Retronauts - 794: The King of Fighters ’94

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

ＧＯ　ＨＯＭＥ　ＮＯＷ！！ＹＯＵ　ＡＲＥ　ＮＯ　ＭＡＴＣＨ　ＦＯＲ Diamond Feit, Kevin Bunch, Brian Clark, and Will Cuevas when it comes to discussing The King of Fighters '94. ＩＴ’Ｓ　ＧＯＩＮＧ　ＴＯ　ＢＥ　ＯＵＲ　ＣＥＮＴＵＲＹ！Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week on Retronauts, go home and enjoy sports. Hello, welcome back to Retronauts, and welcome to the first of what promises to be a long and glorious series of podcasts about the King of Fighters. Yes, yes, it's time for episode 794. See that? Episode 794, which is all about the King of Fighters 94. Now, let's put things respect to here before we do anything else. I want to set the record straight here. Long, long time ago, there were a podcast.

Sorry, no. Wrong series. Episode 121. Retronus did a King of Fighters episode, but it was just the one. It was very brief. And Jeremy Parrish, I love you, but it was very clear during the conversation that you were basically asking the guests, everything. And you're just like, whatever you say, guests. So we are here today with me and three other super fans.

I'm going to say super fans so we can go all in on K-O-F, and we're going to do it one game at a time. We can do one game at a time. And let me tell you this, for that you can thank slash blame Stuart Jip, because Stuart Jip managed to ring five, one, two, three, four, five podcasts out of one Sonic the Hedgehog game. So if he can do five podcasts based on one Sonic the Hedgehog game, then I can dedicate an entire series of podcasts.

to my favorite fighting game series, and we'll get it done in less than 10 years. That's my promise to you, the listeners. By the time we're getting to K-OF-15, K-OF-16 will be out. Yeah, yeah, well, that's true. There is some aspects that it could go on forever. What I'm saying is, at the very least, we will get through the classics. The classics that are retro right now, we will get through that series within 10 years. But then by that point, yeah, there'll be more retro games, and we'll all be significantly older.

Who knows what will happen at that point? What's important here is that I'm not alone, much like KOF. I've got a team with me, although I'm doing four, which is not norm for 94. It's norm for 2001, but we'll get to that later. Let's start in the great state of Illinois. It's Brian Clark from One Million Power, and if you lose, you will join my collection. Oh, that's actionable threat. Watch yourself.

And let's switch over to the great state of Maryland. Which one? Oh, they're both in Maryland. I'm sorry. I thought you were New Yorker, Will. You got that energy. Ever since the playoffs, everyone thinks I'm a New Yorker now. Big mom.

Sorry. Sorry. I'll go ahead. I'll go ahead since I'm talking. Here to discuss Rugal Bernstein, or depending on the title, Berenstein, or Ruegel Bairsteen or et cetera, et cetera, it's Will Quayvoss. A multiverse of Ruggles.

That's a deep cut millennial joke. All right. And fourth, the other person in Maryland who is no less important than the other person in Maryland. Excuse me. It's Kevin Bunch. And for all my Detroiters out here,

you're going to learn a lot about the Bernstein advantage today. All right. Did we all reference Bruegel in our intro? I understand that. I get that. Yep, yep. See?

See, I knew someone would. I didn't say my name, but my name is Diamond Fight, and I think Metamorrow's right. I would look better in a dress. So we should also lay the groundwork here. So, yes, we're talking about King of Fighters. King of Fighters did not come from nowhere, though. So you might want to go back, if you didn't already do this, you might want to go back and listen to episodes 665 and episode 702, because those are both about the entirety of the Fatal Fury series, and the Fatal Fury series, I would argue, is the number.

number one progenitor of King of Fighters, especially because the very first game is officially called Fatal Fury, King of Fighters. So do the math on that. You'll find it, you'll find it all checks out. It's a real feeder league for K-O-F. Absolutely. And I also want to mention right at the top here, so I don't go crazy with quotes, four important sources that I relied upon for a lot of this material. Number one, back in 2004, when the series turned 10 years old, S&K made a little website called the K-OF 10th anniversary website. They did it in English and Japanese. They exist in varying forms of workingness,

so you might have to dig around, but they're both still out there, and they have a lot of insight into characters, and they have little tidbits about the development and what developers thought of the characters. So it's kind of fun. There's also a MOOC. That is not a MOOC.

It's a magazine book. It's a common Japanese term called All About K-OF94. That was posted and translated by Schmoplations. You can look for that up. GameSpot did an article called The History of S&K, which obviously involved a lot of KOS stuff. And most recently, but maybe out of print already, there was The King of Fighters, The Ultimate History from Bitmap Books. I don't know if it's still available. I was able to find an internet copy, but it's a very large tome.

I hope someone's selling it out there. I know that James and Joy Milkey were involved in its production and doing the interviews. So it's a huge resource with a lot of firsthand information. So if you're a K-OFN, trying to find that if it's still in print. I don't know. At least on Bitmap books, it says that it is currently unavailable. But while we're talking about Bitmap books, they do have a one for Fatal Fury that I'm not sure if it's still in pre-order, if it's out yet. But that's out there and a lot more obtainable.

So if you're interested in just S&K fighting game history in general, yeah, it was there. for, you know, Fatal Fury was their first fighting game in 91. So, yeah, check that out if you can. Yeah, maybe by the time this episode was up, things will have changed. But just, there's some names to rattle around. And speaking of names, since we all introduce ourselves, I just want to ask around real quickly, was everyone here already huge in S&K when KOF began, or was it the other way around?

Did you see KOF and then you started to dive into the rabbit hole? Like, oh, my God, all these characters come from other games. Let's start with Kevin, because Kevin went last before. So I'm going to have to credit Brian for this because I did not know anything about K-O-F until I started hanging out with him in high school because he had K-O-F-98 on the Dreamcast. And that was my first exposure to the series and S&K in general. Oh, my. Well, Brian, stories about you. So go ahead. Keep going. So I, 98 was the one that really sent me down the K-O-F rabbit hole. I definitely played 94, but I was pretty on board with S&K. SNK because I was into some of their other, believe it or not, non-fatal Fury or Art of Fighting Games, such as Samurai Showdown and really the flagship fighting game series for SNK and ADK World Heroes.

Very important series. It will get a stay in the sun. It will get a stay in the sun at some point. I'm the youngest. I'm most definitely the youngest K-OF fan here. In 94, I was 7 years old and living in a very small town, Louisiana. So access to something like that just was basically impossible for me at the time. It's a miracle that I got access to an arcade in general via the skating rink that was nearby.

My entry point for S&K fighting games specifically probably started in 2019 when Samurai Showdown, 2019 came out. I had played a few S&K fighters here and there, like whenever I would find a rogue MBS cab, but they were extremely few and far, like years in between playthrus, and I would never really remember what I had played anyways. If anything, it was, the MBS cab usually had like bubble bubble and like some metal slug. That's how I knew S&K was through metal slug. Sam Show 2019

hits. I'm aware of Samurai Shodun, because it's It's also one of those games that just, you know, happened to be in some of those random MvS cabs that came along. Got really into that particular game. And then COVID happened. And I had a lot of free time on my hands. And I was like, well, hey, I'm having fun with, you know, this Sam show. Let me, and I know S&K is a thing. And it's not something I've paid a lot of attention to.

Let me go ahead and dive in. And, yeah, I've kind of been in S&K town since 2019. And I love it here. I love it. It's a great town. That's fantastic. Some people bake bread, some and some people discovered fighting game history. That's exciting.

As for me, the oldest person here, I'm just going to say that I played a lot of arcade games as a kid. And at some point, I think in the late 80s, I figured out that a lot of my favorites had the name S&K on them. And then Fatal Fury happened, then Art of Fighting happened. And then King of Fighters happened. So I was basically there putting all the pieces together like a crazy person in front of cork board saying it's all connected. Yeah, like I knew MVS cabs around. Like I'd seen them all over the place like Pizza Hut, yeah, local arcades and whatnot.

But I never like made that connection to S&K and its various series until I got to try K-OF years later. I grew, I lived in Louisiana for like 13 years. I lived there from like 90 to like 2001 or so. Like that's like I guess it'd be more like 11 years. I left when I was like 13. And I think that he that entire time I was down there, I saw an MBS cab one time at like a grocery store.

Yeah. You know, and that the the nearby army base, Fort Polk had a, had a decent arcade on it. But we didn't go there very often. But like, yeah, I think I didn't start seeing MBS like on, you know, even like a remotely regular basis until like 2002, 2003, you know, and well, well past the arcade days. So it's like, oh, you know, I'm extremely, as far as like my dive into S&K fighting games, I'm like, I've been pretty reliant on like people having stuff and like compilations and stuff like that. Yeah, I worked in an arcade in the mid to late 90s. And weirdly enough, we had a four-slot MVS cabinet and the arcade operator did not let us put more than one cartridge in it at a time.

Why? I have no idea. I remember how mad he got when someone slipped Gau Kaiser in there. I was about to be like, wow, great for you. And then you told me the rest of that story. I was like, oh, never mind. But they didn't have 97. When it wasn't around, we filled it up, don't worry. They did it at 97.

The controls didn't work, but they had 97. Let's talk about some important people behind the scenes of the series and the first game. And, of course, that would sort of set the pace for the rest of the series. And let's start here by talking about very quickly, Takashi Nishiyama, who needs no intro at this point. Takashi Nigiyama is one of the most important people, I would argue in video game history, if not fighting game history,

just aiding an incredibly important person due to his work at multiple companies and sort of innovations in multiple genres. What's important here is that he was on, he was the producer, he oversaw KOF through 1999, then he left and he found a Dimps. DIMS is still an active company,

still active in making fighting games today. He is still the CEO of DIMS. So, Nishi, I think it was a Piston, Piston, Tishama. Yeah, Piston, Nishama. If you look for that nickname in credits, you'll find he has a very huge legacy. But let's also talk about the credited chief director of K.O.N. Masonori Kua Sishi, excuse me, aka Kua Yan.

He was relatively young hire, which, by the way, if you look at these names, you'll find out a lot of these people were relatively young hires. Like Nishiyama's at the top, and a lot of these other people basically just showed up for the Niojio, a couple of years earlier. So Kuwatsashi was hired by Esenka out of college. His first credit was baseball stars professional. He was saved with the series through 96. And according to his Twitter bio, he says, S&K, Saikyo, Square, K2, K2, Krogane, black glasses, I guess,

and zest crew. And we'll talk about K2 a little bit later. I know they're like a support company, but each one of those companies has its own reputation and not all of them are very famous, but all them are still working, and I think Kuoyan is also still working in games today. We have the lead planner-slash-system director of KF94, Toyohi Satanabe, aka Toyo-chan,

who also started on Baseball Stars Professional. He was an object designer on Art of Fighting. He remained active on the Koev franchise through 1999. Then he got special thanked in 2000, which means he probably left before they shipped it. and he joined flagship, which was Yoshiki Okamoto's company after he left Capcom. Then Toyo-chan went to Engines, where he remains today, and Engines again, one of many companies in Japan that does not publish or develop games on their own, but they assist other companies in making very big games, and they're really important. You know, someone should make a podcast about that someday, the unsung heroes of video game development.

Not me, though. I am. I'm too busy. That's a Jeremy Parish task. Yeah, exactly. That's a Jeremy Parrish sort of episode, I think. Real, I can tell you an entire episode about Tose, for example. There should be a Tose episode.

Tose is, yeah. I was going to say Nishi Yama could be an episode in of himself. What's that drawing? I think it's that I-X-D-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-D comic. Yeah, where it's like an entire, like, structure of Legos all supported by one little piece. Like, you can argue that tose is that little piece. See, the funny thing is you could do a tose podcast, but like no one would ever know it was you who did it. All right.

We're getting too on for to. There's no to see involved in this episode. I'm sorry. Last one name here we want to mention here is graphic designer Mitsuo Kodama, who worked at Iron briefly, but then was at S&K. He was also an object designer art of fighting. He has a lot of pseudonyms. Sometimes he was MK. Sometimes he was capsule Kodama.

Sometimes he is credited as O-Tim-Amadok-Eel, which sounds like some kind of anagram, but I could not solve it. Maybe you out there, any junior clue finders out there. Yeah, it seems like that, right? But what's the O-Tim-E? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe Mituo is like Mitsu-O? Yeah.

It's like a reverse thing, but then there's the eel. I don't know what the eel. Lee, I don't know. Maybe eel is his favorite food. I mean, who could blame him? It is delicious, but it's going extinct. Don't eat ill, folks. So, Kodama was involved in a lot of KOF games, but for some reason in the ultimate history, he's not credited.

I guess because these days, he, because he co-founded K2 with KSashi, and he's still active at K2, and K2 is currently a support studio owned by Capcom. Maybe he didn't want to have his name in a book about S&K while he worked at Capcom. I don't know. Well, whatever happened, he was very important, S.K., he was very important to K-OF-94. As soon as the 94 shipped, he left the company, which makes sense because if we get onto the act,

and anecdotes later, these guys all worked incredibly hard to get this game done, and I think he was just like, I got to leave, I got to split. This was too much. But he's still active. He's still making games. Again, look at his Twitter bio. He's very proud of his work on KF94 and the Tenshu series.

All these guys listen, other than Nishiyama, they, like, as Diamond pointed out, they were, they were young. They were like 25 or younger, according to KOF, the ultimate history. You know, many of these guys were not the most experienced when they were initially hired by S&K. They cut their teeth on, you know, stuff like baseball stars and AOF, you know, depending, like, you know, depending on the person. but by the time they started working on K-O-F-94 proper, most of these guys have one, maybe two games under the belt, and then maybe like two to three years of like experience.

A lot of real on-the-job OJT-type stuff. And then, you know, with Kodama, you know, leaving S&K, the ultimate history also points out that, you know, these guys when essentially 94 was greenlit, they worked really hard. They worked insanely hard. to make that game happen, but they also partied really hard. And I'm sure, I'm, um, stories of, of like, a team of 60 people, like, eating a restaurant,

like, empty and then bouncing on the tab, you know, or like, like, like, maybe like a person on the staff would, um, you know, break up with their, uh, you know, their girlfriend or whatever. And like five or six guys would take them on like a, a get over it kind of weekend, which I can only imagine what, you know, what that's, you know, probably like, probably like the precursor to whatever Shibuya meltdown is. So, so, so yeah, the, the, the, the thing about Kodam leaving makes, makes a lot of sense, which I'm sure we'll get into later. This does feel like a senior project for a bunch of people who worked on like these earlier S&K fighting game and other related projects, because it really is like the culmination of a lot of different things.

that they were doing with, you know, Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting. Yeah, as Ultimate History rightly points out, it was Smash Brothers before Smash Brothers was Smash Brothers. Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny, for a very long time, I started champion KOF because of that aspect. Like, you know, everyone, but, like, everyone wanted,

everyone wants connected universes today, and S&K was doing that 30 plus years ago. But it also means that when you look back at KOF today, it seems less special because today everyone is trying to do that. But when this happened, when this happened at the time, this was mind-blowing. It's why when you look at the intro, if you look at the intro for KF-94, it's like in a few seconds, like, oh, there's characters from that one game. Holy shit, there's the characters from the other game.

Wait a minute, here's a bunch of characters, I don't know, and they're all in this one game. What are you talking about? Like, it's just huge. It's a huge impact. You know, it's like a pleasure, a pleasure-filled punch to the gut. You know, I, that's a weird metaphor. But someone out there understands me. Someone out there understands me, I think.

It's definitely, it's definitely a cool thing. And I liked, so, you know, again, I didn't experience S&K as a child, but as a child, I did experience Konami. And Konami was a company that did a similar thing, especially like with like their prorodious titles where they were pulling in, characters from all kinds of different franchises they had in their toolkit and it's something like that that behavior of them I thought was

like really was really cool it was very cute as very enjoyable so for S&K I'm going to meet myself okay okay we'll get back to that we'll sort that out there we're having some audio background stuff well speaking of background let's talk about the background of KOF because as we alluded to earlier

this all started in the early 90s when S&K had multiple fighting game franchises. I mean, S&K in the early days, especially the early days in Neo Geo, they were trying everything. You know, if you look back the early Neo Geo titles, for every understandable game, like, oh, here's your Mahjong game with sexual assault in it. Here's your baseball game, you know. You also have weird stuff like Riding Hero, which is like a motorcycle racing RPG or Sengoku, which is technically a beat-em-up, but Sengoku was like the weirdest beat-em-up. you'll ever see, and I can't believe that has two sequels.

