If you could only play one 2D fighting game in your lifetime, King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match IS the game you would need to play. But if you didn’t know your fighting game history, chances are you won’t know enough, to care. Made by SNK, the King of Fighters series was never really popular in North America, but if you went to the local arcades in Asia, you would find rows of head-to-head arcade machine juxtaposing each other like a bunch of mad Pachinko machines, with crowds lining up and spectating at matches. Of the few KOF machines you can find in local arcades in the US, you would probably only find Asians and Hispanics (and sometimes Europeans) who actually know how to play and be at least moderately competitive. I only had one conclusion I could make, native North Americans (I rewrote this term a few times to exclude myself… and just to sound as racist as possible) are without taste — and that is stated with evidence to back it up — that Americans have never heard of great series like Saint Seiya (and recently discovering it and calling it Knights of the Zodiac), never heard of Captain Tsubasa (and calling Soccer Football unlike the rest of the world), and having an idiot run this country for 8 years and almost voted another idiot vice president (Bayonetta look-alike she is not) to ruin it further.
Let’s get back to the subject at hand. KOF 02 Unlimited Match is the remake of KOF 02, the 2nd dream match title after KOF 98, built on top of the fighting system perfected from KOF 97. First of all, the character roster is impressive, 52 characters not including the alternate versions, and the balance of the game has been tuned to death, it IS the most balanced game ever created. If you played Street Figher 4 you will know the definition of imbalance — that Sagat and Balrog and Ryu ruled the game and if you played Viper you will never hope to win a match, ever, unless you were bullying newbies. 02 UM is not a newbie friendly game however. If you were not familiar with KOF history, and you have never heard of Orochi and the Kyusanagi and the Yagami, you might first want to look up the legend of Yamata no Orochi and go through the KOF Orochi saga (95 – 97) and the Nests saga (99 – 01) and practiced your ass out of 98 and 02 before attempting to master 02 UM.
Why are the Asians and Hispanics kicking your ass at the local arcade? It is because the mastering of KOF 02 requires the culmination of the skills of the games that came before it. The raw form of its fighting system at its core came from KOF 96 and its evolution slowly progressed towards something much more fluid than its predecessors. 96 was the first game that introduced many different degrees of jumps, the jump with the lowest altitude (hopping), opens up infinite possibilities of pressuring tactics against your opponent. And rolling (evolved from the dodging in 95) gives another dimension to the 2D gameplay. Running / Dashing forward was another critical element of the game that made it the most fluid 2D fighter. Now Street Fighter didn’t adapt the mechanics of dashing until nearly a decade later with SF3 and never quite yet learned to adopt the hopping system. Yes, different levels of jumps + rolling makes it impossible to trap someone with fireball/dragon punch tactic, which Street Fighter has never, and will probably never learn from this lesson, that this 1 dimensional gameplay is already 2 decades old and in fact boring but no Street Fighter fans has realized that because they have been addicted to this formula drug for decades, not that it is bad or anything, not for Capcom anyway, just like cigarettes are only bad for your health.
I have not even begun to graze upon the morsels of KOF 02’s complexity, and that comes down what you do with your energy stock and how you build it up. Building it is the simple part, and that comes from attacking and doing special moves. The aggressor certainly will have the upper hand in building the stock. With the 3 on 3 match up, your first character can have up to 3 stocks and your last will have up to 5. There is a variety of things you can do here with a stock:
1) Guard Cancel – pushes back your opponent when guarding
2) Guard Cancel Roll – roll away from guarding position
3) Desperation Move – your simple lv 1 super, which I will call DM from now on
4) Max Mode – goes into a mode that lets you cancel your normal special moves into other special moves or supers and can spend an additional stock for a SDM (level 2 super – in KOF 02 UM you also have access to a SDM by spending 3 stocks directly instead of spending 2 stocks going into Max Mode and then doing the DM, but I won’t go too in-depth into this)
5) Cancels – it takes 1 stock to cancel, which essentially means to do anything meaningful you need 2 stocks, for a super cancel (special move -> DM), or cancel into Max Mode (from a normal move)- which is the heart of this game.
