Shockingly, series-mainstays Kyo Kusanagi and Iori Yagami were amongst the cuts! Imagine if Capcom released a Street Fighter game without Ryu or Ken in it and that's the level of disruption in KOF '99. KOF '99 was the start of a new era and that meant slimming the roster down to just 30 fighters, 24 of whom were returning combatants. KOF '98 weighed in with a tremendous 51 fighters, gathering nearly every character seen in the series at that point in a single game. When a Striker jumps in, they perform a set action and then leave they have no life bar but they can only appear a finite number of times per match.Ĭhanging the number of characters per team was big, but the biggest change was to the roster of characters itself. At the start of each battle, players choose three of their selected characters to fight with the fourth serving as a "Striker" who can be summoned at any time during the match.
The King of Fighters '99 shook up the format by upping the number of characters per team to four. By comparison, the KOF style of choosing three fighters but only using one at a time was less fresh. Even other Neo Geo games like Kizuna Encounter featured swappable fighters. Capcom's VS-series of Marvel fighting games were 2-on-2 contests where switching fighters mid-match was an essential mechanic. But by 1999, there were a lot more team-based fighting games on the market. When The King of Fighters debuted in 1994 it was groundbreaking for players to choose a squad of characters instead of just one. Which means on Septemexactly one year after KOF '98 - SNK released The King of Fighters '99 on the Neo Geo and in doing so tried to upend the entire series.Ī lot can change in five years, especially in the world of video games. The show must go on and it must be ready in the next 12 months. But for KOF, an annual franchise at the time, that was not an option.
For some video game franchises, achieving that level of greatness means years of iterative special tweaked editions and possible spinoff series before eventually making a proper sequel (I say as I glance at Street Fighter II). As previously established here on Retronauts dot com, The King of Fighters '98 is my favorite video game of all time, a culmination of universe-building across multiple independent creations that resulted in a massive collection of interconnected characters who hang out together and also punch each other's lights out.
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