There’s a handful of titles that The King of Fighters fans generally circle back to as their favorites of the now 30-year-old series with classic dream matches like KOF ’98 and 2002 or the still gorgeous King of Fighters 13.
One entry in particular, however, is hardly ever brought up in the conversation of KOF greats for a few reasons, which is a real shame considering all it has to offer.
GuileWinQuote recently released another new excellent video to ring in the new year looking back 20 years to The King of Fighters 11, which he dubs the most underrated game in the series.
KOF11 came at a very interesting time in SNK and fighting game history when the developers had finally moved away from the classic NeoGeo hardware after a full decade for the franchise and were still trying to find their footing shifting over to console and the Atomiswave arcade hardware.
This of course brought on the subpar King of Fighters Neowave and divisive King of Fighters Maximum Impact though the final NeoGeo entry, King of Fighters 2003, would set in motion what KOF11 would become.
Instead of the standard team approach to KOF games that revolved around fighting complete rounds as singular characters, 2003 introduced a tag team mechanic more in line with what you’d expect out of Marvel vs. Capcom — but it felt somewhat half-baked much like the game as a whole.
The King of Fighters 11 would build upon that in some much more fun and interesting ways as a real shift for the series that unfortunately wouldn’t really stick around after.
That game opened up shifts for characters tagging out in a much faster and free-form fashion available off of cancelable normals and specials.
Said shift mechanics opened the door to new combos that were never before possible as well as unique pressure and mixup situations.
This also put more of a focus on team building more than ever before too with synergies and special interactions flipping classic KOF on its head.
Its usage was controlled by the skill meter that does limit the craziness a bit and allows for a defensive break too at the cost of both of your bars.
And of course KOF11 offered the immaculately titled Dream Cancel mechanic as well as introduced Elisabeth and Oswald to the series.
The roster of characters (especially in arcades), however, left out a lot of longtime favorites like Mai, Joe and Andy in favor of some more out there picks like a few Buriki One fighters.
There are other aspects of the game that are not wholly beloved either like the in-game art and UI, Shion and Magaki as the bosses, and some of the character balancing.
And of course changing up the classic formula.
Probably the reason KOF11 isn’t brought up more when discussing the franchise, though, is / was its lack of availability.
The game released in 2005 for arcades at a time when those basically didn’t exist in the West anymore like the ’90s, and we didn’t receive the PlayStation 2 port of KOF11 until all the way in 2007.
Moreover, 11 is one of the very few KOF arcade titles still missing a modern re-release, so there’s now way to officially go back and play it with rollback netcode even now.
We highly recommend checking out GuileWinQuote’s new video below to see all of what makes King of Fighters 11 so special and an underrated gem for the genre.