The King of Fighters 97

When the King of Fighters 97 was released in mid-1997, it was met with the now expected acclaim from both critics and fans alike. While the broader game community was moving away from 2D fighting games by this point, ardent genre fans could not get enough of SNK's yearly hit series. And with King of Fighters 97, there was a lot to be excited about. The King of Fighters 96 the prior year saw sweeping updates to not only the visual style of the series, but also mechanics. Despite some serious balance issues and underbaked move sets, King of Fighters 96 laid the groundwork for what was to come in 97 and beyond. 

In order to drum up hype for the game, SNK commissioned character polls from three popular arcade publications in Japan: Gamest, Famitsu, and of course Neo-Geo Freak. Each publication ran their own contest to see which character would win out of a set number of choices, and SNK would insert these characters into the game. Blue Mary, Billy Kane, and Ryuji Yamazaki from the Fatal Fury series were the winners, and SNK worked them into the over arching storyline as integral to the plot. Aside from Billy, both Mary and Yamazaki have gone on to be in almost every mainline King of Fighters game since 1997 due to their overwhelming popularity with players...even in 2023!

To really put the prominence of the King of Fighters series into perspective from the late 90's, King of Fighters 97 was the second highest grossing arcade game in Japan for the entire year despite coming out in the middle of the third quarter! While I cannot locate any sales data from Middle & South America and China, folks in those regions often still prefer this entry to all others over 25 years later. King of Fighters 97 is still played across the globe in high-level tournaments, albeit with rules that ban some of the jank. Even outside of competitive play, 97 is a fan favorite due to the excellent storyline events and highly unique presentation. 

Despite being highly praised on release, the gaming community in both Japan and the West dropped this game in favor of King of Fighters 98 when it came out that next summer. That's not to say that 97 is a bad game comparatively, but 98 fleshes out the mechanics presented in this entry, rebalances the cast, adds an overwhelming amount of new and returning characters, and much more. While King of Fighters 97 is still regarded as a great entry, it's a bit hard to recommend heartily to modern players when the arguably best entry in the entire series is just one number away. Still, from a historical perspective, King of Fighters 97 is an interesting curio that continues SNK's tradition of trying something a little new with every release. Let's dig in.

As the final game in the Orochi trilogy that began with the 1995 entry, the King of Fighters 97 has a much darker tone than what came before. In the game universe, by 1997 the King of Fighters tournament has become a world-wide phenomenon and the tournament was broadcast across the globe. Rather than there being a single tournament sponsor, multiple corporations have contributed to the event and built six new stadiums across the world to support the bouts. Even though Goenitz was defeated the prior year, Chizuru could not rest and joined this year's tournament along side Mai and King so she could keep a close eye on the happenings during the tournament season. While most characters in the game are there for the usual white-knuckle fisticuffs, all of the new characters have ulterior motives that are not as transparent as Shingo Yabuki's who, like Sakura to Ryu in the Street Fighter games, is obsessed with his hero Kyo Kusinagi. 

Chizuru was right to worry, as the New Faces team comprised of Yashiro, Shermie, and Chris are all members of the Orochi Hakkeshu. Their aim for this year is to resurrect Orochi once and for all, reincarnating him through Chris. During the tournament both Iori and Leona succumb to the Orochi blood inside of them and wreak havoc in the semi-final matches. After Kyo's team defeats Orochi Iori, the New Faces team reveals their true Orochi forms. Even after defeat, they still succeed in resurrecting Orochi. In a rare moment of lucidity, Iori joins forces with Kyo and Chizuru (Team Sacred Treasures) to defeat Orochi once and for all. Despite Orochi's attempts to control Iori through the blood pact, Iori's sheer will overcomes Orochi's temptations and he lands the final killing strike ending both Orochi and this first chapter of the King of Fighters lore. 

After the tournament, Kyo Kusinagi disappears without a trace and nobody - not his friends or even his girlfriend - can locate him. The story continues in King of Fighters 99 where the Nests saga begins and we are introduced to a new protagonist K'. (editor's note: King of Fighters 98 is a Dream Match with no storyline, which is why the story picks up in 1999.)

Each year the memory footprint on King of Fighters games got larger and larger, with 97 being the largest entry to date at 460 mega bits. This generous amount of memory allowed for one of the most expansive cast upgrades in the series history to this point with seven brand new playable characters and six alternate versions of a select few. Unfortunately the team that got the axe in 97 was the Big Boss Team. Here's the breakdown.