Like, a lot of the games were very far out there, you know. And so in the middle of this, you had Fatal Fury and you had Art of Fighting, which were both very traditional fighting games by this point, which is funny to say because the tradition of fighting games basically started with Street Fetter 2, but still, they were both recognizable fighting games as we know them today, if you see Fatal Fury or Art Fighting 1. They both look like fighting games, whereas stuff like Street Smart, the late 80s as K game, which is technically a fighting game, doesn't really look like fighting games as we

think of them today. It's more of a arena brawler, like pit fighter or something. Which is funny, since Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting are just, like, very weird by fighting game standards, like, very unique. But you can tell that the lineage is there better than you can with, like, Street Smart or like one of those other weird, like, fly-by-night games. There's that one, Konami did. I'm always trying to remember.

It's like, what, Marshall Masters or something weird? Not really relevant, whichever it is. So in these games, they start to lay little seeds to indicate that something larger is happening here. And I don't think they intended this. I think at first it was probably just a joke to them personally. And later on, they figured out, wait, wait, we're doing something here, aren't we? Because both games are set in the fictional American town of Southtown. Proofs we determined that South Town is probably in Florida,

which led to a lot of jokes in those past episodes. But unofficially, we don't know where it is. We don't know where it is. But maybe it's in Florida. So, in Federal Fury Special, which was like Fatal Fury 2 and a half, there's a secret boss fight against Yo, the star of Artifiding. And at Artifiting 2, there's a secret boss fight against a young Geese Howard, who is from Fatal Fury.

So with all that stuff happening, it made sense when the announcement, came and like, oh my goodness, we're actually putting all these characters together. But that's not how all this started. So this is amazing to me. K-O-F, as we know it, actually started as a beat-em-up, kind of like final fight. And the two working titles that survive to this day are Survivor or Dirty Knuckle, which is, oh, boy, I wish. I could have put some coins in a dirty knuckle. They got to revive that. Can they still do this game? Is it too late? Could they still make the, the, the, the, SNK universe beat them up?

I mean, they could because Dirty Knuckle never made it past like design documentation. They're like they did absolutely nothing with it other than like sketch out ideas like on paper. And I mean, there's no other game out there called Dirty Knuckles. So that that trademark is up for grabs.

It is very possible. I'm just saying they've done KOF. It's time for Dirty Knuckle. They've done KOF shooting games. They've done KOF dating Sims. It's time for Dirty Knuckle. basketball games. They have Shermy in a basketball game.

That's true. Shermy can dunk. Dirty Knuckle is, it's such a like B-grade, like 80s martial arts movie title, which I say with complete affection that had no disparity to that at all. That sounds like

an amazing time to me. Also, let's mention the fact that in Japan, Streets of Rage is called Bear Knuckle. Yeah, yeah. say connection there, but dirty knuckle. Oh, I love it. Dirty knuckle.

But the concept they had is they wanted to have a team versus team game where the player controlled three fighters and had to defeat three enemies. So basically, like, you're controlling one one character most of the time, but you have two support characters

who are helping you out. Because their idea was, well, if all these are, of all these are beat-em-ups are out there now, because by the time they're working on this, is already probably 90- 2-93. Like, there's a lot of beat-em-ups out there, but also fighting games are getting huge. So, like, well, what can we do here? What can make our beat-em-up different, all other beat-em-ups? So they have this, this sort of team concept. But ultimately, they're kind of like, I don't know if this

is going to work. You know, you can see, if you look it up, you'll see sketches. You'll see some, conceptual art. I don't know how it would have worked, but clearly I had some ideas. And in the end, they decided, you know what? Maybe we should just go with a fighting game. but I like this team concept. What if it's a team-based fighting game? And that's how it happened. Yeah, and I think they made the right call with beat-em-ups, honestly, for as much as I love that genre,

I can tell you by 92 even, like those games were not doing in arcades what they were even a year before because of fighting games. So they really did make the right call for as much as it pains me to admit that. I watched your Double Dragon 3 video. I was about to make that same statement.

I was like, let me see if Brian, you know, if the words come directly from the horse's mouth. I have to. And Double Dragon Three, that was 1990. Like, that's, you know, so we're already at least three years after that, at least when they're talking about this. So they come to the idea that, okay, let's do the fighting game thing. So they come up, the first thing they have is, all right, let's do eight teams, three characters. that should be enough to fill out this roster. And according to Kouasashi,

Kouisashi says this, quote, once we started making the main character roster, I suggested, why don't we bring characters in from the wider net of SK titles and make it a festival and make it more fun? That was my idea.

So Kua Sashi says it was his idea. I can't verify that. That's what he said. That's what I wanted to say earlier before I had to mute my microphone because my kid was yelling up to staircase. Sorry, sorry again about that. Um, that Konami, uh, they, they, they, with like, they're, they're more funny games. They brought other characters from other franchises. And it felt

exactly like that, a festival. Um, you know, it, it, it just felt like a party with, like, familiar characters. Um, so when companies in general do that, so like, when, when Konami has their parodias and when Nintendo has their smash brothers and when, uh, you know, S&K has their king of fighters. It's very fun. It's a very fun and cool thing to do. It's always enjoyable. I'm going to have the cork board and strings from Y, Y, Y, World to KOF. Absolutely. Yeah. KO.F. is not unique in this regards, but it certainly was an early standard. I think in some aspects, I feel it's the gold standard, but, you know, biased, of course. You're right. You shouldn't be afraid.

Obviously, this decision was not an overnight idea. They came up with this. They had to go around. Again, this is a very young team being managed by a veteran. And S&K has a lot of other employees who are probably working on their own series. They had to get permission from everybody around the office. So they had to do a lot of asking and probably some begging, maybe some, you know, maybe they had to go out drinking a couple times and convinced it was a good idea.

But ultimately, this worked out in their benefit because 24 characters for a brand-new fighting game is a big ask. It's a big ask, you know? So by borrowing characters from other series, they really reduced the pressure on themselves on coming up with new people. So if you look at the final roster of KF94, even though all the sprites are new and they've all been clearly, you know, arranged for this game to face each other, I think it's, I think less than half, even less than a third of the characters are actually original original. It's a very small number compared to. It's like 14. 14 of the 24.

14 of the 24 are existing S&K characters taken from Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, Psycho Soldier, Ikari Warriors. I think that's all of the games. And then the remaining 10, yeah, were brand new characters. According to the Ultimate History, they didn't get a whole lot of friction when they went around. asking for permission to use a character from existing franchises. I think the

Fatal Fury guys were like a little apparently were like a little miffed with some of the choices that they the character choices that they made. They obviously went with Andy Terry and Joe which are like the main three guys. I don't see what the problem would that be. Maybe they just wanted to push my who they got

you know anyways. I don't know. Apparently they didn't get too much pushback on on their character choices. The fundamentals of K-O-F now. So obviously, NeoGeo game is a four-button game. I would see the controls most closely resemble the Federal Fury games at the time, in that you've got light punch, light kick, heavy punch, heavy kick,

A, B, C, D. You can taunt when far away with the C button. A-B-together is a little sort of sidestep dodge, which resembles in a way, if you think about it, it kind of resembles the Fidel Fury, like, lane change, except there's no lane changes. And similarly, CD together is a very hard attack that knocks people down right away. And again, in Fatal Fury, a CD attack would knock your opponent into the other lane.

There's no other lanes here, but you can tell the A, B, CD moves kind of function similarly to those factors. If I had to choose between the two, I would definitely say that KOF 94 plays closer to Fatal Fury over AOF, Artifying for sure. Absolutely. Well, there's certainly no spirit meter. There's a different meter, but there's no spirit meter like Artifiding, which kind of defines that series as a whole. You do have a meter you can charge, like in fair artifying. So you got to give it that. That's true.

Holding down the buttons, ABC will charge up your meter. That is very true. But it's not every move requires meter, only certain moves require a meter. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like A.B., it makes it so easy to just invalidate projectiles to where projectiles are almost kind of bad in this game unless you're playing against the CPU or

someone who just doesn't know they can just hit A, B to make projectiles go away. You certainly have an out. When people try to throw fireballs to catch you waking up, like, you can just stand up and mash A.B. And the fireball will go right through you, you know?

But obviously, you got to think about positioning, because if you're mashing the Dodge button and the opponent gets too close, they might, you know, they might grab you and throw you. So, there's a lot of factors here. But yes, absolutely. Like, far away, two opponents far away from each other, you're probably not going to hit them with a fireball, dude. You're probably not going to hit them. Very rare for a 1994 fighting game to have a way to, like, deal with fireballs.

Yeah. It's still early, yeah. Anti-zoner's owners. Yeah. Also, I shut this up because literally 30 plus years of playing this game, I did not know there was a defensive blow, kind of like the Fidel Fury 2 attack where, like, you're pushing the joystick and a button together, and it's this weird sort of like, single hit move that has high priority. I never knew about that until today. Are you kidding me?

And upper body invincibility, yeah. Wow. It is something you can do in both of these games. On the English language, I believe it's the arcade flyer. They refer to this move as bop the bullies, which is just strange. Classic 90s, S&K localization. They really did love the word bop with their stuff.

Yeah. Does that imply that anyone facing off against you in this game is bullying you? I mean, we're all somebody's bully, Brian. I spot it. Someone out there views me as the world's most sinister villain. Someone does. It does mean that Yuri could be considered the canonical big bopper of the King of Fighters games. I want to go back to just real quick about the spot dodge,

the 5AB. I'd get one to point out that if I remember correctly, it lasts for 39 frames, which is a little over half a second. It only has one frame of startup, if I'm remembering correctly, and it has no recovery,

no recovery, which means that with proper timing, that you can make it so there's only effectively a one frame gap between spot dodgers. Mind you again, it's beatable by throw. But I feel like

K-OF-9-9. is pushing right up on the cusp of being like Cheeby Moon from the Sailor Moon fighting game on the Super Nintendo. Oh, no, but there's no timer scams here, right? No, you can at least throw them out of the Dodge here. Yeah, whereas Minimun, she just gets away with it for, you know, however long that's going to go on.

God, doesn't she ever? Unless you know the counterplay, but that's neither here nor there. You can listen to the Guilty Gear podcast to talk about Sailor Moon. ironically. But, you know, I do think it's very interesting, you know, I remember the first time I played 94, like, years ago. I didn't have that much experience with these early 90s S&K games, so I didn't really, like, put two and two together and how much they sort of bleed into each other.

But, you know, Fatal Fury Special, I feel like it's having a bit of a moment these days between Mikado playing the hell out of it constantly and just, you know, accessibility generally online. People have sort of come around to realizing it's actually a really solid fighting game. And coming from that to K-OF-94 now, I'm like, wow, this game in its systems make so much more sense.

Like if you have played that game, you can play KOF-94. Heck, all of these Fatal Fury characters, their moves are done the exact same way as Fatal Fury special. Another thing, it's very important, Fatal Fury characters are allowed to sort of crouch walk forward in this game, but only the Fiddle Fury characters because they already have the animations for it.

So that can be very dangerous for characters with a down charge move. Like you can, as Terry Bogart, you can literally like walk towards the opponent while charging down. And if they try and nab you, you can just, you know, flip up and do a rise and tackle. Yeah. But other characters with anti-airs, you know, with chargers can't do that unless they're already part of the Fido Fury Club. which is an issue, I would say, for other teams as well.

So let's talk with the meter for a second, because the meter is interesting to me. The meter is, again, supermeters are fairly new in 94. Let's be, let's remember right everyone. Supermeters are not that established at this point. So you have a meter, it fills up over time, or you can hold down three buttons and charge it. When you're at maximum status, it automatically depletes. So you only have a few seconds worth of active time. but during that time

you get a damage boost, a fairly big damage boost, and you can obviously activate a super move which is incredibly powerful if it connects. What's wilder though, in King of Fighters,

when you get down to low health and your life bar is flashing red, you're allowed to do free supers as much as you want, which is very much in line with the Fatal Fury games at the time. However, have low meter, if you have full meter and you're at low health, you can do a quote-unquote lethal

attack, which is a super move that does even more damage already. And some of these, some of these characters, if you do a super lethal, whatever attack with low health, you can deal like 80% damage. Like, it's a huge amount. Like, I get it. It's kind of like, oh, you want to, you want to, like, see-saw the match, you know, no one's truly out of it. But still, it's a lot of damage for one move. It was Sam shows Easton before Easton. I also want to point out that when your max meter is full, you also take more damage. It's a small amount.

It's nothing egregious. It's only like an extra like 10% more. But I mean, sometimes that could make the difference. You know, suddenly like, you know, now all of a sudden like a jab could just be what it needs to close out or like, you know, maybe get chipped out a little bit easier. But it's an interesting choice to, you know. give the players so much, but then also, like, you know, put them at, like, a little bit more risk. Yeah, like, if you have not played, uh, this game, I'll, I'll make a couple comparisons.

If you played, like, a recent Tekken game with their, like, rage, uh, aspect that's been around since, like, Tekon 6. Or if you played CVS2, Capcom versus SNK2 with its K-groove rage meter, like, that's what we're talking about. Like, it's a, it's like a 50% damage boost when you're in max mode. And if you charge it up your stuff. self and get into max mode, it's like, it lasts 15 seconds, which is an eternity in this game. That's a long time.

If you get knocked into it, it's only five seconds. So, like, the, obviously the impetus is that you do it yourself. But, you know, it's kind of, they try to balance it out a little bit. Like, if you taunt at someone, like in art of fighting, it will reduce their meter. By a pretty substantial amount, like, I think 16 dots or whatever it's considered. But still, you know, this is not a high, this is a high damage game. to begin with because, you know, it's from 1994. But when you are in

max mode, you can just delete someone with like a three or four hit combo. If you want to get into like the super like, you know, sweaty math of it, uh, the charge takes two frames to start up. And then you get one point per frame after that.

127, uh, points is a full meter. But, uh, taunting at your opponent um, reduces it by, uh, by 16. by 16 points. So you essentially eliminate, you know, 0.16 of a second off, you know, of charge time. So, so yeah, it's like, like you can charge up pretty quickly.

You get a knockdown backdash away and then charge up. That might be that last little bit you need to, you know, get into that 15 second max mode. Also, the charges are a little bit buggy in this game. So here's one fun thing about it that S&K didn't mean to include. So if you have a chainable line. light attack, which most characters in this game do, you can cancel that into the meter charge animation. So you can like do a light button like A or B, do a just tap the charge buttons, like all three

of them. That'll start you in the charge. And because you pretty much finish your charge animation as soon as you let go with those buttons, you can cancel that into a heavy button and then on to whatever you're going to do, which is insane. Because, you know, why not? Why not make this game even more of a damage, uh, spun? So not enough to get you like a full meter, but enough to kind of put a dent and working it up, essentially.

Just a little, just a little moment. Just maximum, you know, just, you know, Mac, getting more for less, essentially. Yeah. Uh, another unintentional, uh, mechanic, uh, special move morphing, uh, where if you, uh, use certain special moves, uh, with, you know, the two different strength, uh, buttons, uh, by inputing the move. again with the opposite strength button, you can essentially blend like the properties of your special.

So you could potentially get like a fireball with like the power of like a heavy fireball, but like the speed of like a light one, but with like the power of a heavy one. It's not like the most, it's not like a game breaking thing like in the way that like, you know, a role cancel and CVS2 would be. It's not like something that, you know, you would build a meta

around but uh you know it is it is a thing that's that's there you need to be aware of it also um uh there's no throw teching there's no throw teching and if player one if both players throw each other at the same time player one wins every time so one of one of those games one of those games it's uh you know it's there's a lot going on this game um mechanics wise especially compared to uh you know it's obvious uh rival street fire two which came out one month earlier, you know, you can say that, you know, that Street Fighter 2 is the more polished game. And I think that's a fair, you know, statement. But, you know, K-WF-94 also has, you know, triple, yeah, triple the cast and, like, way more mechanics compared to SF2, which is, you know,

your basic bare bones, like, strike-throw block. And like, Street Fighter 2 didn't even have a super meter until a super turbo. Super turbo, right? Yep. Which 94, exactly. You know, I just want to throw this out there. There's a bug that I forgot about until I was just reading up right before this recording. So it's not even in the notes. But so if you throw a character and then do a super

before they hit the ground, the damage from the super carries over. Wow. I didn't know that one. Which, you know, Athena can abuse very well because her super comes out so quick. And her throw takes so long. Yeah.

Her throw is very, very floaty. Like she throws them and they sort of go soaring through the air for a few seconds. Wow. So, you know, get that 50% off of every single throw for Athena. She needs it in this game. But if you don't know about it, it can actually bite you. So like if you do a throw and you sit there mashing jab, you're actually going to take less damage than you would have if you just done the throw.

I mean, no one would do that on purpose if they knew, but someone might just be doing it idly or something if they had no idea that was a thing. You know, it's just It's the first step in a long line of S&K K-O-F games that have weird things happening on with throws. Well, speaking of weird and supers, I do want to mention one important factor. Again, this is 1984.

