmans. So if you like fightmans, I'm going to sound like a blithering idiot, but if you're a casual like me, this is a review for you.


I can't really articulate what it is that makes me find the KoF family of fighters so charming to me. I never really liked the iconic Street Fighter designs as a kid, something about them struck me as rather lackluster. Mortal Kombat, well, I always felt like it sold entirely off hype from its gore and wasn't really up to the snuff of Street Fighter.

But KoF man, I don't know. Just something about K' makes me smile, from his ridiculous one-liners in a language I barely understand to the fact he wears motorcycle riding gear. I mean, motorcycle gear is generally rather futuristic looking, but its for riding a two-wheeled engine thingie, not punching people in the face or doing flying kicks in. But that is sort of the thing, other than Mai who is ... Mai, zounds ... the character designs in KoF were always really distinctive and neat looking. Even Robert Garcia, who is supposed to be a rip off Ken or something like that is somehow so unusual looking in spite of the fact he's like a 70s style playboy or something? I don't even know, but he looks pretty generic and yet pretty cool.

But K' rules. The cast rules.

K' = 8[ = > u

I don't know how the move sets of most fighting games have evolved over the years, but KoF is probably at the point where there are too many characters with too many moves for them to all feel distinctive. You end up with a lot of quarter circle rolls to do fireball, and dragon punch motions to do dragon punch analogues (that's forward down diagonal if you don't know) that do have different arcs but tend to all work sort of generally the same. I don't find many of the characters play all that similar, since they tend to mix it up, but once you learn one character's move set even their meter using specials are pretty discoverable. Anyway, while moves aren't that distinct, characters generally tend to feel mostly distinct, or built from each other's elements. What does end up happening is some characters feel like they don't have enough moves compared to other characters, who just feel like they either have more, or have access to simpler neo max good lord this term specials.

Doing two 180 degree rolls into a double button press is just harder than doing a quarter one way, then back the other half, you know? No matter how you phrase it, it is physically impossible for the latter to be worse than the former since you still have to expend time physically making the gesture. Anyway I'm not going to go too far into balance, because I'm garbage at the game, but it really did feel like some of the characters were just harder to play and no one who can handle this game cares so the design has gotten a touch inbred.

The specials all, generally speaking, look fantastic. Even goofy stuff like Andy Bogard's weird flappy dragon punch look great in motion. When the game slows down you do tend to go oh, um, yeeeeah and maybe wince a little. The super specials almost all look incredible, except weird jank like Surprise Rose and Double Strike. Build that meter King, but don't ever use it.

In terms of the visual suite the game is, as far as I can tell, a sprite based fighter or built to strongly resemble one brought forward to what machines can handle. Everything is silky smooth and there is very little where the animation doesn't look great. Some of the backgrounds are a little weird, but they're all filled with color and personality, which changes between rounds. When I say weird, well, the one level is a french cafe with a huge number of very large ladies banging around. Another level is some jungle looking set up, with big chubby cartoonish natives slapping their bellies.  Is there subtext here? But there was clearly so much effort put in, you don't even notice half the details each time or pick up something new when you win a fight. It's pretty awesome stuff.

Character design, like I said, is really strong and mostly distinct. I do wish the DLC characters were a touch more distinct from their base characters, and Vice/Mature could have stood for a redesign to make them a bit more divergent from each other, but other than that it's a pretty huge cast of unique and awesome looking fighters. To accompany the characters, the music is excellent. Maybe I've always liked KoF because Goodbye Esaka was always an amazing song, but the soundtracks is just an endless parade of catchy ear wurms. There are a couple indistinct or goofy songs I either don't notice or don't like, listening to Who is Queen? for ten minutes can get a bit painful, and I had Irregular Mission stuck in my head for days. Well, not because its bad, it just gets stuck in your brain.

I don't really know how people take the audio in KoF, for me, it is extremely nostalgic and many of the clips have the rarefied air of 'classic' that resonates in my brain. The audio never annoys me, it sounds crisp and the character voices are good. I do wish there was a little more vocalization in menus and in the story bits, but I guess people are accustomed to the silent character exchanges.