• The New Faces Team: Yashiro, Shermie, and Chris

• The Orochi Team: Yashiro, Shermie, and Chris, but even more evil with completely different move sets.

• The Special Team: Blue Mary, Yamazaki, and Billy Kane

• Singles: Iori and new comer Shingo Yabuki (a Kyo Kusinagi uber fan).

• Bosses: Riot of the Blood Iori and Leona, and Orochi him (it?) self.

• Extra Alt: King of Fighters 95 Kyo (Kyo with his 95 move set)

In a first for the series, the King of Fighters 97 offers players a choice of playstyle, or "ism," prior to selecting their characters. The Advanced mode adheres more to the changes presented in King of Fighters 96 with full runs, dodge rolls, hops, and super jumps. Basic mode, on the other hand, plays more like King of Fighters 95 with a hop-dash, dodge-parries and a chargeable Max meter. The biggest change to the mechanics in Advanced mode comes in how you utilize the Max meter. 

Unlike prior games in the series, you can now store up to five Max meter stocks. At the start of the match you begin with three Max stock slots and you earn a new stock slot each time you lose for a maximum of five slots by the time you're on your anchor (last) character. When your Max gauge becomes full, you earn a stock. Once you have your Max stocks maxed out you must use at least one stock to earn more. You can use your Max stocks three ways: 

• Option 1: Desperation Move - You can use one of your desperation (super) moves.

• Option 2: Break stock - This mechanic works like having a full Max meter in prior games that gives you a timed damage buff.

• Option 3: Super Desperation Move - Once you have broken one of your stocks, you can spend another stock to do a super version of one of your desperation attacks.

You can read a more comprehensive breakdown of the key Advanced and Basic mode mechanics in the King of Fighters 98 review.

That's not all, though. Because the storyline to the King of Fighters series was well established by this point, there are some characters who naturally will resist working with each other on the same team. This leads into another Max mode mechanic that relies on the type of relationship your characters have with each other. On the team order select screen, hold down the start button to see an emoji that denotes the mood of the character. Characters that are happy will give the next teammate an extra Max stock if they lose a round. If they are neutral, the Max meter stocks will remain unchanged. Finally, if they are angry, a Max stock will be removed the next round. Basically, you'll need to balance your team out by knowing how each character interacts with each other in order to know how to set up your point, mid, and anchor positions.

While the King of Fighters 96 set in motion important changes to the series formula, the overall gameplay loop of King of Fighters 97 solidified what the series would morph into over the subsequent years. Modern fans can have a good time with 96, but 97 will feel much more familiar as the mobility options have been tweaked to be more responsive, jump heights have been altered slightly, and command normals that were curiously missing from 96 have been added back into the mix and are now a core part of your combo strings. King of Fighters 97 feels great to play, and the updates to move sets, changes in normal attack animations, and general increase in tempo make it easier to overlook the glitches and general jank that still plagues this release. 

Characters saw generous upgrades to their animation sets that better round out the sprite updates from King of Fighters 96. Many of the animation upgrades come in the form of tweaked moves and the reintroduction of command normals across the board (thankfully). While we wouldn't see the full expression of these sprite sets until the next year's entry, the King of Fighters 97 characters looks better than prior year entries. The brand new characters introduced in this game also look excellent, meshing well with the now established graphical style of the series. 

The King of Fighters 97 has a wildly unique presentation, but that uniqueness doesn't come without a few quirks. First up, the game is the only King of Fighters game to be presented like a true televised broadcast. This leans into the global nature of the event that is detailed in the cannon storyline. SNK created the universe's own news network called Satella, along with leaderboards, brackets, and camera men walking around each arena. No other King of Fighters game leans into this type of presentation with such gusto - save for 2022's King of Fighters XV to some degree. While the overall network broadcast presentation is certainly unique, the art direction leaves a bit to be desired.

When coming from a game as good looking as King of Fighters 96, you'd expect the next game in the series to outdo what came before. That's not the case here. Despite the opening animation sequence being absolutely killer (best in the series, imo), there are some odd choices in art direction throughout the rest of the experience. The character select screen is uninteresting and feels a bit slapdash, and the character portraits that appear when you hover over a character have slightly odd proportions - shoulders too big for the head, small hands - subtle but off-putting features that harken back to the somewhat strange proportions on character art in King of Fighters 94. By extension, the post-fight victory scenes also include larger portraits with the same strange proportions. Not all characters look off, but a good number of them are quite unsettling looking. The pixel art in the cut scenes and endings, though, are all well drawn which leaves me even more confused as the art style from the character portraits and story scenes just don't mesh well. 

