I waited HOW long for a re-birth of my favorite fighter for them to completely mess it up?
I've been tracking this game since I first saw an early build of the gameplay, because holy damn the new graphics are amazing. It's easily the prettiest fighting game on the market.
Unfortunately, what used to be a deep and engaging fighting series got completely stripped of all that the previous years have built towards. I don't understand the vast majority of the new game mechanics, topped off with the fact that every character is completely bare-bones. The first thing I noticed was the lack of my favorite moves on just about every character I have classically been good with. They removed Power Dunk from Terry, they removed Teleport from Athena, and removed all but one super special from every single character but Ash. It honestly feels like Ash is the only character worth playing anymore because he was simple to begin with so his two moves still made the cut.
Let's not forget that Iori is a completely different character now. I understand where it comes from a storyline standpoint (as his Orochi powers were stolen by Ash at the end of the last KOF) but they NEVER explain this to anyone. It's something I've figured out as a fan. They completely removed all plot from the title! I realized that a fighting game is never about the plot, but when you've got 15 years of character building going on, I'd like to see their latest purposes for fighting again.
To top it off, the online play isn't worth your time because of how horrendous the lobby system is, and how broken the lag time is.
The price tag is way too much. They could have easily made this a $20 game over X-Box Live to satisfy us KOF freaks for when they hopefully actually release a finished KOF product in the future. I understand it takes a lot of time to completely hand draw every motion in the game, but give me a break. This half-assed attempt at a fighter leaves me feeling rather empty. I had such high hopes.