It's still relatively early in the fighting game genre. And S&K in particular, well, I guess Capcom too, but both companies have their share of unusual commands. I think this is an era when the payoff is, the thinking I think at the time was here are these commands that are their moves that are very, very damaging. We're going to make the commands very hard to

input so that people can't just do them easily. And it's especially to be in King of Fighters because you have free supers when you're very low in health. But some characters, their super moves are incredibly bizarre. And my favorite, my favorite, which I think is Hydern and Choi,

is you've got to charge back, then span down to the box, down, then press up and then press buttons before you jump. It's usually two buttons because they're like following the Fatal Fury special standard. And this is really where you can tell that this game was made for like a four button in a row like rainbow layout. Because the buttons that they want you to press are almost always like the two middle ones, which if you do in like a modern box layout is very awkward.

Very. Yeah. Luckily with Hyder and you don't need. super's, but we'll get to that. Oh, God. Yeah, in most cases, the characters who come from other games basically have their same movesets and their same commands. They really don't change much.

So, like, not only is Terry's power gazeder, now is it really easy to input, the shortcut even works. So, like, when you're low health with Terry, you could just, you can fire that off in, like, a split second. It is so easy. It's so easy to fire that off. Just boom, boom, boom. Yeah, I like spamming a Mize super.

in this game just because like I'm so used to doing it and fail fury special. It's the exact same motion. Almost as good. In these classic years S&K gets the reputation for like being like a tougher set of games to play like as far as like doing like your inputs and stuff as concerned. But when I revisited

KOF 94 in preparation for this, I found it pretty pretty easy you know to do what I wanted at any given time. It didn't feel too tough to play in the way that like something like O2 did for me.

The AI, in the other hand, was, like, just mean as hell out the gate. Like, in some of these classic Essingade titles, sometimes, like, the first second fights are free, and then after that, that's when, like, the AI starts kind of, like, ratching up the difficulty. 94, it felt, like, just from, like,

the very first match, they were, like, input reading and just absolutely just, you know, giving me the business. I was like, man, well, hey, at least I can D-C consistently in this. God help you if the first match you get is against Rio. Yes. Yes. I am convinced that there is a lean in terms of like who you're,

the order your opponents are based on the team that you select. And it felt like I was getting a team AOF pretty consistently as my first opponent, simply for playing women's team, aka Team England, in this in 94. So let's talk a little bit about how the team thing works. So as we established before, it's eight teams of three characters. However, and this is the only game that does this, this is the first game, but they didn't figure it out yet, you cannot change your teams.

So essentially, really speaking, there are only eight choices on this character select screen, but once you choose your team, you can then break that down. And in each match, you get to choose what order they come out in. And it's match by match, too. It's not even like you pick your team and then you pick the order. It's like you pick your teams and then each match you can pick your order and you can change that around. So if you really want to start up with Terry each round, you can start with Terry every time.

If you won three rounds in a row with Terry and you're kind of tired of Terry, you can start the next match with Joe if that's what you want to do, you know? Or you can start each round with a different to fighter because you want to practice all the characters. It's up to you. What's also important is that your two teammates are always standing behind you. in the stage. And as long as they're still, you know, awake, like they haven't been knocked out. They can help you if you're near them.

Kind of like, kind of like in a pro wrestling match where if you're in your corner, you know, your team can kind of like knock the opponent off of you maybe when the rep is not looking. Like, there's no ref here. So if you're getting sort of choked out or whatever and you're in your corner, quote unquote, you can mash the buttons and your teammates will jump in and knock you out of the grab. And it's pretty fast, too.

Yeah, they're on it. I think the command's like ABC or it might be ABCD. Either way, they're like, it's very consistent. Just smash the buttons. It's fine. I really wish that they still did this because they stopped having like the teammates cheering in the background after 98. And it was like such a nice little like touch that really made it very endearing as a game. And they'll put more thought into it too, which we'll get into when we get later games.

But later games like put more into the system than just, you know, match the. buttons. There's more to it later, but that's, we'll get to that in later games. For now, it's just there. So this is a real disadvantage to some characters who have, you know, very powerful moves that grab the opponent and do lots of damage. Basically, those moves are basically worthless unless you're far away from your opponent's corner. Because otherwise, you'll get knocked out right away and you'll barely do any damage. So, also important, it's three on three. So each fight is only one on one. You can't call in your teammates to help you otherwise, like you can and say a Marvel Capcom, which we think of today,

or modern, you know, other later careoffs, I should do this too. But for now, it's strategically three on three, but one, one fighter at a time. And when you win, you get a little bit of health back for the next fighter, but not necessarily all of it. So if you, if the first two characters have a very close, long dragout fight, and you're at like 25 percent and you kill your opponent, you're going to get some life back, but you will start the next round at a disadvantage, like basically like you're tired if you imagine. Like you're tired from your first match,

you don't have all your stamina. You know, the corner thing, it makes me think, you know, this was about, this was the same year that S&K did Kizuna encounter, um,

which is a game where it's a tag game, you know, a tag team game, but you could only tag out in your corner. So I wonder like, if there was just something floating around the office, like with this idea of like, echoing pro wrestling matches in that way.

Well, we know Japan as a society has a deep love of pro wrestling, especially in the subset of people who make video games. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Huge. I'm going to go on a limit. I'm going to say at least 15% of all video games are secretly based on pro wrestling, at least. Certainly everything suit of 50s ever done is all wrestling.

And then the other 85% are outwardly. based on pro wrestling. Yeah, but we'll get to World Heroes another day. Yes. One thing I want to mention, because we're going to talk about a few of the bugs here, and the difficulty in sort of having all these characters sort of face off against each other. Again, because this production took a long time, they were working very, very hard. Some things had to be truncated.

And according to Kodama, he said they only had about two weeks to actually balance the game, which he estimates means less than one day per character, and that's 24 characters. So a lot of their work was kind of like, maybe this is okay. It's a lot of guesswork, but they also figured, you know, and I think they're almost right here, almost right. Some of the mistakes are bigger than others, but because everyone plays three on three, whatever characters you pick, they're only going to be one third of your team. So if you have one overpowered character and two lesser power characters, then it's like, okay, maybe one of your characters is really good, but the other two characters aren't as great. Now, that falls apart,

but some of the teams are just entirely overpowered, like all three of them. But I get it. And going forward, I think they would, you know, they plan out their time more and they'd give more thought into this. But for now, Camp 94 is kind of a feaster famine. Some of these teams are incredibly strong, and that's just because it's the first time they're doing this, you know? Hey, It's my first day, but it took like seven months. You know what? They got the foundation down for this so they could spend a little more time with everyone in the future editions.

I get it. I get it. Yeah, I think pound for pound, Fatal Fury ends up being the best team overall. But, you know, you look at any tier list that's broken down by character. And you definitely do see, like, one member will be like in a high slot, you know, another character will be like in a low slot. So, you know, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's fairly balanced for a game of its, of its vintage. And with all the, you know, the unique quirks that it has just kind of like natively, it's, it's, it's not bad.

I think it's not horrible. I think most, I think most of the teams are, like, fairly playable. It's just, like, the Fatal Fury team and the Art of Fighting team have, like, two and a half extremely good characters. And everyone else just has to hold that. And then some of them are so good that one team can just be carried by one character. Sometimes you have team Brazil. Yep. Yeah, yeah.

I'm looking at high turn. I'm looking at high turn. Yeah. Well, let's get into the character. Let's dive into the meat of this episode, frankly. Now we've already talked about you for like an hour. Let's talk about these characters. It's very important.

So just, again, for numbers-wise, eight teams of three, that's 24, plus one unplayable boss. I'm sure there are home versions or edits that let you play as him later, but the base 94, you could not play as the boss. Could not play as it. Thank God. And right at the bat, and this is very exciting, I think, even though this is a game featuring lots of characters who were already popular,

they decided that the hero team or the Shijinko, like the main character team, is going to be three original characters. And they really thought, and they fought hard, like, okay, we're putting these brand new guys up against characters everyone already loves, we kind of got out to ourselves. And while they cheated a little bit by just outright stealing one of the characters, I really do think they did a great job with the, you know, quote unquote, main new character of Kyokosanaki.

But let's talk with us to the hero team who fights in Japan. Their stage is literally a street fight in Esaka, which is a neighborhood of Osaka, not the city of Osaka. technically the city of Suita, but this was the neighborhood where S&K was based. They remained there for a very long time. They only left a couple years ago to relocate to the city of Osaka proper, but for decades, even after the bankruptcy and the reopening and all this stuff, they were based in Esaka. Esaka was S&K for a very long time. It's very dark, so you really can't see many landmarks, but you can see sort of the train tracks and some streets and some

buildings that don't exist anymore. So it's kind of hard today to match up 94 with the modern neighbor of Esaka, which is not the case with later games. Later games have much more clearer like, oh, it's that building. Oh, it's this intersection with the cars. But, you know, there's some street signs that are in the background. Also, it's also kind of fun to me. This is supposed to, you know, I guess it's 1994.

I don't know what's happening in Japan in 1984. Like, Osaka looks like it's ready to explode. Like this riots. It's construction, but looks like no one's actually doing any work. Like, it looks like things are about to fall apart. I don't know what's going on. It's the aftermath of burning fight. Right, right, right.

Like, to me, as a young person in 1994, I'm coming, I'm seeing this shortly after seeing a cure for the first time. And I'm like, is this what's happening in Osaka when, like, Neo Tokyo is about to explode? Like, what's going on here? I'm just disappointed that Kyo doesn't speak Kansai bin. That is a weird oversight, yeah, because really going forward, their home turf is almost always going to be in Esaka, but Kiyosanagi is not a Osaka character. But they have two other characters who are Osaka characters will get to them. Still, we have a quote here from Tanabe, which I kind of love. Tanabe said, we wanted KOF characters to look like people you might see on the street, to which I add on the streets of Osaka, yes.

Yeah, as soon as I read that quote I looked at my first thought was Benny Maru Like all right brother He's a very stylish man you know Maybe if maybe if Benny Marr's hair wasn't so ridiculous Maybe he'd be a little more believable

But the hair just He doesn't have product in it all the time Come on Product I think product he's got like he's got You know like I think he just uses electricity Like keep it up right I think one of his like wind animations

he like kind of like injects it with electricity and it kind of like sticks itself back up. He might be using his powers. The ultimate product. Electricity. It might be full time. Like, he would be even stronger if he didn't care about his hair so much. Yeah. It's the weight of, it's got the weighted clothes, but it's his hair.

Yeah. He's just constantly diverting some energy to keep his hair up. But Benimaro's second. Benimaro's second. Let's start with the leading man who is Kyo Kiu Kusanagi. I don't want to do voices just because it's important going forward because some of the voices will change. But for this very first game, and for most games going forward, Kiyokustanagi will be voiced by Masahiro Nonaka.

Now, in the planning phases, Kiyo Kiyosunagi was called Shō, Kishima, and that was spelled S-H-O or S-Y-O, which is a localization issue. We'll talk about that later. But I think they made a good job in going for Kyo instead of, you know, if they went S-Y-O, like, no American, like, I had American friends, who could barely pronounce Kyo. Like, one of them kept calling, calling him Kayo, which I, you know, at that point, like,

multiple friends of mine spoke enough Japanese to pronounce Kyo. So to have one guy keep calling him Kyo, we're like, dude, it's Kyo, Kiyo, Kiyo, like literally the character from Kyo and Ryu. Kyo and Ryu, yeah. I don't blame anyone. It's okay if you couldn't pronounce these Japanese words. They're Japanese, but also every KOF game has the announcer say the character's name,

so you really should be able to say, like, Street Fighter 2, I get it. The announcer never says, do you or Chunli or anything. So, like, you're just guessing, you know, but here, K-O-F, they say the name every time. Kyo versus, you know, like whoever. So catch up, kids, catch up.

You can do it. Influences on Kyo are they cited Astono Joe or Tomorrow's Joe, the boxing manga anime, Devil Man, which is just full of lots of weirdos. I don't blame them. Sure, why not? In particular, Nonaka said he had Utaka Ozaki's image of my mind. Brian, do you know Utaka Ozaki? I am a huge Utaka Ozaki fan. And one thing I will say is that I, I guess I kind of see it,

but they didn't, they didn't, Kyo's hair doesn't have any texture in it. It's just flat. If you look at any picture of Utaka Ozaki, he has much more styled hair than this. So I don't know if they've really succeeded in that specific goal. But props to, you know, modeling them after you talk Ozaki is a good choice. I always interpret it as like, as like, it's more like spirit, like personality wise. Because I, same, same thing. I look at like the physical appearances. I'm like, I'm just not quite seeing it.

But that's sort of like rebellious, headstrong, you know, sort of like, you know, anti-establishment, you know, thing that Osaki had. going for him, which was, you know, emerging at the time. Yeah, definitely, definitely there, you know, similar to like Joe, he's very, in Aschichino, Joe, he's, he's very anti-establishment, you know, he's not wrong in the stuff that he's constantly complaining about, but, you know, he's just a little heavy-handed and, you know, young about it, brash about it. Devilman, I feel like Devilman's a little bit of a stretch, because Devilman, you get into, like, genuine, like, monster humans, but, yeah. You know. You can tie anything. to devilman if you try hard enough, I feel like. Yeah.

Yeah, I guess. I would say that Kyo is basically, you know, you can, your quote-un quote, your quote, choto character, like he's got the fireball, he's got the dragon punch. He doesn't have a spin, he's got a spinning kick that goes up at a diagonal, so instead of across the screen horizontally. Also, which is very interesting, his fireball is on the ground. So he sort of does a wave motion and he throws fire on the ground and it goes. on the ground. So it's kind of like a power, like a power knuckle, not power knuckle.

Power wave. Power wave from Fidel Fury. Original COF. Right. Yeah. I think part of the reason why maybe Keo's fireball goes along the ground was just an intention by the dev team to stick out. They placed a lot of emphasis on being stylish and cool. And they looked at previous fighting games. They were like, okay, this is getting a little garish. This is getting a little boring. This is getting a little ridiculous. So like a lot of

traditionally a lot of, you know, fighting game character with Fireballs at the time, they do they put their hands together. They do like the Dragon Ball, Kameha-Meha type thing. So, you know, would it be look more cool for someone to like, kind of like, ah, whatever, I'm just going to like throw my arm and like the fireball's going to go long ground because

you know, I'm cool and laid back and uncaring versus like, you know, like thrusting the fist out and be like, ah, you know, you know, fireball come out, you know? So that's kind of like my take on it. Was that like, you know, a lot of this like these like ground fireballs. It was just, it was more like laid back and kind of like cool looking.

Him whipping it on the ground is pretty cool. That would be a very Utako-Zaki way of throwing a fireball. If he could throw a fireball, that's exactly how he would have done it. Yeah. We're not going to dive too hard into the lore because there is a lot of lore going on in K-F games in general. But basically, Kiyokusanagi is like part of a long line of martial arts users who have control over fire.

That's why he's got like this the sun on the back of his job. jacket. So it's like he is generating fire in his body. That's why his super move is like a big burst of flames. He can sort of, you know, his win quote is like, oh, like you're burnt, basically, you burnt. And as we'll establish later, he very quickly established himself as an incredibly cool character that everyone is super into. So like, great job, guys. Great job. Yeah, but they'll be a sign. Yeah. One of the, one of the, one of the, one of the devs in the, the Ultimate Edition talked about how they got like a postcard from like a female fan

who said like whenever they would win the game as Keo and he would appear on the windscreen, they would like hug the arcade cabinet. And I'm just like, all right, yeah, that's fair. Yeah. That's fair. You know. That's the best you can do 94.

There's no VR. There's no body pillows yet. There's no, you know. Not yet. But man, like, you know, it's a discussion for a future episode. But man, this franchise is insanely popular with women in Japan. They got to use a very sizable and vocal

fandom. There was a reason why they made a dating sim called K-OF-4 girls. Yep. Yeah. Yep. They do that. I'll have to try to find it for a future episode,

but there's like one, like a poll that was all women. It was like rating S&K male characters on things like handsomeness, coolness, like dad ability. I remember that poll. Yeah. I got to find it because, like, the one that they do, the, the, the comments for geese were like, absolutely like, like, this is a horrible human being, but he's so sexy. I want him to like, I want him to have my children.

It's like, okay. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. It's 100% like, like Shokotan talking to, um, Hi, Hirohiko oraki of Jojo and just saying, oh, yeah, I, I dream of marrying Jotoro and he spits on me. and just saying it to his face, and he's like, okay. Yeah, okay. And speaking of a rojo. How about that segue?