Backgrounds have loads of detail, but because of the "televised" approach they all end up feeling somewhat the same: crowds of people watching the fight in different settings like an amusement park, a few different arenas, etc. Despite all of the backgrounds teeming with animation and detail, they just aren't all that interesting overall outside of the two standouts. The Orochi team's slowly disintegrating background with each round is quite nice, as is the Bali stage with its dancing tribesmen. Unlike prior years, though, there are only six backgrounds on offer here which is a bit of a letdown as teams no longer have their own unique arena. Unfortunately, SNK would continue this trend for all subsequent King of Fighters and many other games. Unique backgrounds per character/team take a load of memory that could be allocated to more characters, animation, or sound overall and are expensive to produce. Still, classic SNK was known for their highly detailed backdrops and to see less of their amazing art is a bummer as a fan. 

The King of Fighters series has always been known for its fantastic soundtracks. And if you purchased King of Fighters 97 without any prior knowledge you'd be expecting to be wowed by the instrumentation and composition of the music. Sadly, the majority of the music is ambient noises you'd expect to hear in each stage's setting. That's not to say these more ambient tunes are bad, as some are quite interesting - like the Indonesian stage. It's just...things don't feel quite without that driving synth guitar and basslines fans associate with the series. That said, the music that is present is great, and a number of characters have specific themes that play when you fight them. The Orochi Team's theme, Rhythmic Hallucination, is easily the game's best track and one of the best rock anthems in the entire series. 

One of the most glaring issues with King of Fighters 97 is in its overall performance on the Neo-Geo hardware. This game is plagued with slowdown at just about every turn. Fire effects make the hardware buckle, for example. A simple flame uppercut from Iori or Kyo will throttle the frame rate from a smooth 60fps (where a fighting game should always be) down to the low 20's in less than a second. In a fighting game, extreme performance issues like this kill combo timing and frame counting. That said, savvy competitive players can make use of the performance issues in creative ways to create combo strings that otherwise wouldn't work without these performance drops. So while I find them distracting, there are plenty of folks that wouldn't have it any other way. Thankfully these odd performance issues are worked out entirely in the next year's entry.

At the end of the day, the King of Fighters 97 is a great game with an interesting setting, awesome story, and more fleshed out mechanics than the prior year's entry. That said, the character balance and performance woes are noteworthy issues and a more robust soundtrack is sorely missed. In a world where King of Fighters 98 exists, it's actually a little hard to recommend King of Fighters 97 unless you already have some nostalgia or want to experience the game for yourself for the storyline and/or artistic context. There's a lot to love here for casual and hardcore fans of the King of Fighters series, but if you're just after the best mechanics and balance of the Orochi era of King of Fighters games, King of Fighters 98 is the better game all around by a pretty significant margin.

So, where is the value factor? King of Fighters die-hards can pick up King of Fighters 97 pretty cheap on AES. A complete Japanese copy can be found for as little as $120 and as much as $250. I would recommend NOT paying over $170 for the game in 2023. A US edition can cost as much as $2000 or more, though. MVS and Neo CD versions are less than $50 each, so if you aren't tied to an AES but want to play the game on real hardware, that is where I recommend you spend your cash. You can also find the modern Playstation 4 release titled Global Match for a few bucks on the Playstation network, or you can grab the Arcade Archives release for $8 on most modern platforms.

Of course there are 90's console ports you could grab as well, and the litany of compilation packs that have come out over the years including SNK's own plug-n-play solutions. But it's hard to recommend any of these solutions as the modern, officially emulated releases like the Arcade Archives series are going to give you the most accurate experience in the modern age. For posterity sake, though, the Sega Saturn port is the one to find as it uses the 1mb RAM expansion cartridge and has shorter load times than the Playstation port which is missing animation, etc. Like all these 16 and 32-bit ports of Neo-Geo games, there really is no need to play or pay for them these days, but for the curious gamers out there it is fun to see the differences in port quality if you're into the history of the medium.

If you're just getting into AES collecting, don't let the collecting bug get ahold of you if you find a "good deal" on King of Fighters 97. Save that money and spend just a bit more to get King of Fighters 98. It's one of the most common AES games, and you can get a complete copy, easily, for right around $250. I encourage you to read the King of Fighters 98 review prior to purchasing 97.