There’s room to appreciate an animated restaurant display or how the bartender at Pao Pao pays more attention to the fighting than to her customers. It’s strange, but the purposeful limitations carry more personality than stages decked out with hyperactive animations (rest assured, KOF XV has a few of those, too). KOF XV hosts its tourney on calm streets, or within other game universes like Metal Slug where bearded POWs cheer you on in the background. Mortal Kombat games have stages set in the middle of hurricanes or inside volcanoes. The execution is simple and antiquated, but it has some appeal. Then, team-specific endings (made up of stills and text chatter) last longer than all preceding dialogue combined. The “story” here is done in the traditional arcade mode of old, dressed up with three cinematics and the same sequences for every character no matter their place in the plot. When you compare KOF XV to its greatest rivals - mainly recent Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games - the scripting falls flat. Alternate dimensions rip open, and a sold-out crowd watching the finale still thinks they’re somehow safe being near this tournament location. What was once about overthrowing corrupt organizers like Geese Howard has become an exercise in absurdist fantasy. The boldness with which KOF XV descends into unintelligible anime nonsense is almost admirable. SNK has built a branded fighting game universe, for better or for worse.
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