How about that segue? Speaking of Iraqi, let's talk about Benimaru Nikaiido, who is voiced by Atsushi Monster Mayezuka, who would voice several characters this game. So, Benimaru is one of the most obvious we took a Jojo character and put him in our game. Like, of any character in all time. Like, he is like top three, maybe even top three. too. I don't know, God, Godwin-Straheim is right there. It's, it's very close, but he is absolutely Polner, like, in dress and in hair, and just an overall presentation, he is Polnareff

from Part 3 of Doge's Beard Adventure. It's absolutely, the developers even called him Polnaref around the office, like, you know, are you working in Polnareff today? Like, they knew he was Polarf, even though they made him a Japanese man. Now, I will say, he does not fight like Polarf, because Ben Amaro has lightning powers and he doesn't really have much longer. He can move pretty fast. He's got a lot of quick combos. His lightning fist where he sort of like

points his fist out and creates a ball of energy. It's fast. It's powerful. The super version is incredibly fast. Yeah. But he has to get close. So he plays very differently than Kyo. So already you've got the team of three characters.

Kyo is the guy who can sort of, you know, can zone you with fireballs, whatever. and, you know, the dragon punches. Ben and Morrow has to get in close. All his moves are about getting in close because he's got to hit you with the lightnings. Or the knee, the quick knee, which looks very cool, the knee thing.

I'm gesturing on camera, the knee. The knee is very cool. He's got that. He's got his flip kick. He's got that really cool sweeper. He like spins around on the ground, like break dancer style. Definitely probably the flashiest

character, you know, on this team and possibly like in this particular game, period. And, well, I'm glad to use the word flashy there, Will, because he is so flashy and, dare I say, flamboyant that some players, especially, I'll cop to this especially, especially me and my friends in America who don't really, didn't know much about Japan at the time, we looked at him and was like, is he supposed to be gay? I definitely think in the 90s you could have been forgiven for thinking that. And it's a real thing.

So S&K has officially gone on the record by saying he is not gay. So on that anniversary website, the Japanese version says, Karewa Okama Dewa Aramisen. Ha ha ha ha. And Okama, apologize Japanese listeners. Okama is slang for gay people. I don't think it's on par with the slur we use in English sometimes, but I don't think you want to say that to someone who's not already your friend.

So, you know, like be careful. It's a slang word, but don't throw that around unless you know the person already, because I think some people would not like to be called Okama, occasionally. Yeah, I mean, when you get that big hair and who beer rings and your abs and your exquisite abs are hang, you know, out. And the voice, the voice, too. And the voice does a lot of lifting. Like, he's got a, he's got a sunk you.

Like, he's very, you know, he's got the Bishonan kind of thing. He's got a feminine cross-gender thing. The English version of website, by the way, the English version is not used a the English version says it's not what you think. Nothing's anything wrong with that because it's written in English so they're channeling Seinfeld. The official line in the book is he's a man's man. He loves women. And I think if you look at his win quotes, a lot of his win quotes are very flirty.

So that reflects that. But again, we'll get to this later. When put into English, most of his win quotes become gibberish. So what are you going to do? He's not alone about. But yeah. So we absolutely thought he might be gay at the time because it was 1984 and we thought people were kind of funny because we didn't know any better. But it's official.

Ben Amaro is not gay. He's just flashy and flamboyant, which is exactly what they wanted for those characters. And rounding out the hero team, Japan team, is Goro Daimon, which is funny because Goro, he's coming a couple of years after Goro Mortal Kombat. So right off the bat, you got two Goro's in fighting games. Goro, by the way, is voiced by Masaki Usui, and he's straight up, this is a judo guy, and he, like, he dresses like a judo guy. He wears Getta, which are those wooden sandals. He's always, he's got the uniform on. He is kind of in a perpetual squint, which is a joke they would pay off like a decade or so later when they actually made him open his eyes for a change.

But for now, he's always basically like looking very, you know, it's that intense sort of manga character, kind of like Brock. Pokemon anime, like his eyes are basically permanent closed, but, you know, he's looking at you. He's just, he's just looking at you intensely. He's got intensity, you know? Yeah, I think as far as like a, like a visual trait that's supposed to express some sort of of idea, it just really just means that like that character is probably like a little more reserved or, you know, a little more choosy with how they, you know, when to speak and what they say, which is a great foil to, you know, the previously discussed character. Yeah, you really, you have to wonder why on earth he's hooked up with these two, you know,

comparatively wacko guys. Yeah. Because he's also older than them for sure. Like, I don't, I don't look up the individual ages, quote unquote, but I'm pretty sure both Kyo and Ben Amaro are supposed to be, like, Kyo was supposed to be a teenager at this boy. Like, he's literally wearing a schoolboy uniform as he's modified. Ben Amaro might be like a teen or early 20s, and I think Gore was supposed to be 30s minimum. Minimum.

Yeah, Gordon is a dad. He's consistently portrayed as like, he's a father. He has a, he has a child. So, like, he's literally hanging out with, like, a legitimate high school student and then someone who maybe just is fresh out of high school at best, you know. And he's also like, you know, traditional judo pants, the gaita headband, you know, nothing too flashy. He definitely does stick out in the sense that, you know, he's just, you know, he's just a big muscular dad. But, you know, no hoopie rings or, you know, schoolboy, you know, uniforms with headbands.

It's just hanging out with his two weird, you know, sons, I guess. His friends at locals, you know. He's the most terrible. Team Japan is every, Team Japan is every fighting game local right now in 2026. But God, he's like, he is terrifying to fight against in this game. And in every K-O-F, I'm pretty sure. It's like, he can just do so much stuff.

He like, you know, so he's like a judo character. right? So he's a grappler. He does have a range move. Yeah, he's a fast grappler. He has a ranged move where he slams the ground and you have to block it low or jump or you'll be knocked out, which gives him plenty of opportunity to move in. To move forward. Yep, he's got a dodge roll.

He can, I don't remember if it's in this game. I'm pretty sure it is where you can just grab you out of the air. He can definitely grab you next to him. Yeah, we'll talk about one of the glitches later, but yeah, one of the glitches makes him even stronger. But yes, he's got lots of grabs. His super, of course, is a grab. The dodge roll I find interesting because eventually KOF will give everyone a dodge roll, but for now, he just has his own dodge roll, which is very important for him to get in close. You know, it aids him a lot. And of course, you know, he is the getta. So when he's running, you get that clopping sound.

And I'm pretty sure, you know, if you were a KOF player of a certain age, you get into some like nom-style flashbacks when you hear that clopping sound of Daimol rushing at you. because you know you're about to die. Yeah, he clearly had a champion behind the scenes because some of the other staff were kind of wondering, like, really, we got this guy in the wooden shoes and like, what's his deal? But they're like, no, no, we got to do this.

We got to do this. So we have a quote from the Mook here. He says, his Kurt Tester and wind dialogue and the funny explosion sound when he wins, like he does, like, his victory post, he doesn't say anything or he grunts, I guess, but like you can hear an explosion sound in the background. I don't know what that's supposed to be.

It's incredible. Is it gas? I don't know. But his Kurt, Tester, and wind dialogue, and the fun explosion sound, were all added at his designer's explicit direction. So they clearly like, no, he's got to be a guy, he's got to be this strong,

and when he wins, something explodes. We don't know what it is, but something explodes somewhere. It's your opponent, like, slamming the machine is what it is. Their rage. Their rage is exploding. They had to give him something to make him,

you know, as bombastic as his teammates. You know what it is? It's like, you know, if you find like a Hubert machine that still works properly, there's like a pinball solenoid in there that when pinball, when a Hubert jumps off the pyramid or one of the enemies, they land on the bottom of the cabinet, it makes like a thunk sound. I think this is their equivalent of that, you know, but, you know, they can't put that into a Neo-Geo. Huh. Yeah. Is that what that? I was at the church arcade that just opened up in Pittsburgh earlier this year. go check it out if you get the chance to do that. Anybody who's listening. They had a Kubert machine. I was playing it.

And that's what I would like, I would fall off the pyramid. And I'd hear a thunky noise. And I was like, you know, the first time I thought it was just like one of the pinball machines on the other side of the arcade. But it kept happening every time I died. I was like, what the hell was going on? Yeah. Because I'd only ever played like home parts of Kuber. I never played it in an arcade proper.

I thought I was going crazy. Now I know what that is. Oh my God. That makes a lot of sense, though. That's a really cute touch. We'll move on to an established team, the Fedofuri team, who are for some reason fighting out of Italy, which at first I was like, okay, is this an Andy thing?

Because in Fiddle Fury 2, they sent Andy to Italy for some reason. But I found a quote. I found an explanation, because I've always wondered about this. So Tanabe explained this. He said, for KOF, we first established what countries we wanted to put into the game, and then we forced the characters into the teams completely disregarding their backstories. It's kind of funny, he admits.

So, yes, these three men who are known for being in Southtown and working together in Southtown are now operating out of Italy for some reason. And in the background, you'll see a lot of other Fatal Fury characters. So I guess everyone went to Italy that summer to hang out and eat pizza. They went to Italy because Joe has that one artwork of him enjoying a gigantic sub sandwich. And they're like, oh, I really love Italian cold cuss. And they're like, we should all go to Italy and get Italian cold cuts. And Terry was like, that's a wonderful idea. And then he was like, guys, I don't think that's really how that works.

But by the time he was saying anything, Terry and Joe were already buying plane tickets. It was like, all right. So I guess we're just going to Italy now. I feel like Terry would go anywhere as long as like someone else is paying because, you know, he is a canonically kind of a bum. Yeah. So like if Joe is using his alcohol. Yeah, he wants that line. So anywhere, you know, Joe.

was willing to front them because, you know, he's the champion, so he'll go, right? True, true. And they ignored the art of fighting character who is actually from Italy. So, yeah, it must have just been trying to be wacky. So character-wise, voice-wise, everyone here is the same as they were in Fed of Fury 2. Terry Bogart, voiced by Satoshi Hashimoto, Andy Bogart, voiced by Jun Hashimoto. I never knows that, but both Andy Bogart and Terry Bogart are voiced by two men named Hashimoto. They are not related, but they say their friends.

friends. You know, technically the Bogards are not related. They're adoptees. Yeah. Yeah, true. Good point. Joe Higashi is voiced by Katsalheisha Namase. I don't know what there is to say about Fittofuri because they're basically the same as Fido Fury regular.

I just want to point out that one thing they noted in the book is that a last-minute change let Terry cancel out of both the first and second hit of his standing C, which is very powerful button. and that just leads to a lot of big combos for Terry. And that's why Fatal Fury is in the S-tier. Like, very strong character kind of got a little stronger just because. But I don't know, is there anything else you want to add about the Finifery team? Otherwise, they're basically the same from Fatal Fear games, I think.

They pretty much play like they did in Fatal Fury Special. Like, they're all pretty good. I think Joe has, like, been nerfed a little bit from Fatal Fury Special, thank God. But, you know, Andy and Terry, are still very messy characters. I would say that Andy Super got a little better, you know? True. Just because in Fatal Fury, like, it launches up and goes across,

and it's very easy to just knock them down once with the Super, and then, like, that's all the damage they take. But in this game, if you get hit by Andy Super, you're probably taking all the damage as he goes all the way up and all the way down, and you're just, you're just, that's you. You're eating it. You know what?

Zadai Ken is a lot better. this one. Oh, boy. Well, it was already really good in Fatal Fury Special, but it's also extremely good in this game, too. Maybe not as good as Fatal Fury 1, but yeah. Yeah. What was like the best thing you could do in Fatal Fury 1?

It was a race to pick Andy and just spam that over and over and over. Yeah, it's a win button in Fatal Fury 1. Absolutely is. Another established team we want to talk about is the Art of Fighting Team, who, again, they're now in Mexico, but they're at the power. Pau-Pao Cafe, which is based on South Town. So apparently, it is the fictional Mexican branch of the Pau-Pow-Café because every local eatery has an unofficial Mexican branch somewhere, I guess.

Yeah, it's like Goku's Tukaria, you know? Yeah. Pizza Ria de Rugal. Sure. Also, Pau-Po-Pafe is not in artifying at all, so kind of a weird poll here. But it is South Town, so I get it. So these guys are basically, it's Rio Robert and Takama, so they're all basically modeled after they're artifying two variants,

which means Rio has this airfire ball that goes down. Robert Garcia has his dive kick, which goes down. Takama Sakazaki is here, but notably he's wearing a full ghee because they wanted to make him look different than Goro, even though Goro's like twice his size, but still, I get it. They didn't want to have two shirtless karate guys in the same game. So Takama is now wearing a full karate ghee, whereas Goro is shirtless with the, like, karate judo pants.

I want to talk about this is a couple things here. Riyosaka Zaku Zaku Usui, who is one of the busiest voice actors. If you look up S&K early games, he voices so many characters. I think he's like three or four different art of fighting characters. So, of course, he's still here as Rio. Robert Garcia, that's Kazuhero Inagi.

And this blows my mind. This is the only important to me as an Osaka local. Aiji Tzuda voices Takama. he has voiced many rail companies around Japan including the Osaka monorail which is very close to my house. I've ridden that monorail for years now. I never connected it that the voice of Takama

is also the voice of the monorail. So mind blown. Unfortunately, he passed away last year. Yeah. Next time I ride, I'm like, that's there he is. That's his voice. That's amazing.

In the universe, Takama seems like the kind of guy that when he was younger and just trying to make money, he would like, you know, Moonlight is like a rail voice guy, you know, while he's building up the Kiyokukin Dojo. He's kind of very stern. It works.

I mean, the rail version, of course, is a lot more polite because he's talking to customers. But still, he's got authority. He's got an authority behind him. But really, part of the problems we just established, all these guys came from art of fighting, and they basically have all their moves from art of fighting. but art of fighting has the spirit meter which means you have to sort of choose and pick your moments to use special moves, but not here.

So these guys have way too many moves for this game. It is absurd. Even the Super Fireball, like the giant Super Fireball, you're going to throw that eight time, no meter. It's slow as hell, and it didn't do as much damage as it does in Art of Fighting, but still, it's just there for you whenever you want it, which is kind of crazy. team is insane.

This might be like pound for pound the best team in the game because like, you know, Rio and Robert can just kind of do what they want. Yeah. And Takuba, like, he's just along for the ride, but he's also extremely good. He's just not, you know, compared to those two.

He's like, he's still on earth. Whereas they've ascended to godhood. There are two competing quotes here that they explain a lot. First of all, Kuasashi said the original art of fighting dev team members were very strict about how the characters moved and made sure it was pure to the original, which I think probably influenced this other quote

where they said, we couldn't just start erasing the moves. So I think what they tried to make them weaker. Like definitely, the Housel kit, like the Super Fireball is definitely way weaker compared to the Art of Fighting version. But still, they have so many moves and so many, like, tools at their ready,

it's kind of hard to lose with these guys because they can do so much. And even they admit in the description, I think we didn't go far enough. So later games would radically alter these men, like, completely. They'd be completely different characters over time. But for now, they're basically cut and paces straight from art of fighting, but without the restriction of art of fighting, which is bonkers.

Like, even like the super, like the dooku Rambu, the one where you dash forward and beat the crap out of everybody. Like, you just launch that as many times as you want, you know? And the motion is, even though the motion is kind of complicated, it's far easier in K-O-F than it is in the original Artif Fighting series where you got you like a fireball and the C button and then the A button, but not the same time. Like, it's a weird move.

It's a weird move. This one is just the motion and then you hit the two buttons together. And it'll do a ton of damage, assuming they didn't block it. Yeah, when you play these guys in the arcade mode run, you're going to get real familiar with your spot dodge input. That's about the only thing that makes that. that matchup be remotely reasonable to deal with. That's a good point.

The Dodge just make the fireballs a little more manageable, but still. There's so many. They've got the flying kicks. It's so much. Yeah, you still have to deal with flying kicks and just the buttons and everything else. I mean, you solved one problem,

but there's still seven other problems to deal with. Speaking of problems to deal with, here is the Akari Warriors team, fighting out of Brazil, Rumble the Jungle. I'm guessing the plane crash behind them, I'm assuming that's a reference back to original Ikari Warriors, right? Because the plane crashes. Yeah, yeah.

Which is, by the way, I don't want to run off a tangent, but if you ever look up the official story to Akari Warriors, it's a lot. There's a lot more story than our plane crashed. It's kind of crazy. Look that up some time. But anyway, the Akari Warriors back in 86, so almost a decade after our original Akari Warriors,

they took the two core fighters of Ralph and Clark, who in that game are just straight up Rambo A and Rambo B, Rambo Red and Rambo Blue. So in making that journey from Ikari Warriors to King of Fighters, they had to make some changes. At first they said, okay, great, they're shirtless guys, right? That changed. Ralph Jones, who is the guy in the bandana,

he got the bandana, he got a vest. He was going to have grenades as a weapon, but were basically cut at one point. Someone quoted in the book that said, it was kind of unfair to allow grenades in a martial arts, tournament, to which I say, don't tell WIP, because WIPP shows up, she has a gun. Ken Chira would allow it. Kinshira would have allowed it.

