This is gonna get me into some hot water, but... I never liked Killer Instinct. I've always loved fighting games. Even though nowadays I say that classic Mortal Kombat was never good to begin with and only got good with 9 onwards, games like Mortal Kombat Trilogy and Mortal Kombat 4 entertained me a lot during my childhood. I loved fighting games, and I loved Mortal Kombat. But I hated Killer Instinct Gold. I even gave the Arcade originals a try via Emulation, and I never ever found what people found so appealing about the franchise.
This was among my earliest games, probably among the first ten and I do have some fond memories of playing this game against friends or my father. But I never really liked it as much as my other fighting games. Even back then I couldn't ignore just how ugly the characters looked, how weird their proportions and animations were. Nowadays its even worse, the females have HUGE heads and smaller bodies with HUGE breasts which looks all kinds of deformed and ridiculous, heck, even TJ Combo gets a huge neck and tiny T-Rex arms. Tusk and Maya both have orangutan arms that reach down to their knees. Some of the character designs, like Jago, are just dumb.... and the animations aren't far behind, even though it has a few well animated moves, others, like Jago's walking cycle, are just unappealing. The music, however, is amazing.
Fun fact, I'm writing this after I finished my conclusion. As I finished writing I noticed that all of my complaints were leveled against the graphics, but as far as gameplay went... I liked it. I also took a step back and realized something: I actually had fun playing the game before writing this, but my negative bias I held towards the game since my childhood... was making me think I actually hated the game. I didn't. I even popped the cart back in just now to check, and I really liked the game. And I'm not changing the rest of this write-up because I found it so interesting how much a 'bad memory', or a memory of something, can twist your feelings towards it. Curious.
As I said before, I don't very much like KI:Gold. It's a 1 on 1 2-D fighting game with ugly 2-D digitalized sprites over surprisingly pretty 3-D backgrounds. It's a six button fighter, 3 punches and 3 kicks, with input commands for special moves. It has a few original mechanics, like auto-combo and combo-breaker, but I don't much care about it. The usual normal-into-special cancels are here, as they should, and you can also cancel from an auto-combo into a special move. That said, if I can say one thing in its favor, is that the game is fast, and I really liked that. Controls are very responsive, moves come out quickly and it feels really nice to land combos.
The game also deserves props for having a nice amount of modes: Arcade, VS Player, Team, Team Elimination, Tournament, Practice and even a tutorial that teaches you the basics as well as a few simple combos for whatever character you choose. Fairly ahead of its time if you ask me, most fighting games of the era expected you to either read the instruction manual or figure everything out on your own.
As you can tell by how quickly I wanted to get Killer Instinct Gold off my platter, I don't have much love for this game. If it's worth anything, I'm clearly in the minority since people seem to love this series. And, in the game's defense, if the sprites weren't so darn ugly I would've enjoyed the game a lot more, and I'm usually not one to care for graphics, but when the presentation is so sloppy it takes you out of the game completely. I could've done with simpler, less detailed sprites if the proportions were better.
7.0 out of 10
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