I’ve been out of fighting games for kind of a while at this point. I got really into Granblue right when Rising came out, but the constant drip feed of DLC characters and patches annoyed me so much that I quit before ever entering a tournament. The game itself was beginning to get old, but I’d also forgotten how stressful it is being immersed in the culture of a game with constant patches; the constant back-and-forth, putting every new character under a magnifying glass to see how they would change “the meta” (oh how I miss the days when fighting gamers never used these words) and endless bickering over which changes would or wouldn’t be good for the game reminded me of the absolute darkest days of my life: when I was deathly ill with a months-long respiratory virus and couldn’t do anything but play League of Legends.
I also used to put way too much value on fighting games back when I did play them, and this was another reason I walked away from Rising; I could feel the temptation to go back to my old ways and grind the game constantly. I love fighting games, and when I’m playing them I have a lot of fun in the moment, but there are things I’d rather be spending my time on and it can be a little difficult for me to play competitive games in moderation. This is another problem made infinitely worse by patches and DLC; I can’t grind like crazy in training mode and slow down once I feel like I’ve got a handle on my B&Bs, setups and problem matches because, whether it’s true or not, it feels like there’s pressure to keep up with a game that’s in a permanent state of flux.
But I’d been meaning to get into SNK fighters for a long time. Back when I was deep in the fighting game scene, my friends and I would try every new game on release, so we were on KOF XI and XIII right when they hit consoles. My best friend in the fighting game scene is the kind of player who figures out oppressive offense really quickly, so all I really remember of XI was getting looped by Oswald oki in the corner until all of my characters were dead, but since I like Yuri a lot, KOF XIII was a good time. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a more fraudulent character in my life. We still only played the game two or three times, though, so when my friend told me he wanted to run a KOF 98 beginners’ tournament, I agreed to join. I don’t want to bury the lede, so I’ll just say after some initial frustration I came to really really like the game. With that out of the way, here are the things I learned from my time with the game in no particular order:
Six weeks of advance notice on a beginners’ tournament may actually be too much. This really caught me off guard, because I’ve been to a lot of tournaments and I don’t get nervous all that easily, but apparently I do get stressed. I felt like I had to practice more or less every day or the tournament wouldn’t be fun to watch. I still had fun the whole time, but I spent ten hours on Fightcade the day before the tournament and woke up with my heart racing early in the morning on the day of, which is an annoying reaction my body has to extreme stress. If I never drill Shingo 623B into 214D again in my life it’ll be too soon.
Learning three characters is not that bad. I’ve held off on KOF in the past because figuring out an entire team seemed like a barrier to entry, but the movesets in this game are honestly pretty simple and most of the characters have straightforward gameplans. If anything, I think the fact that you’re forced to split your practice time three ways reinforces good habits for picking up fighting games in general; you want to start simple and build from there rather than trying to simply learn everything at once. Many people in the beginners’ tournament hit on this; they became masters of Chris j.CD and 3B, Chang j.CD and command throw, Athena 214P and runaway, Ralf 5C, 2C and 41236K and just focused on using their focal tools well rather than trying to copy a gameplan from a match video that’s way above their skill level.
The caveat here is I think identifying movelist bloat is a skill unto itself, and knowing what you can safely ignore goes a long way. A pretty good example of this is, until you are an absolute god at the game and need to know every little damage optimization for every fringe situation, you have no reason to ever 214C with Saisyu. The move might as well not exist. It’s bad in neutral, and if you can combo into it, you can combo into 623D instead and always get a hard knockdown that does 2 less damage. If you’re new to fighting games, don’t trust yourself to make these assessments. The supercombo wiki has a lot of problems because, being charitable, it’s a product of its time (a lot of the information is copied and pasted from posts that are probably decades old), but it’s a good way to learn what not to do, especially if you’re cross-referencing it with match vids on the palekofstine and Arcade Games KOF youtube channels.
The input parser is strange, but when people tell you you’ll get used to it, they aren’t lying. This was easily my biggest source of frustration for the first couple of weeks we were playing. If you ever thought classic KOF felt weird and couldn’t put your finger on why, I bet it’s this: the game waits a few frames to parse your buttonpresses, but it parses your joystick inputs immediately. You can test this by loading up training mode, getting point blank against the dummy, hitting 5C, then immediately hitting forward. If you’re fast enough, you’ll actually get throw instead of 5C. This has some pretty significant consequences:
- Chaining into command normals is a little harder than you think. If you’re trying to do, for example, 2C 6A 63214A, what happens if you release the joystick after the 6A? If you’re fast enough, the answer is the game reads your input as 2C 5A and the command normal doesn’t come out. Even if you don’t return to neutral, if you start inputting the half circle back preemptively, the game might interpret your inputs as 2C 3A or 2C 2A and, again, you’ll get nothing. You’ll hear people tell you the trick in KOF is to slow down your inputs and this is a big reason why.
- It makes empty jumps even more legit. Empty jumps are extremely bad in many anime and Street Fighter games because you can execute a defensive throw while holding back as soon as the opponent lands. This is infinitely harder to time in KOF, because if you’re holding back and hitting C, you will walk out of throw range before the game reads your buttonpress and get close C (or even far C if, like me, you’re dumb enough to play Shingo). This is actually a decent defensive option because your close C is usually your fastest normal and is likely to beat empty jump lows even if you’re a little late on the button, but it means you can get opened up by some absolutely wacky stuff that would never work in any other game, like empty jump close C.
This brings me to a point that sounds obvious, but that I failed to really understand for my first few weeks of 98: King of Fighters is its own game. It is not SNK’s take on Street Fighter or some other preexisting fighting game paradigm. If you are expecting to coast along on fundamentals you built playing some other game, you will get slapped by stuff that you’ve written off as “fake.” Having bounced from anime games to Street Fighter to Tekken to Marvel Vs. Capcom I thought I was inoculated against this frustration, but I went through it, too. You simply have to play this game the way you play every other fighting game: you analyze what hit you, you figure out why and how it works, and you build your theory fighter around that. If you start from theory fighter and work your way backwards to make KOF fit, it’ll only frustrate you. Theory fighter is only useful if you can use it to analyze play that’s working; if you’re using it to dictate which styles of play should be working, what you have on your hands isn’t theory – it’s preconception. In my case it was “empty jump normal is bad,” but it could just as easily be “jumping is bad,” “reversal super is good,” “5C 623A should be easy,” etc.
Knowing exactly how many frames of lag there are between buttonpresses and joystick taps resolving can help you make sense of what you’re playing, but it can also make you lose sight of the forest for the trees. In the same way that “learn to anti-air” is great advice for a Street Fighter novice, “slow your inputs down a little bit” is great advice for a KOF novice. The input parser sounds weird, but once you simply accept that you’re playing KOF and not some sort of rushdown-oriented reimagining of Street Fighter, it works just fine.
Finally, there’s a lot that Capcom does wrong that SNK does right. By my estimation, these things are grapplers, funny “big guy” characters like Chang, overheads, chain combos (although I genuinely suspect the SF3 target combos were SNK-inspired) and heavy buttons outspeeding super-safe jabs. I cannot imagine what would possibly possess someone to go back to Zangief after experiencing Clark, for example. Presumably people do it, though. There’s a Youtube tutorial for the bassline to Yellow by Coldplay that has 572,000 views. That’s just the world we live in.
That’s the extent of it. I had a lot of fun with this beginners’ tournament because it was nice to play a game with fourteen other people who were all learning it alongside me and as a salve for the burn Granblue’s patch cycle and expensive DLC characters left behind. I hope I get to keep playing KOF 98.