Actually, no, Kinshira would have objected to it as well. Like, hey, you call throw dynamite of martial art? Hey, whatever works. Ralph, even though Ralph ends up having no weapons at all, he still shows up and has a bandolier of bullets across his chest, and that would stay around for quite some time. Indeed, I think some games give him, like, more bullets, which is kind of funny. You have to be ready, you know? It's just a stylistic choice.

It's an intimidating Yeah Exactly Oh Ralph by the way voiced by Monster Mizuka Who voiced Benamaro He's also voicing Ralph here Now Ralph's clone

His Clark Steel Now steel is spelled S-T-I-L In all promotional materials But it's pronounced Steel So don't call him Clark

Still, it's Clark Steel And he is voiced by Yoshinori Shimah And again Initially it was going to be identical to Ralph except for they gave him a hat. But eventually they put on sunglasses,

and I feel like that goes a long way to making Ralph and Clark have just a little bit of different personality, because body-wise, from the neck down, they are literally identical. Like, it's a memory-saving technique. You know, it's basically, you know,

it's kind of like how Rue and Ken and Akuma and Street Fighter all are basically the same spright except for certain differences. Like, these two guys are almost identical. And their movesets are incredibly similar. The main difference, is that they're Vulcan punches, which is a dash forward and delivering lots of punches. Ralph's version lights you on fire and knocks you down.

Clark's version, which I think is much more dangerous, actually juggles you. So if you can jump in and get a deep hit and then combo that into the Vulcan punch, you will do a heavy hit and then, oh, and punch them up into the air. It does a lot of damage. It will fill your meter very quickly. It is very dangerous. I believe you can juggle with it too, at least to a limited amount. Absolutely.

The hits will juggle you up slowly, slowly, slowly. And if you time it right, you could probably get a move in afterwards. Just imagine that in Max mode now. Yeah, exactly. They're both very dangerous characters. They both have a command grab, which is called the Vulcan Argentine. No, sorry, it's a Vulcan Punch. It's the super Argentine backbreaker, even though they're out of Brazil.

and in Clark's case he has a super version which he does three times which means it does crazy damage you know Clark was one of like the first characters I really gravitated to in in K-O-F

and it is nice to see that you know they brought him in from old days S&K at this point and made him and Ralph like pretty cool characters like there's very little in common with their Akari Warriors

versions in the game, but, like, they are identifiably, like, okay, these are, like, dudes from, uh, from like a shooting game. Yeah, I can see it. I do want to point out that, uh, team of Ikari Warriors is one of the, like, I, I don't think there's a single character at this point that has perfect attendance in KOF, um, but, uh, as far as getting close to it, Icari Warriors are pretty, pretty high up there, uh, which, you know, you, you think that after a while, like a sort of a weird pick like that would fall off eventually. But no, they've been in the majority of K-O-F titles.

I think Ralph is close to 100%. I think Clark might have taken a couple of years off somewhere, but I think Ralph is at or near 100%. No, I think he's right. I think Ralph and Clark have been in all of them. Those two and Athena and, of course, like Keough, Terry, and Rio. I'll check that later for the overall list. but I think Ralph has more appearances than Clark for some reason. I forget why.

There's one weird outlier where Ralph is there and Clark is not. I forget which one it is. But let's get to their, you know, their commanding officer, a man named Hider. And I guess he's supposed to be a colonel. He certainly, I think in attire, I really do feel like they looked at the, at Colonel, what's his name from Rambo? Colonel Troutman. I really think he's dressed like Colonel Troutman. Yeah, except he has an eye patch.

Hydern is voiced by Toshimitsu Arai Apparently initially Kuwasaishi says At first they thought Let's just make a third Akari warrior You know like a Billy and Jimmy and Sunny If you will Like right

Oh no no no Again with the double dragon three You can't escape it But they're like no no no Let's make their commanding officer That'll be a lot cooler And yeah They made him cooler

But also like I've never seen a soldier fight Like Hydern A lot of the sources say the developers weren't sure if he was supposed to be a wizard or an alien or something. Like he has, his command grab drains your health. Heels him, yeah. It's crazy. There's something really weird about this guy.

I don't know what his deal is. I hope he is an alien because that might mean there's a chance that Hydern is related to Mars people. So there you go. Or SMK synergy. connection. Yeah, he's also just like very appearance-wise different because like Ralph and Clark are very kind of like barrel chestage, stocky. Guys, hi-in-he, he's very tall and very lean. He's got, you know, like, you know, he's just like very like agile.

He's so sleek-looking, you know? Yep. He's got, he's got charge fireball. He's got a charge book where he leaps onto your head. He's got the command grab up close. And of course, he's got the moon slatcher, which. is a lightning-fast anti-air. It's a charge move, so you've got to prepare for it.

But if you get it all, if they're flying at you and you're already going to charge ready, just, whoosh, moonsh, moonsh, moonshler, they are not going to get out of that. Yeah, this brand is like, what if Gile had a command grab? Yes. And here's the... It makes all the difference. Here's the really wild part. If you whiff a moon slasher, you triple the damage for the command grab and the super.

So if you just with a moonshler, like just do one on purpose against nobody and then rush in and get a command grab, you might get 100%. You might get 100% if you plan it right. Yeah. It is bizarre. All the other insane stuff he can do with that command grab. Like you can combo it from any standing attack. And if you combo it, you can chain grab them while they're still on the ground. so you can grab them while they're on the ground

and then you can dash forward and just keep rinsing and repeating with the grab forever. It's so broken. Yeah. It's a bug that affects all the characters, but it's especially powerful in the Akari team, and it's especially, especially powerful in high turn because he has so many moves

and because his command grab literally drains your health and refills his health. And he's kind of fast, so like on top of that, You don't have to be as tight on timing as you do for Ralph and Clark. He's so fast. He jumps a lot. He's got the liby moves. He's crazy.

And you know, you get a little bit of like pathos with him because like when he wins, he's like pulling out like a photo of his family that the final boss apparently murdered. And he's like, he's getting wistful. He's got a tragic backstory. Yeah. Like I feel like Ralph and Clark are here because he ordered them to be here,

but also they clearly love what they do. Like they have a job to do and they love their job. And Hyder and is here kind of like. I am rooting. I am somber. I won't be in mini-games going forward, but I'll come back. You know, like... I'd always really liked Heidern and going back and replaying 94 and seeing just how

busted he was made me realize, like, this is probably why I like him so much, isn't it? Along the way, I'd forgotten exactly why, but I think I rediscovered it. Also, I'm guessing, Brian, you put this in here because, like, yeah, the theme song for the Brazil stage is one of my favorite K-off tunes of all time, but you pointed out that it is obviously taken from Faith No More? Yes, it is a Faith No More song called Surprise,

you're dead. If you listen to that, you will immediately recognize the riff. And I feel like this isn't in the arranged version of the Team Brazil song, but it is in the original. There's kind, if I believe there's kind of a moment where they do like a kind of like a scream

in the background, which is absolutely approximating something that happens in that Faith No More song. So they knew exactly what they were doing. There's a lot of samples. There's a lot of samples in this game in general. We might want to talk about at one point. But for the Brazil team, I know their music has a lot of like jungle noises, like monkeys

and birds firing off, but it's also combines with the like the heavy guitar riffs. Like that's why that's one of my favorite songs. It's like there's a guitar strumming the entire time and somewhere a monkey is murdering a parrot. Like, it's awesome. It is so awesome. Don, da, da, da da da da da da da. Okay. Okay.

Also, if you go to the official video on YouTube for Surprise You're Dead, at least when I looked at it earlier today, the top comment was someone saying, it's the theme song for Team Brazil in KLA 94. Yeah, nerds rise up. Nerds know. Nerds know. Yeah. I'm going to go do this.

same for children by Robert Miles because it's so clearly Rock Howard's staging gero Mark of the Woods.

Let's tunnel through the earth from Brazil to China on the opposite side of the world and talk about the

Psycho Soldier team so named because two-thirds of the cast are from Psycho Soldier which was

S&K's well first there was Athena and then there was Psycho Soldier which paired

Athena with a young man who I'm put on the line here okay I always thought

his name was C-Kens Seoul, but apparently, I read, I read up on this, it's supposed to be Chi-K-K-S-S-I-S-U. Not Seoul, but Su. I'm not a Chinese speaker, but I see K-E-N-S-O-U. I thought it was Seoul, but it's Sue. I'm going to keep saying. And he's the one, he's the one speaking consign, Ben, even though he's from China.

Yes. Yes, the two heavy K-N-Sai speakers in K-O-F are Robert Garcia for some reason, even though he's supposed to be an American or maybe Mexican-American. Right. Or Italian, I don't know. And C-Kensu Chinese man. But he speaks, I guess, there's a large population of Chinese speakers in Osaka, I guess. Sure. Anyway, we got Athena Asamia, who, by the way, it's Atina in Katakana. So when you listen to her intro, she very clearly says, Atina, I'mikimus. So that's how you pronounce her name in Japanese. And, I mean, this is kind of like the Ikari Warriors team, like these are characters taken from another game. But they're essentially new here because you don't do any fighting in cycle soldier.

It's basically a shooter. So do you guys want to talk about what they've done with Athena and C here? C, she? I mean, I didn't really mess with Kenzo too much. Or Ken Su, sorry. It's going to be an old habit to break. Athena's fine. Like, she plays like Athena usually does in these games.

Like she's sort of like Shotoish. She's throwing fireballs. She's got a dragon punch. They're just not very good in this one. but like they did make the very like smart choice I think like they did consider giving her a schoolgirl outfit which I think is what she had in Psycho Soldier but they uh yes they opted for giving her like sort of an idol costume to go with the fact that her backstory and this is that she's an idol and I think it works and accordingly she updates her fashion in every future K-OF game at least until they started doing the uh the fancy 2D animation for 12 and 13, and they just reused a schoolgirl outfit. For the next decade or so, he, she will get a brand new outfit every single game,

and a new voice actor for every game, which is kind of a big surprise. So right at the bat, you can say hi and bye to Osaka Local Reiko Fukui. This is her first and last Athena voice. Oh, Kensu, by the way, is voiced by Aegeeano, who is, I think he's a local because he's doing the Japanese voice, although I don't know if he's actually a consi, if he's consigned local or not. A lot of the actors are local because S.

SOK is based on Osaka, but not all of them. You'd be surprised. I do like the Athena. I think it's very smart that Athena has the mirror move where she bounces back projectiles. Because, yeah, her base projectile is kind of slow and not great. But with the reflection move, that makes it easier for her to deal with other characters who have fireballs. And she has those air moves that get her in close. And she has the most unusual super.

I think in this one, it's just the spinny orb thing. Right? Like, that's all it is, right? And then later games added the second move you can sort of do out of it. But in this game, it's just straight up, you do the move. She has orbs around her body. They last a long time. Don't touch them. But if you're not up close, she just kind of like is doing her own things.

And you're across screen and sort of looking at her like, okay, I see you have orbs now. Cool. Good for you, Athena. Good for you. And see, yes, he can't see. He's like, he has a better fireball, and he's got, like, sort of that leaping kick attack. But I think he especially feels underprepared for this. I don't know.

Like, he's fast moving. He can deal. He's got combos he can deal, but I also feel like he seems like he's really missing something. Even compared to his teammates who have, like, a lot more stuff going on. I don't know. Am I crazy? And yet I feel like he's the best character on this team.

Maybe. Because, like, yeah, Athena's not great. And then, like, you have the other. one who we haven't even mentioned yet. Chin Jensai, the old drunk man who's supposed to be their like martial arts expert, but like he's extremely slow

and there's not like short hops in this one like there are in later K-O-F games. So his only real options to move around are, you know, dashing, which is, his dashes at great, or jumping and he has like a very high jump so you can just sort of pick him out of the air real easy. So he is

kind of bad just all around. He might be the worst character in this game. I think he's the character who definitely improves later on with some tweaks. For now, he's kind of rough. I will say, though, his super where he breathes fire is very useful when you're low on health because it's so big and it comes out pretty fast. So, you know, you could spam that late in the match and you might get lucky because it's big. It's a big. It's not full screen, but it also goes up a little bit, so it's good for anti-air stuff.

Like, it's pretty powerful. But, yeah, he doesn't have a lot of options. I think in general, the Chinese team is one of the weaker, if not the weakest team in the game. Just because no one feels particularly prepared for this? I don't know. This feels like this must have been like the last team that they took a pass on for balancing. I was about it's time for these guys. They're fine.

Chip it. I do like that they had a quote here saying, luckily we had a designer whose specialty was drawing old guys. So someone of the team's like, oh, you. want an old drunk man? Now it's my time to shine. Chin does always look pretty good. Like, I'll give him that. The sprite work is always impeccable for him.

Yeah, I can't say this is a team that I put much time into. I do think, like, aesthetically, I do think Ken So, I'm sorry, I'm just going to keep going with that, is a really cool character. I kind of wish that he was in more things. I wish he was in 15. I'd probably play him a little more. I just love my, you know, kind of like Kung Fu. sq

characters and then you know I mean Athena's Athena you know you don't have

to love her but you also it's hard to hate her you know she's just you know a big draw to the

the COF tradition with like how they you know treat her specifically with like the costume changes

the voice actor changes stuff like that so yeah they're there they're cool it's one of the most popular

characters I think the best thing this team brings to this game is they I think they started the legacy of the many many versions of Psycho Soldier that we would hear throughout the different games. The one in the game is pretty good but if you listen to the one on the arranged soundtrack that's very very good. It's very enjoyable. Brilliant arrangement in that song. Yeah, unlike a lot of the other

characters who show up, even the ones who come from other games don't really bring the music like the the fiddle fury team, the Artifiding team, they don't have music from those games. They have new music, but the Psycho Soldier team show up and they have a theme song because it's a thinness theme song. So it's Psycho Soldier. But yeah, there's no voice in the NeoGeo original, but yeah, arranged versions

add the voice in because why wouldn't Jen the voice? It's time. Best team. I love everybody. It's time to go to America to New York, in fact, and talk about the American sport team.

And this one fascinates me because if you look at the If you look at the planning documents, this team particular, these characters go way back to the early stages. In particular, Brian, the football-looking guy and Heavy D, the boxer guy, you can see their roots in early documents from like the survivor dirty knuckle days. So even before K-O-F was K-O-F, you had some version of these guys hanging around. And that's amazing that they made it all the way to the end. And well, here they are. They're great.

I wish S&K had any faith that people actually like these characters beyond being memes, because they are actually really fun. There's a reason why my favorite classic K-WF is 98F, or UMFE specifically, because sports team is there, and that's arguably when they're at their best and most viable. And it's like putting heavy deal on my team is not a liability anymore. You can't say that about 94. Like Lucky and Brian, they're just not very good.

But they're so stylish, you know. They're so, they're so, they're very much the Americans that Japan thinks, who thinks America is. And it's great. Yeah. Well, also, it really makes sense that they came from the beat-em-up days because, like, they absolutely look like characters that would, and have been in beat-em-ups. Like it's like something just unlocked in my head just now

You have fought these characters in like The the B tier beatmops that came out immediately after A bare knuckle Or aka Streets of Rage You have seen these characters You have seen these characters In some Kauai Tecmo Beat him up

But yeah I gotta say first of all as a New Yorker I really appreciate how they really went all out. They made a stage in New York, and it really is a real place in New York. It looks very different today, of course, but the fight is taking place underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, and you can see Manhattan in the background, you can see the World Trade Center in the background. Like, that's a real spot. It's a real park you can go to today. It's obviously, you know, they've, frankly, they've gentrified it. So, like, it's basically like a park park now with, like, fancy

stuff and probably like, you know, $20 hot dogs or whatever. But still, the point is, you can still go to Brooklyn under the bridge and get that view of the Manhattan skyline. It's still very, very nice. I've got a picture of me somewhere looking at the skyline saying, hey, it's KF94. I also appreciate there's Mo Money graffiti. That is very 94. Mo Money was still in the zeitgeist. And I also like, there's a little guy sort of scruiting back and forth watching the match and he's got a mic, so I don't, he's like a hype man or a play-by-play guy or I don't know. Like, he's very much like Spike Lee on the Knicks kind of thing. He's always there. He's very excited.

He's very excited. You know, this song for their stage has a lot of sampling in it. And I feel like, you know, when you listen to it in isolation, it's like, man, this is really kind of annoying. But when you play it on the game and you like have a little hype man there, you're like, oh, yeah, he's the guy. This is like supposed to be him. I get it now. Yeah, it's very hip-hop. It's very 90s hip-hop.

So it sounds totally different than all the other songs in the game. And indeed, I would say it's a time. sounds very different than most video game soundtracks at the time. I think it took a few more years for, you know, especially Japanese video games to embrace hip-hop. I don't think a lot of 90s games at this time we're doing that. So it makes sense. It's New York. I'm sure we'll discuss the soundtrack at some point in the episode, but I do want to jump ahead.

