The King Of Fighters XII Is Completely 2D!
SNK is giving Capcom a run for their money with their unveiling of King Of Fighters XII. While Street Fighter IV maintains 2D gameplay using 3D graphics, KoFXII promises to be 100% 2D, using a much-overdue upgrade to their character’s sprites.
One of SNK’s greatest strengths has been to produce beautifully animated 2D graphics. Now they’ve accepted the challenge of taking the step into higher-resolutions, much in the same fashion as the Guilty Gear games. In fact, the bar on detail has been raised to such a level that most people who caught the trailer at the latest AOU in Japan assumed that the graphics were 3D with an advanced cell shading engine. That alone would have been cool, but learning that the graphics are completely hand-drawn…”impressive” doesn’t cover it.
This suggests that instead of competing with Street Fighter IV, perhaps SNK hopes to out-shine Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. It certainly puts them into the better light, since Capcom’s Udon team has been struggling to retro-fit SSF2T’s sprites with anime-style, high-definition animations. Though SNK has a different technique: Drawing the characters in 2D, rendering them into 3D models, then the smoother animations used from the 3D models are rendered back into 2D and colored. Meanwhile, Udon’s approach of tracing over the old animations, then following that with touch-ups sounds clumsy in comparison.
I don’t mean to trash talk my boys over at Capcom too much, but this is something worth taking a few notes on. Capcom tried their hand at high-resolution sprite animations with their CPS3 arcade game line (which included Street Fighter III and Red Earth), but never kept up the fight. In any case, I’m pleased to see three genres of games are far from kaput: Arcade games, fighting games, and 2D games all together.
