This Week In Retro: The King of Fighters 2001 (Patreon)

November 15, 2001: The king has stumbled. Long live the king.

by Diamond Feit

Annual franchises get a bad rap. We point at big-budget brands like Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty and deride them as soulless corporate creations but how can we hold their popularity against them? I may not be in the market for a military war simulation or whatever the hell Assassin's Creed delivers year after year, but it's unfair to equate my own indifference towards those games as evidence that they are "bad." No, I'm not arguing that selling millions of copies defines quality, but it also does not disqualify them from having artistic merit.

I am, of course, biased on this subject for I grew up entranced by an annual series that held my complete attention in the 1990s and early 2000s. SNK recruited a decade's worth of established characters into a company-wide crossover title, dubbing the results The King of Fighters '94. The ability to pit all those known entities against one another astonished me, but not nearly as much when I saw The King of Fighters '95 appear in arcades the following summer. Considering how Capcom kept revising and re-releasing Street Fighter II with no sign of a proper sequel, the idea that a competing series would just deliver a new game every year was delightful beyond reason.

In previous essays I've covered why The King of Fighters '98 is one of the greatest games ever made, how KOF 99 tried to shake up the formula while maintaining the annual pace, and how KOF 2000 felt like a last hurrah for the company as a whole. SNK declared bankruptcy in 2001 and corporate restructuring left the future of the Neo Geo in serious doubt. Yet whatever I feared was taking place across the globe in a city I had yet to visit, the tradition endured as we did indeed get a new KOF chapter that November.

From its opening seconds, The King of Fighters 2001 tries to assure fans that, despite the absence of the SNK name on screen, nothing is going to interrupt this year's tournament from taking place. The intro animation specifies that this is "Episode 7" and features a full lineup of familiar faces while also alluding to the "NESTS" organization that served as antagonists for the previous two games. There's even a tease of a new gloved character alongside K' and Kula, a potential ally or adversary for our heroes to handle.

Things take a turn, however, once the game introduces a new wrinkle during the "how to play" segment of the introduction. KOF 99 added a fourth player to the three-on-three team-based battle system, with the extra fighter serving as a "striker" who can jump in at select times. In 2000, new striker-only characters debuted, giving players even more freedom in building their team. The King of Fighters 2001 scales back that option, but allows players to select how many members of the team fight and how many serve as strikers, throwing out the three-on-three mandate in favor of "anything goes."

For The King of Fighters, this served as a radical reimagining of how fights could unfold. Players who opt for extra strikers benefit from a shorter power gauge, enabling them to use super moves (and strikers) more often. On the other hand, selecting more in-ring fighters means having more fighters, although damage is scaled accordingly to weaken teams with extra bodies. As in the previous two episodes, players can rearrange their team before each bout, opting to change their approach for each opponent they face.

The King of Fighters 2001 features a slight roster reduction from KOF 2000 due to the lack of striker-only characters, but four new fighters do make their first appearance. Only two would prove to have a lasting legacy, however, and for very different reasons. The mysterious gloved stranger is K9999 ("Kay-four-nine"), a tortured young man who struggles to control his own body. Capable of transforming his arm into weapons, he can also release his power in a super attack that takes the form of a giant, undulating flesh tendril.

These characteristics might sound familiar to fans of the classic animated film Akira, as Tetsuo in that story is also a teenager with significant psychokinetic powers that he can barely reign in. In KOF 2001, the references are more than just implied, as much of K9999's lines come directly from that movie, and all his dialogue is delivered by Tetsuo's original voice actor Nozomu Sasaki.

The other notable newcomer is Angel ("An-hell"), a woman with a very skimpy outfit who deals damage via a series of complex melee moves that link together in various combos, a difficult character to master but one who can tie up opponents in the hands of an expert. Angel became an instant fan favorite and appeared in the recent 3D outing, The King of Fighters XIV, with her distinctive wardrobe also showing up in SNK Heroines Tag Team Frenzy.

K9999 proved to be more complicated, for while fans definitely took to him, there was also a contingent who objected to his nature as a transparent homage to Tetsuo. Fighting game characters derived from famous pop culture creations are about as common as cartoon characters derived from real-life celebrities, and the practice is still seen today. However, whether it was the extent to which K9999 borrowed from Tetsuo, or simply his status as an outside creation (SNK did not develop KOF 2001), K9999 was not popular inside the company. He would make one final appearance in the following year's tournament, but has since been removed from subsequent remasters such as The King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match.

A few years ago, I spoke to members of The King of Fighters XIV development team about future additions to that roster. They smiled politely and gave non-committal reactions to my speculative suggestions, neither confirming nor denying that any of my ideas were feasible or might already be planned for release. The only exception was K9999; when I asked if he might ever return to KOF (as Angel had), the answer was a resounding "no" — in English.

It is difficult to look back on The King of Fighters 2001 with affection even after all that has happened. At the time, I was grateful to have any KOF at all given the troubles at SNK, but the game never grabbed me like any of its predecessors had. Even without any insider knowledge of who made what, it was apparent that the development had been passed on to another studio and corners were almost certainly cut.

Aesthetically, The King of Fighters 2001 just feels wrong. I cannot say "bad" because I know it has its fans, but it compares poorly to any of its peers in my eyes. The new striker system was a major shakeup to the formula, but as an avid player of Capcom vs SNK I felt it didn't compare favorably to that game's ratio system. The backgrounds in KOF 2001 lack the playful, lived-in mood of other KOF games; they are full of people but no real character.

The greatest sin of The King of Fighters 2001 is its soundtrack which I can only describe as "rote." The Neo Geo hardware excels at sampling, allowing for a variety of "instruments" to give each track a different air than the last. Sadly, every track in KOF 2001 just sounds flat, relying far too much on one electric guitar to breathe life into the action. As with most other KOF titles, there is an arranged soundtrack album out there that I can recommend, but you won't hear those versions when you play the actual game.

2001 would not be the end, not for SNK, not for the Neo Geo, and certainly not for The King of Fighters. The series had more annual entries in years to come, and the overall franchise is still alive and kicking (and punching) with The King of Fighters XV slated for an early 2022 release. I don't think I need to be kinder or fairer to KOF 2001 given the circumstances under which it was made, but 20 years of hindsight allows me to recognize it is neither a hidden gem nor is it as bad as I remembered. It is just what it says on the box: An annual edition of The King of Fighters series that debuted in the year 2001, no more, no less.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.