I do want to point out that it feels like this soundtrack dips back and forth between, like, hip-hop elements and then, like, rock elements, depending on, like, you know, like, the stage you're on. and it definitely comes out a lot here. It comes out in Italy stage a lot, too. The Italy music is actually surprisingly gentle, but I guess it fits the stage. It's like a seaside, there's some fireworks. It's light, it's light, whereas here we are, it's Brooklyn, it's the 90s.

No one's particularly happy about being in Brooklyn in the 90s. You know, I get it. Brooklyn changed a lot since then. Some would say for the worst, someone's for the better, but, you know, certainly from a safety standpoint, Brooklyn's a lot safer now. All right, let's get the, we talk about about New York. I'm sorry, I can talk about New York forever.

So let's talk about the actual team. So first of all, we have Brian Battler, football player, who's voiced by Aegeano, who, yes, that was Ken Su. Everyone in the USA team, by the way, voices another character in the game. So basically it's kind of like, hey, we need American voices. Just here's like four English words and growl a lot, you're American. Good job. So that's Brian Battler. So yeah, he's one of the earliest characters of the game.

Now, he's a football player, but he doesn't look like a football player because they took off his helmet and pads. Originally, he did have them, but they took them off. And they're glad they did that because while they were working on this game, Johnny Maxim appeared in World Heroes 2, who is straight up a football guy with the hat, with the helmet and the pads, like, and everything. So Brian Battler does not look like Johnny Maximum, and that's a good thing, because otherwise that would be weird to have two football guys. I also love the developers. He has got a very distinctive dash move in the air where he sort of spins his body and comes crashing down at you. They just call that the dash gamma behind the scenes because he's spinning around.

I'm going to use that now. I'll never be able to see it as anything else again. That's the real name now. Yes. And even more than his teammates, Brian Battler is like the meme poster boy. Whenever S&K announces a new character is coming to any game, not just K-OF, any S&F, any S&S. S&K announcement of, hey, new character coming, someone on the internet will Photoshop Brian Battler into their announcement image.

It's like, it's time. It's his time. Often with the dash camera animation, if possible. But yeah, that's Brian. I mean, he's a big guy. It's basically like getting fast, getting close. Hit hit hard. You know, he's got a very far-breech of super where he dashed across the whole screen.

So, like, if hits once, it will juggle you. But if it doesn't hit, it doesn't really hit. So, okay. So he's a football guy. His teammate, Lucky Glober. That's a hell of a fake. Lucky Glober. He is a basketball player, voiced by Kasul Hiro Inaga, who I think is Robert.

I always looked that up, but still, another guy from this team. Lucky Glauber is officially 222 centimeters tall. That's 7-3. He is almost as tall as current NBA star and villain of the year, Victor Wemban Yamah. He is not as tall as the character we'll discuss later, though. There's another character in this game who's even tall. than lucky. And yeah, you've got a basketball guy who's fighting very clearly. Obviously, they're thinking of Karim Abdul-Jabar in Game of Death. He's not dressed like that, but he's

basically, he's got the lanky moves, which he's got basketball moves. He's got moves where he throws the basketball at you, which, like, yeah, basketball guy, throw the basketball, sure. In early stages, they thought it would be funny to make him an American who was super into a Japanese stuff, and that sort of faded over time. And I think that's too bad. because let me tell you, if you lived in New York in the 90s, you probably knew a lot of guys like that who were really into Japanese stuff, especially black guys, I gotta say.

When I was in my first Japanese class ever, there were two black guys there, and they were absolutely those kind of black nerds. They were really into Japanese anime and Japanese music, and like, that's them. I don't know if they were into basketball. I didn't ask about that, but we definitely talked about anime all the time.

You know, what's funny is I just watched Game of Death recently, like a couple weeks ago. And then I saw, in your notes, that, like, Lucky was supposed to be based off Karim Abdul-Jabar from that. And I'm like, holy shit, that absolutely, like, makes total sense. I've never made that connection before now. So I've learned something today. I always thought it was Will Smith.

Yeah, I don't know if I'd seen Game of Death in 94 when King of Fighters came out. I don't know what State Game of Death was in at that point. I mean, I think it took, I think it was only in the late 90s where they actually tried to reconstruct Game of Death and make it into a movie as Bruce Lee intended and not the sort of boulderized sort of half-half-finished cut they released, you know, five years after he died. Oh, you mean the one that has like 12 minutes of the footage of like 105 minutes of footage they recorded? Yeah, yeah, it's a minute.

If you're out there and you want to watch Bruce Lee movies, do not watch the 78 cut. It's pretty worthless. Go out, go find the documentary version and see what, see what Bruce Lee was trying to do. before his life was cut short and they're just like, well, we have some footage and it's awesome. How do we make a rest of the movie? I have no idea.

And that's basically what the strategy was. And the third member of the team is Heavy D. And I got to say D because it's an exclamation point to differentiate Heavy D from Heavy D and the boys who was a fairly active rapper at the time. I mean, he wasn't as big as, you know,

run DMC or anything, big. I think wasn't Heavy D and the boys the guys who did the Living Color theme song? I think it was, right? I think that was that. Anyway, I'm not a lawyer. I don't know if you just add in a switchpoint and make the difference, but anyway, Heavy D is a boxer. He's not a rapper.

He's voiced by Toshikaze Mishimura. And if you look at some art, and we'll get to this later, but they had some canceled team ideas. There's a dance team, and if you look at the main guy on the dance team, it super looks like Heavy D. He's got the Mohawk. He's got sort of like the short open jacket. He almost looks like a ripped version of the dude from Cameo, you know, Word Up, like that guy, but they really just

he's got a very new Jack swing kind of like Bobby Brown look to him. And if you look at the wiki, Heavy D's favorite music is officially listed as as New Jack Swing. Oh, okay. They did their homework. So, Kevin D is a boxer, which means kind of like Ball Rock at the original Street Fighter, too. He has no kick attacks. If you press kick buttons, you get punches.

And that's normal for boxers, but they also made Heavy D very, very tall. Officially, he's 206 centimeters, 6 foot 9, but in game-wise, he's just super, super tall, so a lot of his punches will whiff the shorter guys. You just, you have to be crouching all the time, or you're

not going to connect with your moves, which is kind of a big deal if you're a box. You can't angle those down a little bit? Not some of them, yeah, some, like, I think his, I think his standing D is like a medium hit, but like his standing A, B, and C are all just way too high for half the cast, you know? So it's kind of a problem. Yeah, heavy D and, I mean, the sports team in general is kind of so, so, but heavy D is a particularly low, I think.

I don't know. Maybe I'm those heavy D experts out there, but I was never into these guys that much. I liked their sort of presence and personality, but like move-wise,

like, their ability to win to me doesn't really strike me as high. Yeah, they don't show up in many games and frequently,

they're not terribly. They're very much like a color team. They're just there to be cool and fun and stuff like. that again, like 98 UMFE is probably their best rendition, but even then, that's the,

that's a game that has like AG in it. So, you know, everyone, everyone's kind of suffering in that game a little bit. But, uh, but, yeah, they're, they're a pretty memetic team for, for multiple reasons. Yeah, they, they're here at the start. They will not be in, they will be gone right now. They'll be gone by next year.

They won't, they'll come back eventually sometimes. But this team in general, is very much, they're easy, like, next to like the one-offs, these guys are incredibly low on the K-OF Totem pole as far as appearance go. I just don't see them that often. There are a lot, there's like a running gag

in the KOF series where, like, they keep getting invites to future KOF tournaments and then someone steals it, like, I think I already steals it in, in 95, and I'm pretty sure, like, the Yashiro team steals it in 97. It just keeps happening to them. I think even in, like, 15,

they made a joke about it for one of the characters or one of the teens. When I read your comment about this, I assumed that it was a reference to the fact that people steal other people's mail in America with some frequency, and that's what it was. Yeah, I think they just need a PO box. I think they have to go to the post office to pick up their mail so they can get back in. And, you know, I think we need to petition Zoran Mom Doni to get the USA sports team in the next K-OF game. honestly he would do it he might do it you know he's so much for the nix he probably would he's done so much for the nix already yeah maybe he'll get save the kov save the kowf save the kowf team mom dony please

make it part of initiative to you know rebalance brooklyn i guess enough enough let's go let's go to the exotic nightmarish nation of korea for some reason because here's the kim team officially it is the kim team because the main character is kim kippwan who was introduced in Fidel Fier 2 and pretty quickly established himself as a pretty good guy. So naturally, he's here with two criminals, villains, brutal, brutal men. That is the backstory to that, Kevin. You want to tell the story? Yeah, and I think it explains why they're like stage and their like team song is just like kind of unsettling and weird.

And it's because this was originally going to be a criminal team where, you know, two of the characters, they did go ahead and use a Chang. and Choi. And they had a third one that was supposed to be like their leader. At some point in development, they dropped him and decided to use Kim from Fatal Fury 2. They did keep that idea in mind. And as I understand it, when KW14 came around and they were adding in a bunch of new characters, they gave, they brought Chang and Choi back. And they finally brought back this like criminal leader concept with Zanadu, who was absolutely dog shit in every version of that game. which is really too bad. He's super fun dog shit.

He's super fun and he's super like entertaining, but he's just not good. But, but you know, at this point, like, clearly they had already worked on like the stage and the music for this team. And they're like, well, we're just going to roll with it. We're going to put Kim in charge of it. And we're just going to let it rock. Zanidu's Super and K-O-14 is one of the funniest superers I've ever seen. I love it. I love it. He's a revelation.

That was the one K-OF game that we used to play, and I would pick Zanadu, and she thought it was hilarious whenever I hit that super. But yes, because it's a criminal team, you'll notice that the original concept was like literally dressing all three guys in like your cartoonish black and white striped jumpsuits until they realized that that would have been hella annoying to actually draw an anime. So like, okay, we'll just give them solid colors. fine. So Kim Capuan is here and he's basically dressed as Taekwondo guy because he's Taekwondo guy. Chang is basically wearing a giant version of Kim's clothes, which makes sense, given that Chang also model some of his moves after Kim. So like he's clearly studying Kim and trying to be more like Kim and his attack and his offense. And then you got the little guy who is tiny Freddie Kruger. I don't know how to explain it. Like it is what if you took, if you made a mini-mee of Freddie Kruger

and give him two gloves instead of one. Like, he looks so much like Freddie Kruger. It's kind of amazing to hear the behind the scenes. His original design was even more like Freddy. I guess they gave him the stripes, and they decided to change it at the last minute and give him suspenders instead. But, like, even to me in 1984,

and believe me, in 1994, I had never seen a nightmare on the street. I was a child. I was scared. But I knew what Freddie Kruger looked like. And we saw this character. Like, why is Freddie Kruger in this game? and why is he two feet tall?

There's definitely one of the cool one of my favorite things about KLF is that like there's so many influences that create like that go into all the characters and the stages and the music and all that stuff and certain characters definitely wear

their inspiration, you know, more on their sleeve than others. And Choi is absolutely like probably like a top fiver in terms of like yeah, you take one look at him and you know what he is based. what this character is based on where that influence came from. But I guess he's just different enough than never got any letters, I guess, because he hasn't

really changed, other than a few outfit changes, like, he's still the same guy decades later. He's still got the gloves and the hat and the glass, he's got sunglasses. Like, he's basically the same guy, you know? I guess the excellent on Heavy D worked and just changed his experience. The spinners worked for Troy. I guess they're just, you know, they're just getting by. Let me name these guys before I forget. So Kim Kapwan is voiced here by Satsoshi Hashimoto.

He's returning, yes, that means the same actor voice as Kim Kapwan and Terry Bogart. Kind of amazing. So, forgive me, at the time I spoke no Korean. Today I speak like one-third of one percent Korean. So I'm going to do my best here. So we've got Chang K-O-E-H-A-N, Kohan, who is voiced by Yoshinori-N-O-Rishima. and yeah, they had the idea of being this really big, brutal guy, and they kind of softened him over time. So even in 94, he seems kind of more goofy than anything else.

His voice is very, you know, he's very much like the sort of like, you know, tell me with a rabbit's Lenny. Like that's his energy, you know, like the big stupid dog in like Loonitunes cartoons who's like, he's strong, he's very powerful, but he's also like an idiot. Like that's what, that's the energy that Chang has here. I asked a Korean-speaking friend, by the way, he said that Koh-Han kind of sounds like a big dude's name, and Google translated as a giant of a man, because I have the Hang-Gul. So I guess it's a Korean pun about, like, big guy.

I don't, again, I don't speak Korean. But it's funny to me that even though most of Chang's moves involve him fighting with his giant ball and chain, which, by the way, they don't really animate the chain, which I get, he just kind of has this ball magically floating around him, like, hey, that's fine. That's like, I'm a goal. I get it.

He's got the ball on a chain. You can't see the chain. But his super move is basically a big, dumb version of Kim's super move. And I like the idea that he watched Kim do his move. Like, oh, I can do that. Like, that's all he does. It's funny. There's a mobile game, the King of Fighters All-Stars,

that has a number of characters that, have gender bent entries. Like there's pretty Billy Kay. There's like Lady Zero. Probably the funniest example of the gender bending is Lady Chang, who goes from being a seven foot five, like big guy swinging a ball and chain to like a little like three foot girl with the same ball and chain. There's like a little cartoony like chalk drawing of, uh, of Kim and Choi on the ball. She's, it's really adorable.

It's really cute. That's funny. That's very funny. Anybody who hasn't seen Lady Chang, I recommend looking at it. It's just good for like a two minute lap. It's just, there's just something about it that she's so endearing as far as like, you know, like playing around with like, you know, stuff like that as concerned. And the third member, the tiny one, that is Choi Bongge. I guarantee you in 1994 I was saying this as Bounge, because I don't.

I didn't know how to pronounce it, but it's spelled, it's always spelled in English, B-O-U-N-G-E, like bounce, but with a G. So it's like, oh, so it's like Bound-G-G-N-G-G? No, it's Bong-e. Apparently that means lightning in Korean, which I guess makes sense because he's kind of a fast little guy. He's very mobile, and some of his moves actually do produce lightning, although I don't think, is that in this game or later games? I think in later games, he has lightning attacks, but in this one, he's got a lot of tornadoes and such. Like, his super move is a big tornado thing, so. he is very easy to like get caught when because he has a lot of like mash moves so if he's

anywhere near your corner you'll just knock him out of it every single time he's struggling in this game yeah I feel like the Korean team would get better over time but at first it's it's basically Kim is basically carrying this team at this point because Kim is still from Fiddle Fury and Kim is still Kim so he's extremely good kind of the all-rounder yeah by no means the least team here. It is the woman fighters team who are based in England and no, none of the women

are British, but there's an explanation. Early on, they had the idea of having a team of King, Big Bear, and Billy Kane. And Billy Kane, of course,

was presented as the London fighter in Fit of Free 2. But Big Bear, and Big Bear was Australia, so that's, you know, that's the English, you know, it's Commonwealth. What, diaspora?

Yeah, Commonwealth, exactly. Big Bear was dropped because memory problems. Big Bear was too big. basically. And then they said, okay, let's put in Yuri because Yuri had just appeared in Art of Fighting 2. And once they had King and Yuri, they're like, okay, let's just make an all-girls team. Billy, you're out. Don't worry, Billy. You'll come back. Well, this is not the end of Billy Kane, but that's how they got in this team. But they stayed in England. So three ladies, none of whom are

British are here fighting in England. And I've got to say, as stages go, this is definitely one of the most of its, like, I would say next to maybe, next to maybe the New York stage was absolutely a place in New York. Like, this is like, names stuff about England. Okay, it's all here. They drew everything they knew about England and they put it all on the screen.

You got bobbies, you got the guys in the hats, you got the London Bridge, you got a bunch of birds for some reason. I think there's a double-decker bus. Like, everything you know about England or heard about it, it's here. Go.

You know, thank you for mentioning the birds because that does remind me, like, one of the things I really enjoy about this game is that they really ran with the idea of having every stage have its own special introduction animation, which is something they'd only done a little bit in the previous fighting games they'd done. But they did it for everybody here. It just made it a little bit more special. I love it. I love the animations in this game. Nothing quite comes as close as

Geese's intro in Fiddle Ferry Special, but the fact that every stage here has some kind of thing, whether it's a pan down or a pan in or like, you know, the China has the door that opens. A lot of cool stuff is here. It doesn't serve a purpose other than to reinforce that these places and these people are in a world and they exist in this world. And it goes so far to convincing me as a player, as a dumb kid, like, wow, these are real places. Because they're based in real places and it sounds like a real place. So I'm sold. As a kid, I'm sold. Also, it's really funny that my was not originally like intended to be in this game it sounds like like this is really that like short time in s and k's history where

you know one of their most popular female characters that she barely got into fatal fury two she barely got into kof 94 she barely gets into like fatal fury three like they just did not have faith in this character but like i think she really snowballed from here i have to say i'm very i'm very glad that she made it in instead of Billy Kane. That was a really good call. Keep Billy Kane out of K-O-F, please. Keep him out of everything. He's paid for enough sins. He's coming, Brian. We'll get to him.

