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From the screenshots alone, this game looks fantastic. Sprites look like they're unchanged from the originals, and all their colors are retained. This is true for the most part, but from screenshots alone you can't tell anything really. Artoon handled this game and I can't help but continue to ask myself, if SNK did this, would it be incredible? Their Neo Pocket fighter line-up was. The final product is certainly not incredible. In fact, it's about average. Once I pop the game in, I'm quickly reminded that the GameBoy Advance is really just a SNES in my hands, and all the nightmares of SNES ports of arcade fighters flood my memory once more. The game suffers from poor music (are Nintendo and Konami the only companies able to get good tunes out of this machine?), animation cuts, and a lame unchanging story. After the initial shock passes by, I come to grips with what I have here and try to enjoy it. Funny, a person playing this that never played KOF before would probably think it's awesome, but because I've played the original KOF99 (which this is based off), I notice all the imperfections first. The music situation I expected (Advance Wars and Castlevania are still the best examples of GBA tunes), but too bad you can't turn down the music volume because it drowns out the sound effects. The character voices are not all present. No shocker there, and it's not a big deal. However, one thing that's very annoying is that if a character has a knock out scream, it skips twice (stutters) when the winning portrait is coming up. Playability is tough. While it's great that the GBA and KOF both use four buttons, that L button cramps up my left hand. There is an option to make the game 3 buttons, but it's confusing. Special moves that could be done with the L button can now be done on R, but you still lose all of the normal L attacks. Interesting option though. The game offers about 6 teams of 3 playable characters each, and one non-playable, Striker only character. Every time you finish the game, your points are tallied and open up extra Strikers. So far by finishing the game twice, I've opened K', Maxima, and Vanessa. The select screen has a space to the left and right of the random select. This is where I suppose Geese and Iori will open up. Iori fights you after you defeat 6 teams, and then the boss of the game is Geese Howard. You get the usual KOF options, but one of the normal ones, Single Play, is mutated. For some reason in Single Play the matches are best of 7. Why isn't there an option to change the number of rounds? Bizarre. Also, in Team Play, normally the boss only has to be beaten once because they're the only character, but here you have to beat Geese or Iori 3 times. Very weird. The new artwork for Geese's portrait is nice. The new character Moe (Mo-eh) plays a lot like Kyo with cherry blossoms. She's being put into KOF2002. SSF2X is still the king of GBA fighters IMO, even with the button handicap.
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