To understand the mastery and the beauty behind KOF 02 one has to understand Max Mode. In Max Mode you actually do lower damage to your opponent (sometimes when you play in the arcade you see newbies doing this for no reason, that’s just wasting a stock), experts only goes into Max Mode with a cancel, which means yes, they spend 2 stocks to make their character shine all sparky and does lower damage and yes if they mess up the combo they would have wasted 2 stocks for nothing. What Max Mode does is enabling your character to cancel their normal special moves into other normal special moves, and enabling you to do a SDM if you spend additional stock.
If you are not a fighting games aficionado I suggest you skip the following paragraph (Well, or not). True mastery of KOF 02 is the epiphany of comprehending when and why you would spend 2 stocks to cancel into Max Mode, as a matter of fact there is a whole FAQ written (only in Chinese, that I can find) just for different ways of mastering and utilizing how to cancel into Max Mode, and buffering the moves that come after. Buffering means inputting commands in advance to executing them, which is crucial in this game. Canceling into Max Mode gives you a few frames of advantage while you attack, it cancels out the remaining frames of your move and totally removed the staggering effect after you perform a move. For example, using an overhead, after you activate your overhead, let’s assume your opponent is an expert that saw that coming and he’s standing up to block it, at the last few frames of your overhead, you spend 2 stocks to activate Max Mode, now your opponent is stuck in standing position blocking, and he’s actually stuck, while you are free to move, but we are talking about a fleeting 1/2 second here, when he’s open to attack, if you dash forward, and begin a string of combo with a low kick. Why only experts do this? Because it is impossibly hard, you only have that tiny window to perform a string of commands and if you messed up your dashing forward you could lose 2 of your stocks for nothing which you could have used otherwise in easy combos like regular super cancels or just keep turtling and spending it to push back your opponent. This is where buffering comes in, when you know the series of commands you are going to use and input them accordingly ahead of time, and there are shortcut commands which may also help you to achieve your goal.
I have perhaps only talked about 10% of strategies revolving around KOF 02, so as you can see the depth of KOF 02 is simply an infinite abyss. Experts can probably write a thesis on how to master the game. So if you got half of what I am talking about why are you guys still lining up to play Street Fighter? For those who could not visualize what I was talking about, check out the exciting tournament video below and pay attention of what the 2 experts are doing (and how their stocks are spent). Outside of local arcades, KOF 02 UM is available on the PS2 if you import and there’s no online functionality outside of Japan. However it IS scheduled to come out next year on XBLA (I’ll cross my fingers and await eagerly). Meanwhile you can play KOF 98 UM on XBLA and it does have some healthy competition (albeit very poor and laggy net-code which I hope SNK will eventually learn to improve). The other alternative to experiencing the original KOF 02 with flawless online play and lots of expert competition is via emulator on the PC. Check GGPO for details.
I can pretty much stake my life (or various body parts) that KOF 02 UM will be the best fighting game for the rest of my life (and I am hoping to live a pretty long one), unless SNK creates a KOF 02 UM + which includes more characters from the franchise. Being the best here is referring to the in-depth system and not the graphics. Of course KOF 02 UM also represented a lot of missed opportunities, that I would think if SNK went the path of what the team that created Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix it would have resulted in a much finer product (SF2 HD looks damn good while the gameplay sucks ass), much better than working on the reboot garbage like KOF XII. And yes, reboot here means developers get my boot in their face, again, when they reboot. Speaking for all KOF fans, I am pretty sure that we will be oozing in utter bliss if one day we can play KOF 02 with all the characters in KOF history, and with the graphics of SF2 HD.
And by all means, do not support KOF by going to the theater to watch the upcoming live-action movie directed by Gordon Chan, not even if someone pointed a gun at your head. There are worse ways to torture yourself, and not with that total disrespect of the original material.