I know. So, mostly, because it's all three established characters, they have some changes, but not that much. So King is here. King is voiced again by Harumi Ikoma, and I love the story. So Harumi Yakoma is Osaka Local. She is to date the original, and she is the only voice. for King in Japanese media, unless you've got the anime, and I do not. So most of these characters have changed over the years. They've switched voices over time. Not King. Harumi Yakoma has always voiced King since she first appeared in Artifiding One.

She has never changed. And I love that for her. Which fits because I feel like maybe it's just me, but to me, King has one of the more iconic voices that can't really be substituted unlike some of the other characters, where if you get a sound alike, you're kind of like, yeah, yeah, you know, close enough. It's always weird. It's always weird when they have some of the, like, because some of the early art of fighting games,

I think experimented with English dubs. And whenever the voice, like the English voice for his character shows up, you're like, that's not king. What do you talk? Get out of here. That's not king.

I wonder if they got her for Artifighting 3R. We'll see. We'll see. My guess is yes. Perhaps the biggest change for her is that they felt, they didn't want Surprise Rose. Surprise Rose was her super in Artifiding 2. They didn't want that.

So they gave her a new super called a lubexiexie. D'Oxion Dance, but surprise rose will return in the future, but for now, she's a brand new super. It's kind of like the other Artifighting Super isn't that she flashes forward and does a lot of kits, but... Yeah. Yeah, they dropped Surprise Rose for that. Yuri is here, and like the other Artifiding characters, she has too many moves. She's voiced again by Kaori Horrii, who voiced her in Artifiding 2. Very much, she's in the game because she was in her fighting 2.

They saw her and like, oh, well, we got to put her in our game. and funny thing I noticed, it's a stray observation. Of all the 24 plus characters in this game, only King and Yuri, if you beat them with a special move, their clothes blow off. Now, this is the bespoke animation

for these two characters, these two characters only. I wonder why. I wonder why, hmm, why would they, hmm, I just don't, I don't know. I don't know about that. It feels like one of those things

where, like, yes, they also wanted to do it because, you know, they're horny 20-year-old. But also, you mentioned earlier about how, like, the art of fighting team were such sticklers about making sure everything, like, matched up so much to their work. I wonder if that was, like, the other, like, big reason why they did it. I mean, it's probably thinking that, too. It's probably why they dropped it after a couple of years, but it's also probably not why they brought it back in recent years. I hear you, Kevin, but I would say if they were really sticklers, they would have insisted that Ruel, Robert, and Takama, all.

retain their clothes tearing emissions because Artifying 2 gave everyone a closed tearing animation. At first it was only King because it was story reasons. Then Artifying 2 gave it to everybody for, I think, equity reasons. I think it was probably smart. Yeah. And that stayed forward Artifighting 3. Artifery 3 also has the closed tearing. Yeah.

But somehow, somehow in this game, only King and Yuri will show you their underwear if you... I will close... I will close this on saying that my... can't have her clothing explode when she gets hit because she doesn't have much more to lose. There's no underwear. You know what? There it is. There it is.

Maybe that's the reason because they flew all of their remaining memory on Mai and they had to cut somewhere. I'm just making stuff up at this point. But that would be really funny. Anyway, the behind-the-scenes quote said that the designer of Yuri spent a great deal of care on Yuri's calves. So there you go. And then there's Mai. Maya is voiced again by Akoya Sogi, who voiced her in Fatal Fury 2. And yeah, yeah, Mai Shira Nui, we know.

We know it's a lot. It's so much, in fact, that if you played this game outside of Japan, by default, her animations, let's say it, were locked. You have to enter a code to unlock Mai's special animations because it was viewed as two adult for people who somehow had the money to buy $200 cartridges in 1984. In the arcade, it was not censored in the arcade. Yeah. The home version, I'm saying.

The home version of the cartridge, which my friend had access to. So we had to learn about this code. We're like, again, much like King speaking English, that's not King. My without animations, that ain't mine. But so originally these animations did not. apparently exist in this game. So, according to the Schmupplation's interview, one of the animators for these characters came to the designers and asked if there was enough memory left over to, like, add some additional

animation to my, and they're like, sure, we think so. So, uh, yeah, I also like the fact that right after that the quote was like, oh, I thought we had a little extra memory. In fact, we did not. So this animator, who they identified as, as a woman. and there's only a couple women on the K-WF-94 staff who were doing animation, so I'm guessing it was Miho Miho Uwematsu, couldn't say for sure. But whoever it was, they spent a lot of energy animating a lot of jiggle for Mai,

which did not exist in Fatal Fury 2 and special. Like Mai's, Mai had a very sexy outfit in those games, but she did not like have a ton of bounce to her, so to speak. Only the wind, the wind quote had bounced. The windboat headphones, but that was it. That was the only time. Right. So like, here, here my is 24-7, non-stop serving, you know, call her 7. So call her 7-11, if you must.

She is serving all times. It's just, wow. I mean, again, I'm a child. I'm a child when I see this game, and it changes me. I'm just going to say that. It changes me. Hands up. I do put it on this game and on the, the Obari Fatal Fury movie as to,

how this perception of Mai changed. And, you know, I really feel like, considering the fact she became a real mainstay in S&K games in general going forward from here, that's probably the big reason why. Two big reasons, I guess. If it is Mahou Uy Matsu, then we have, we have Miho, sorry, it means Miho. If it's Miho Ui Matsu, then we have her to thank for really changing my forever and making her the legend she is today. I'm really curious, like, if they had to cut down on what she had animated, like, how long? far did she go with this character? Just full-on

flashing desert moves. Just here I am. Like, you know, on Street Fighter 6, how, you know, characters have a lot of, like, jiggle whenever they're like doing a kick or something. Maybe she did that. Could be, could be. And I just want to run through real quickly. I advise that listeners to look this up. If you're hearing the notes,

you can go ahead and scroll to the bottom of the notes. I found some pictures of art for teams that were, you know, pitched and sketched but rejected. There was straight up a circus team with a grandmaster and two clowns. I find that hilarious, because I don't find clowns hilarious, but I find this team hilarious. A dance team designed to invoke a European atmosphere, and again, the middle guy is absolutely looks like Heavy D.

A beast team, who would have been for Brazil, which is yikes, a beast team with wild Tarzan and Bigfoot-like warriors. A whole bunch of, like, you know, like Tam-Tam kind of guys, you know, from Semmer Showdown. and another team all I can describe these guys it's like what if Mola Ram showed up with two thuggies from Temple of Doom

like very yikes very yikes in the way that you know Dals team is kind of like these guys would be a lot I think this guys would maybe cross the line I think I don't know I think it's gonna be smart move

I got to that part of the ultimate guy where you saw the designs for you know these teams that were cut and as soon as I looked at them my mind went back to like at the very beginning of the book when they're like when the team were designing characters they were going for people that you could find like on the streets on like on like none of these cut designs are that like you're already like really pushing it with like characters like you know binny maru and whatnot but i'm like you're telling me like

a mulalrom team is just someone that i can you know imagine just tromping around the you know New York. Well, actually, yeah. No, no. No. You see Choi hanging out, like, on the metro. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But yeah, yeah, these, these designs are definitely, they're pretty interesting looking, but yeah, I think for one reason or another, you can kind of understand why it was good choices that each of these were cut. Well, speaking of cut, let's talk about the boss, the big man, the Rugal Bernstein, whose official is not in a country, he lives on Black Noah,

which is his own aircraft carrier with a flag. Also, ironically, Rugal is voiced by Toshimitsu Array, who also voices Hydern. So there's two mortal enemies voiced by the same man. He knows him better than he knows himself.

They're both one-eyed character, so, you know, all coming together. That's true. Rugal clearly had an injury, but instead of an eye patch, he's got some sort of like mechanical glowing red eye, which is much, much more sinister. In the Japanese dialogue, I think they cut this for the English dialogue, but in Japanese dialogue, he straight out says he has the strength of Geese Howard and Wolfgang Krauser,

which makes sense because in battle, he'll use the Rapuchen, which is Geese's attack, and when he's low on health, he will use the Kaiser Wave, which is the Kaiser, you know, Krauser's attack. In fact, the MOOC said our first idea was to have, he would be like a mimic character. he would learn any move he saw once, but again, they didn't have memory to do that. So they're like, hey, know, just just make him a hybrid between geese and Krauser. That's fine. We don't really learn much about Rugal at this point.

We know he's a secretary. That'll be important later. We know he's a pet panther. I've learned the pet panther's name is Rodem, which is apparently the name of a character in the manga Babel 2, which I don't know about manga, but that's one of those manga that, like, everyone in Japan read and, like, half of them went to become video games. So Babel 2 is one of those like, you know, it's right up there with like Cobra, like the secret sauce behind a lot of stuff you didn't realize it was behind it. Rugal's fetish is after he wins a fight, he makes a statue or maybe transforms his opponent into a statue.

I really don't know. The English is very unclear. I don't know about the Japanese. I have it here. I don't know, Brian, what do you think? Do you think he's making the people into statues or is he making the statues based on his opponents? You're right. Now that I look at it, I see you have it here in the comments.

It is just unclear enough to where it's hard to say with assurance which one of those it actually is. So I was looking it up when you shared in the notes, like the full list of Japanese win quotes and everything and dialogue. For the women's team, he talks about how he's not going to like, you know, turn them into statues the same. He's going to stuff them. So I think the implication is that he is like taking the bodies of his defeated enemies and like cladding them in metal. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

All right. Kevin, you made it weird. No, I thought you, Kevin. Rugal made it weird. It's not you. Rugal made it weird. Rugal made it weird. Anyway, he's evil.

He's evil. Everything Rul does evil, folks. Do not emulate Rugal. At no point, you have to hand it to Rugal, okay? Importantly is a child. Yes. That's also. Yeah, very funny to me because you see when you first meet Rugal in a cutscene, you see he unveils a whole bunch of statues behind him.

And one of them is 100% Guile, not even joking, is just Guile, which is funny because years, years later, Capcom SK2, I believe, when Rugal fights Gile, he summons a Gile statue and then smashes it. It's kind of like, hey, I remember. It's your turn. It's your turn now. Anyway, Rugal operates in a way that I feel like they would do a lot with S&K games going forward, whereas when you first fight him, he's kind of slow. He doesn't do much. He'll fight back.

He's not a stiff, but he's not very agile. And if you win one round, you get a special cut scene where he's like, oh, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. You're serious, are you? And then he takes off his jacket. And then Rugal Bernstein says, I've got the biggest dick in this room, thank you very much. And Rugal goes crazy. Rugal goes crazy. Maybe the ultimate example of SKBoss syndrome because Jacket's Rugal is a monster, a monster.

The weighted jacket has come off and he turns into an absolute killing machine. able to do like 90% of your life with one special move. And I mean, big range, you know, fast movement speed, never mind the fact that the AI is just

reading your inputs before you even think about doing it. It takes, and watching my friends who are like lifelong K-OF fans and streamers and stuff. And when they, when they do runs of that game, it's like they have to go with very specific like AI manipulation, like strategies. in order to like make that fight like any any measure of like bearable it's really it's really hard to

describe it you just it's one of those things you just have to see for yourself like how crazy this this boss fight is they weigh the odds against you slightly in the fact that you have three characters and he essentially has one like you have to beat him two rounds but it's still one character so like when you lose a character you will get a fresh character with a full light bar and he might not. But he is so strong that it's entirely likely he will wipe out one of your character in like four hits. And then his life bar will either be full or so close to full that the refresh fills it up. And it's like, okay, well, great.

Good luck. It is kind of one of those things where you really are learning how to work against the AI versus just like playing the game like you would against another person. Like I've seen people wait for him to charge up because you basically get a free hit or two off on him when he charges. And also I've seen people exploit the fact that he always tries, well, he almost always anyway tries to reflect projectiles. So like King's double strike will get him a lot. Yeah. But like these are things you wouldn't normally think about when you were playing the game against another person, right? you have to really tune your brain to be like,

okay, how can I beat the specific boss AI? Also, his second phase has, in my opinion, one of the coolest S&K final boss songs that there is. Very good music. Also, very sample heavy. We talked with four. A lot of the tracks in KOF94 and just the game in general has straight up samples from what might be public sources.

I'm not sure we... If you look online, there are different videos collecting where they think the audio is from. And yeah, Rugal's stage gets really, really into it. There's a voice going on over the metal sound and there's someone it's not like someone just shouting into like

a speaker at the market. You know, it's like, we got a first deal of pineapples. I don't know what he's saying, but it's very, it's very urgent. It's very urgent. Buy the pineapples. Anyway, behind the scenes, everyone acknowledges that yes, Rugal is too strong. They said the concept was they wanted to make the mightiest, most violent,

most evil boss character ever. The Mook calls him the cheapest bastard ever. He's just so, so strong. I argue for me, my lynch pin for, not my linchpin. My litmus test for this boss is too hard is always Dio and World Heroes 2. But to me, Rugal-a-94 is very close just because he deals so much damage if he hits you. You basically have to fight him perfect or exploit him if you even want to have a chance.

Otherwise, you're just dead. You're dead. It's gone. It's a very, very tight road that you have to be on in order to get by. It's either Fights against him Either go completely your way Or you're back to

You know character select in a matter of like a minute I just want to point out This is the same year And probably the same time of year That Tito came out with Kaiser Knuckle Which also has like The most busted boss character So it feels like there was like an arms race there

Between a Brugle and the general That's a good point And World Heroes 2 is also 94 isn't it Right Or is 93 93, I think. Okay. I think Jet, World Heroes 2, Jet was 94.

Oh, maybe when Dieu got playable. Still. World Heroes 2, 93. Yeah, okay. Jet was 94. All right. Well, no connection then. But yeah, definitely agree about the final boss arms race.

Absolutely, that was the thing. Anyway, if you do beat... Shout Khan in Mortal Kombat. Sorry. That's true. That's true. If you do beat Roald. If you do beat him, he decides to blow up his ship and you with it.

Obviously, your team escapes and you get an ending. But clearly, Rugal dies and he will never, ever return. So, you know, thank you. Welcome and goodbye. Great opening, grand closing for Rugal Bernstein. So long, Rugal. Could that mysterious R be? I'm sure it's for Randy Bernstein.

All right, we're well over two hours. We're running pretty long here, but I do want to talk about the localization because this is interesting to me. as someone who understands what localization is now, because at the time, I just didn't get it at all. Because, number one, the announcer for KOF, who does not get any credit,

we don't know who did this, they speak English, but it is almost incomprehensible. I don't know if it's a low sampling rate or the fact that the guy doesn't speak English or both, but you can barely understand the guy saying round one fight. You're like, come on. Those are not hard words to say, buddy.

The win quotes in this game are kind of bizarre. everyone has a unique win quote based on who they defeat, on the team they defeat. So, like, if you got Team Japan versus Team England, if you win as Kyo or if you win as Benimaru, you get different win quotes depending on the character. But depending who you beat, it doesn't matter. It's just, you just beat the women's team.

And there's a full list of these quotes that you look up online. They got all the Japanese quotes on all the English quotes. But here's the problem. For some reason, the English Texas game, maybe it's a memory issue. All the English text is written in full-width characters. Can anyone explain what full-width versus half-width means? I don't know.

I don't really know that I can explain it well, but, like, it's the amount of space that they take up, like, almost, like, physical space, if that makes sense. Like, when you see regular, you know, when you're using, like, a Roman typeface of some sort, the letters are usually relatively close together, right? unless you specifically space them. But when you look at Fullwitz characters,

which you do see sometimes stuff in Japanese written this way, there's almost like an uncanny amount of space between each letter and the next, even if they're in the same word. Right. So what happens is it cuts the amount of characters you can have on screen by half at least. I don't think this is a single English message

in the game longer than 36 characters or so. So what happens is all these win quotes, which are supposed to reflect their personality and tell you something about who they are and what they think about the world are just reduced to the most basic and sometimes nonsensical English and here's my example

so if Clark beats the American sports team he says you're ha'raulte our sports bongue de mitya which I would say something I think he's saying like you guys you're fighting it's like the wide world of sports over here look at these guys with the wide world's sports right

he's Josh and him, he's making fun of them because they're a bunch of like goons, right? In English, in English, he says, go home and enjoy sports. That's the joke I mean at the top of the show. It all comes together, people. Like, what does that mean?

