Review #544: The King of Fighters '00/'01

 How many Kings of Fighters have we got already?

Should've just made original art. Meshing both artworks together made for an ugly result.

 Not as meat as the Orochi collection, this 2-disc monster includes KoF 2000 and 2001, the last game made by SNK as we knew them and the first one developed by Playmore. Back in the day these games were subject to poor reviews, mostly citing the ugly graphics, because paid reviewers always seemed to value graphics over substance.

 Both games offer the same modes: Team Arcade, Team VS Player, Single Arcade, Single VS Player, Practice and Party Mode, which is a Survival mode in which you recover health as you land hits, but also start to gradually lose health once a timer reaches zero. It's the bare minimum, but by this stage that's what we've come to expect from SNK. At least there're tons upon tons of playable characters.

Ralf and Terry won't ever miss a KoF.

 The King of Fighters 2000 is one of my favorite entries in the entire series. It plays pretty much exactly like '99, which means the Striker system that I liked so much, and it introduces a bunch of great new characters like Vanessa, Seth and Lee. But the main attractions are Strikers, whichever character gets stuck on the fourth position becomes the Striker, but this time around there're plenty of alternate strikers, mostly drawing from older SNK games or even unused character designs! The soundtrack in this game is glorious and it has ZERO load times. Thank the gods!

 The King of Fighters 2001 is not as good, but it's not bad either. Unpopular opinion, I actually adore the art for this game. This game concludes the NESTS saga that I liked so much, and it also brought changes to the Striker formula, now you can sacrifice playable characters in order to have a smaller energy gauge to fill as well as more than one striker. I guess that change is alright, although I didn't particularly care for it. On the other hand, Strikers now cost an energy bar to use, which I didn't like. At all. The new characters are relatively bland, Angel is one of the worst designs in the franchise, Maylee is forgettable, K9999... got retconned out of existence and Foxy is alright. No load times here either!

Some things never change. Like Chang's sprite.

 I guess you could say that both games are just more of the same, and I wouldn't blame you for it, but I've a lot of love for the NESTS saga and 2000 is easily one of the most polished and enjoyable games in the KoF franchise. The sad truth is that there's no real reason to own this version over an easily emulated rom, but if you want to own legit copies, this one is as good as having an arcade machine.
 9.0 out of 10