On that note, while I enjoy the versus and arcade modes, and the survival stuff is neat, I find the story mode really overwrought and just loaded with way too much not story, not punching. I don't know if it is just that it isn't "for me" and don't "get" how fighters tell stories, but it just feels a bit too janky for me to enjoy. It also took me a while to realize, in order to just play a string of 1v1 matches, you need to set up versus and then tell it to randomize. But even then it isn't quite as punchy as I'd like, with a lot of numbers and talking and just things that aren't the core gameplay.

Have I mentioned the core gameplay is good? Even as a novice, albeit a patient one, I found the core game to just be really enjoyable predicated on the excellent visuals and solid engine. Just really satisfying, and altogether an excellent purchase. I think I got it in a bundle even, which is just nuts.

And now, for the negatives...

There aren't many issues I can speak of to the single player game, at least from a technical standpoint. The game is mind you a bit iffy on the old 1080p scale, and feel a touch upscaled, but it is still a visual treat to me. Your mileage may vary, as the saying goes, but I do sort of wish they'd scaled it up a little more natively. I don't know if they have the assets to do so, though.

The game does stall here and there, in a very strange way. Loading times are generally very snappy, and the game can go from the steam context menu to loaded with punching in a period measured in seconds. Yet every couple rounds of play the game will just sort of jam up, doing nothing, and then just get back to running again without any sort of rhyme or reason. I don't know what this implies, but it isn't a big deal for me.

I guess its sort of a minor element to point out but sweet Jesus the breast sizes are just exploding in this version of the game. Mai has always looks ridiculous, but her sprite at this stage is just insane. It also looks like some sort of weird breast inflation cartoon porn and not, I don't know, an attempt at an attractive character design. I mean her animations are still awesome to watch, but that first bit where you open the round and her idle animation looks like some seedy flash porn game is just oy.

I'm not really good enough to bother with online play, and a cursory look shows it is apparently mostly dead. I think that is a bit of a shame, but I also get the impression that the online fighting community is both not especially huge and is incredibly sharded. So I guess if you're looking for what, buy SF4 nine million adjectives edition, and then maybe you can find someone? Except apparently they broke the netcode, so I don't even know.

Anyway, more seriously...

you're right Iori, beating children IS funny

Simply put my love for KoFXIII is rooted in a sort of weird nostalgia, where I really enjoyed an earlier version of the game and it keeps going into this version of the game. I think it was KoF2003, but I'd have to go dig around to figure out. I didn't play it in the arcade to any real extent, I played it emulated years back with MAME or something.

The thing is - I was pretty bad at KoF2003, and while I think I'm a little better at XIII, I feel like this game is just absurdly complicated and the barrier to getting past the button mashing stage is just insane. The game has so many mechanics that I can't actually finish the tutorial. I can string together simple quarter or half turn specials pretty reliably, but when you start getting into hyper drive cancelling one special that requires 270 degrees of movement and then two quarter turns into another special my hands just can't cope. Whether or not it is me screwing up, or the xbox one controller not being up to snuff, I'm not sure, though I'm more than willing to say it is me. A lot of the instructions just don't make any sense and the game could use a bit more in terms of documentation or explanation. I've gotten to the point where I can do a couple drive cancels and might accidentally do a super cancel, but I can't string together long combos and I'm not even sure how.

"I can't finish the tutorial" is pretty indicative of the game's overarching design and while I don't want to call it flawed I honestly doubt that most people are going to enjoy the game for very long. I'm saying 'most people' here in the sense of the larger gaming community who might enjoy this, not like 'most fighting game players' because I don't know any or 'most gamers' because actually most gamers couldn't puzzle their way out of a paper bag. If that sounds arrogant, well, keep in mind I am straight up admitting I just can't cope with this game's mechanics, so I'm not seeing the personal bar much higher here.

It actually sort of makes the whole review process a bit humbling and also pointless. Like sure, this is a wonderful, nuanced fighting game with an amazingly deep and interesting system you could spend your whole life fiddling with. It is also ridiculous to the point of feeling like you're executing a programming language in real time, with an endless assortment of complex commands. There is a language to advanced fighting games, and honestly?

Most of us are never going to speak it.