It doesn't mean anything. I mean, Gile says go home and be a family, man. That's true. Anyway, I made a spreadsheet. I'll see if I can figure out a way to link the spreadsheet to everybody, but it is it is so funny to me to look at these as of someone who speaks Japanese and English and see what someone tried to express in Japanese and how some other person scratching their head is like

you lose big boy like that's what they that's the caliber that's the caliber of English we're talking about here it's it's all weird it's all weird English extremely weird I mean I mean at least nobody's being called a Dwebenheimer no no it's yes that is true the Short characters means everything has to be economical so they can't rent about, like, say, the great ice cream man or anything. There's no room for that. There's no room for the ice cream man. By the way, about the full-width characters very quickly. I don't know.

It's been a long time since I've used a Japanese keyboard, so I don't recall. But, for example, on modern-day windows, when I set my input to Japanese and I type something that won't convert itself over cleanly into, you know, some type of kana or kanji, I get full-with characters. Yeah. So I wonder if it just wasn't just a matter of them not really thinking about it too deeply, you know, and being like, this is what my keyboard outputs when I type in English. And it began an end there. It's very strange to me. It affects the entire game. Like, even cutscenes are written in this giant text, which means it scrolls very slowly.

Like, it really throws the whole timing of the whole game off, I think. But, again, they're probably localized this thing in a weekend while humming. over, you know, who knows, who knows who wrote this. All right, let's talk reception. Let's talk reception. So obviously this game was put together in a hurry. It was very experimental. Some people had confidence, some people did not. I have a quote here from front designer Chikata Yamasaki, who has many nicknames. He says, the lead programmer thought the game wouldn't sell, but I thought it would catch on. I thought a lot of people would come to the location test too. But only 10 people showed up to the first one. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. That's a very nervous laugh at her.

Kodama said he was told the stages and characters were too bland. And he was really upset about this. So he said, he says that one night after an all-nighter, he was walking home from the office and he went and if you, at that time, there was a huge arcade called Neo Geo Land in the neighborhood near the offices of S&K. So he walked past Neo Geo Land where the location that was happening. And he overheard girls screaming, kakui, kakui, about Kyo. And he said he just started crying.

Like, he was in tears. He, like, this was proof to him that all the work he had been doing over the last few months wasn't for naught. It was going to work. It was, it was going to be, because there was so much doubt. Like, there was actually serious talk about just canceling this project. Like, it almost didn't make it because people, some people, I guess the wrong people, didn't have confidence.

But the Behoo made it had confidence. So we're lucky. And in the end, people embraced it, I would say, almost right away. If you look at the reception, GAMist, GAMIST magazine named it the top title, not the top of the genre. The best game of that's 1984, according to GAMIS, was King of Fighters' 94. Just for education purposes, the top three, King of Fighters' Nighter's, Virtua Fighter. So obviously, fighting games were, you know, were very, very popular. still. That's how it panned out.

K.O.94 also won Best Direction and placed third in best music behind Darkstalkers, hey now, and Power Instinct 2. Sure. In the character ranking, almost everyone in this game made it onto the best character ranking.

Athena number three, Kyo number four, Yuri number seven, King number eight, Mai number 10, Ken Su, number 16, Hyder number 17, Ralph number 19, Ryo number 20, Goreau 26 Robert tied for 36

Clark 38 Kim tied for 44 and Ruegel and Chang tied for 48 That's most of the cast Yeah I feel like the game Best Character list are not Normally 50

I'm assuming 50 long So I feel like they extended it out just for this game This particular year I'm sure they'd do some math They had to do some math there Yeah Meanwhile here in America

The Electronic Gaming Monthly 1995 Video Game Buyers Guide. They picked KF94 as the best fighting game and the best NeoGeo game. They also had a poll for hottest game babe,

which my won with over 75% of the votes. Of course. Sadly, if you look it up, the hottest game hunk is just joke answers. It's a tie between the Incredible Hulk

and EGM staffer Al Manuel. No district to those people. I'm sure Al Manuel has had a life to live. And I bet somebody out there does in fact get horny for the Hulk. but I feel like it was just a bunch of guys in the 90s who are like oh yeah she's hot who are hot guys um I guess the Hulk is muscular maybe you know like

come on guys you can admit Benny Maru is hot you can do exactly uh I think uh is Brian is you know about game machines this looks at your note it is yes a magazine a publication I should say that I frequently go over in in my own streams and whatnot uh so they put it at number two on their their their buying weekly best hit 25 games list in October 1st of that year. It came in just behind Virtua Fighter, but it would overtake Virtue Fighter a month later and then be bumped down by Samurai Showdown 2 in December. So S&K Product beats S&K Product, I guess.

Yeah. Well, again, it's 94, 94. It's hard to believe that King of Fyter's 94 and Samirishowndor 2 came out like, what, six weeks apart? Yeah. Two months, tops? Like, crazy amount. crazy amount of talent, crazy amount of output at that time.

And boy, talk about crazy last bosses. Semarosho 2 is Mizuki. Holy crap. Yeah. Oh, Mizuki. Oh, no. Oh, Mizuki. Anyway, but obviously we know it sold well because we got a sequel one year later and

we're still to what K off today. So, yeah, instant hit, you know, haters, you were wrong. Lovers, you're right. You know, Fujushi undefeated. And, yeah, tremendous. and I just want to run through this very quickly. So obviously the game has been ported and re-released many, many times over. Its first debut was September 94.

That was the arcade version. The home version for NeoGeo was October. The CD version was September. That was the NeoGeo CD era. November. We Virtual Console, November 2007. Almost any S&K compilation has had this game. There was a King of Fighters collection in 2008 for PSP, PS2.

That version is still available on PCC. PSN, if you want to buy it on PS4. The S&K Arcade Classics Volume 1 for PSP PSP-PS2 has KOF-94. The NeoGeo Station, the PS3 exclusive sort of collection of games, that had it. It's all in the NeoGeo Mini, the mini console released in 2018. That is KOF98. Hamster's Arcade Archives. You can buy it on any modern platforms, all a cart.

Go ahead. And then, for the game's 10th anniversary, they made something very special, only in Japan, unfortunately. for PlayStation 2, K-OF-94 Rebout. And I want, I think, Kevin, you should probably take charge here because I never owned Rebout,

but clearly you do. Yes, I have a copy of Rebout, and I played it back in 2004 because a friend of mine had Rebout and hosted House Sessions. So this was like a reissue of K-WF-94, like celebration of K-O-F for 10 years.

So what that actually means functionally is that you have the standard like Team versus mode that plays like K-WF-94, You also have like an edit versus mode, which lets you play the game with custom teams, which is kind of the number one complaint people have about 94. And this also adds in Rugal as a playable character.

He is not balanced any. And Sishu, Keo's dad from Kof 95. We'll get to him later. But suffice to say, both of these characters are extremely overpowered and extremely good. On top of that, they also redid the graphics a little bit. So they redid all the stages in 3D, which is kind of what they had been doing for their,

uh, their, like, CD releases for, uh, the Dreamcast in PS2. So that's not really too surprising. Uh, they're kind of, they're pretty good stages. Like, they were pretty good at making those. They had a lot of like,

S&K fighting game characters in the background to sort of like, bring forth that sort of celebratory atmosphere. It has the arranged soundtrack, uh, which is fantastic. If you want, though, you can set it to, the original NeoGeo OST as well in the options. Always good.

You can also turn off these new stages if you want to have the cool old ones as well. One thing you can't really do anything about is that they have quote unquote high resolution sprites, which is something they did in like the a a aughts, especially when they moved to a Thomas wave, where they just kind of like took their existing sprite work for the Neo Geo and just sort of like slathered like a smear filter over it. and it looks okay here. It doesn't look nearly as bad as it does in like K-O-F-11 and Battle Coliseum. But it doesn't look good, and your only option is to make it softer, which is not what you want, really, but, you know,

everyone's afraid of chunky pixels and the aughts. I kind of understand. My big issue with, like, the 3D backgrounds, though, going back to that, is that if you have them on and you do a dodge, like they shift the angle a little bit to sort of like at the I... get across the notion that you're dodging, and functionally it's just very jarring and very uncomfortable.

You don't have to worry about that. Yeah. So it sounds anguishing. It's like paper Mario just rotating in place? Is that what I'm getting here? It doesn't rotate per se, but it like shifts upward a little bit. It's very weird.

Oh, okay. It's not great. No, I don't want that. But again, you can just set it to the old, you can always set it to the old backgrounds. One other fun thing with the 3D backgrounds is that you don't long have your teammates in the background, but you still have the functionality

to have them come in and assist you. They just sort of like jump in, like strikers from off screen in the later games, which is very funny because it also means that you no longer have to be in your corner for doing this. So, you know, characters like Choi who have those like grabs are just screwed

no matter where they are. Oh, boy, yeah. And sort of rounding out this package, you have custom colors. Choi, either. Sorry, Choi. You have custom. in colors, you can edit those as you

want and save them. You have net play in Japan. They also have like a fun opening animation that is pretty cool. You can find it online. They also have like voiced descriptions of the events of the first two

K-OF like story sagas, the Rochi one and the Nests one, which are pretty cool. Again this is all like a Japanese package. This did almost come out in the US exclusively for the Xbox. It did not come out, but it was going to be on Xbox Live. A review copy leaked out, you can find the ISO if you really go digging around and you want to play it in English.

Sadly, Insignia Live, which is like the Xbox Live revival platform, does not have support for it. And they've said that they won't because it's technically an unreleased game. So they don't want to run into any legal issues. But the PS2 version is fairly cheap if you really want to check it out. I don't know necessarily why you would, but it's a cool package. It really sounds like Rebout is asking the question. How badly do you want to be able to mix match your team? How much are you willing to suffer?

Smooth pixels and weird 3D backgrounds, et cetera, et cetera, just so that you can have the team of your own design. That's the impression I'm getting here. They did keep most of the bugs. Like they took out some of the like dizzy combos, some of the characters had, but they left a lot of the other ones in. So, you know, it's 94 is a package, more or less. I do know that these days fan modders have created a version of 94 that lets you edit the characters.

I know that exists. I don't know if you can play online with it, maybe, but modders are out there trying to make 94 fit in line with the rest of the series and let you change your characters. But no official version of that has, this is the only official version of that. was only in Japan. So, yeah. All right. Well, we're definitely wrapping up here. We're in the final round. Again, as I said at the top of the show, I do think that KOF both feels bigger and smaller today because everyone wants to do the universe thing and everyone tries to do universe thing. Some of them fail at it spectacularly. Some of them do okay at it. But they just did this, and they did it over 30 years ago. But also the fact that everything's a crossover now,

Ken Shiro's in fucking Fatal Fury, okay? Like, when you have, like, anime characters who are superhuman fighting regular characters and regular games, it kind of defeats the purpose of the crossover games, in my opinion. So everything's crossover now, which is kind of a bummer, but I don't know, I guess I do like Kenchero, okay? I like Kentro. Can't get mad to Kenchero. I just don't like him in Fatal Fury. My whole thing, and I'm not trying to make a thing about this as we try to wrap up, is that, like, I'm okay with crossover if it's, like, within universe. you know like like like K-O-F and fatal fear and art fighting yeah sure okay that's all great but like once we

start bringing in you know Ken Chiro and actual real Freddie Kruger and the Terminator and stuff then I'm like all right or soccer player with with with credible sexual allegations against him yeah yeah bad idea bad ideas but this way Ken Chido can kill him that's the truth can can I want to Yes, it's one of the first things people took video of. Yeah, you can look it up. People wasted no time. Ripper, although, also you're out of the World Cup. Screw you.

Yeah. But ultimately, I think it's just kind of wild that not only to KOF do this and putting all this to characters together, but they quickly decided we're going to do this every year for about a decade until basically the pure economics of the arcade business and their own company shut it down. but they still never stopped. They just had to slow it down. But still, this is 94.

We're going to get a game a year for a long time after this. And my promise to you right now is I will not wait one year between these episodes. We can put them out faster than that. But yeah, at the time, it was kind of like you would get a K-O-F, you would enjoy K-O-F, and somehow you're like, oh, boy, I wonder what's going to happen next year. And you just had to wait and play the one you had. Or an old one, if you like the old one better. But yeah, we were playing 94 a lot, and we played it.

We probably played 94, well, more than 95. I'll tell those stories later. But still, I think 94 is a great game. I played a lot of it. I think the only downside really is that once KOF became KOF and became the big deal, every other S&K game kind of suffered. I feel like, you know, Fianna Fiori tried to maintain its own image. It's kind of real about games.

But Art of Fighting, I mean, we had Artifiding 3, and that was kind of it. Unless you want to count Ricky 1. You know, like a lot of other games that weren't Samurai Showdown kind of faded away. So a bummer in that regards. Yeah. I was something a huge fan otherwise I wouldn't record this podcast. The rest of you, do you think a person living today in the year 2026, should they play KOF94? If there are a sicko for 90s fighting games.

Yeah, absolutely. If you aren't, then you could probably skip ahead to one of the later ones. Brian, what do you think? I think it's worth playing. And I was thinking about this, particularly if you're a beginner to fighting games and you are overwhelmed by more modern things. If you look at it, you're really not overwhelmed with choice in this because you don't have team at it yet.

So that takes a lot of the agonizing over a team game out of it, right? The combo system is still pretty simple. like most of your combos are three hits, save for the juggle stuff. And if you aren't the art of fighting team, you don't really have your full move roster that you'll become known for in later King of Fighters. So it's kind of easy to figure out what you're doing.

So like it'll be a stepping stone for you, but it would be kind of a fun one. That's a really good point, Brian. I didn't think about that. If a new player to KOF plays any KOF except for 94, they're going to be sitting on a screen with anywhere from like, to like 60 different characters.

Their eyes are probably like, what? Yeah. How do I know who's good? How do I know who goes with who? It's like decision paralysis. But here in 94, it's like, no, no, just pick one of these eight teams and figure out that team.

Every team is going to have its own deal. Figure it out. Go ahead. It's fine. Different thing about that. That's good. Well, it's closing it on three hours here. So let's wrap things up here.

very much. This has been a Retronauts podcast. If you did not pay money for this podcast, thank you very much for listening to Retronauts. But did you know, Patreon.com slash Retronauts. $3 a month, you get all our episodes one week early, higher audio quality, $5 a month, which is just $2 more than $3. We're just real basic math here. Five dollars a month gets you exclusive episodes every other week. Discord access, my weekly columns that I read to you. I've done many Kiof columns at this point. Our monthly community podcast, so many more extras, higher tiers, even let you come on the show and tell us what to record about.

So maybe if you're out there and you want that KeyZun Encounter episode, it's there for you. Give it to us. I'll record it. If you pay us, I will record. I promise. I'll do it. I promise.

I'll do it. But you have to pay. I'm sorry. Let's go to. Will, Will, tell the people about you if you want the internet to find you, if you want that. I do know, wish to be perceived. No, I'm just kidding. You can find me on Blue Sky is about the only thing I'm active on anymore.

You know, at Super Bowl at Will. Yeah, where I just, you know, just do more the same of what I do here. Yap about the things that I love, shoot-em-ups, fighting games, new J-X-wing. That's maybe low-key why I like heavy D so much. The New York Knicks, and, you know, yeah, see you guys next time. Big Bong. Bing Bong.

Sorry, can't stop. This is going to be me for the next year, at least. Kevin, go ahead. You can find me on blue sky at Atariarchive.org. That's the name of my website and my YouTube channel and my Patreon and my book. So look up Atari Archive. If you're interested in the history of really old video games that generally don't involve fighting games, but, you know, I talk about that a lot, too.

in my own time. So don't worry about it. Brian. And you can find all the things I do at One Million Power.com, which includes not only game and Japanese music-related translations. I think I have some old K-O-F stuff

I translated up there from game magazines, but also videos and live streams. And in fact, as of the time this releases, depending on when it's coming out, and speaking of Kenchudo, I'll almost certainly still be in the middle of playing through every fist of the North Star video game live on Twitch and YouTube on Thursday evenings.

And chat is going to help me rank them. So be a tough boy and join in. Oh, man. How many of those are there? I haven't counted them, but there are a good amount. It is not Dragon Ball. It is not Gundam. But it's still a pretty good amount.

It's a lot. Come on, that's a lot of game. I'm going to be doing this for a while. I think they hit number 10 before they even got to 16 bit, I think. I think they did, yes. Yeah, that's a lot of games. But that's awesome. That's awesome.

I, geez, I got to get on to that. Okay, that's good to know. Yeah, because this episode woke up for a while, but yeah, you will be at that for a while. So good, good on you. Brave, brave man. Brave man. As for me, Diamond Fight, look me up on the internet as Fight Club, F-E-I-T, that's my last name, not fight, the verb or noun. C-L-U-B, that's the noun or verb.

and yeah, social media, letterboxed, Kofi, Patreon, you can find me on there if you want to throw me a couple bucks for all the notes I had to do for this episode. But yeah, we can keep this going because I love K-O-F. It's very much part of me. And we'll see you again in 95.

Good night.