The Best King of Fighters Game Yet...

Story 5/10
The main characters of King of Fighters 2006 are the Meiras, Soriee and Alba. The story starts up where the last game ended, at when Alba was made the leader of Southtownmuch. The story progresses until the Meiras brothers decide to enter the new King of the Fighter Tournament, which is a tournament that hosts the best fighters in the world in an elimination bracket style tournament. Even though these tournaments are usually filled with respect towards each fighter, some underground fighters and crime organizations try their best to sabotage the tournament to gain power themselves. This game really does not have the most inept story and that is true with most fighting games. The story was bare and is confusing if you have not played the other King of Fighters games.

Graphics 7/10
Whilst the graphics for this game could be improved, they are definitely good enough. The character's faces are more detailed and the outfit’s looks much more detailed than before. Although some characters that do not have much clothes on look pretty bad since areas without clothes are not as smooth and are pretty jagged. The stages are very pleasant and great to look at. This game has tons of great looking areas to fight in and there is so much diversity. In the game, you end up fighting in places like arenas, ruins, mountain, and caves.

The only real problems I have with the graphics are how some moves are done. While some moves do look crisp, other moves look to plain. Even a couple of the characters specials look lame. To sum it up they need to add more effects to some moves to make them seem more potent. Therefore, the graphics were well done, except for some of the specials.

Sounds 6/10
The game is pretty awful in this department. The voice acting was just horrible. I could not recognize the voices on some characters. I also believe some of the males sounded to feminine, I think the same actors that did the female voice overs also did the male fighters voices. Another problem I have is during cut scenes you cannot understand some of the characters because of the speech impairment some of the actors have. This only refers to the English actors. In the game, you can switch the language into Japanese, which sounds so much better.

The music at the character select stage I hated the most since it was such an awful screeching type song. I enjoyed some of the environmental music; a couple of stages also had some melodious beats than were quite pleasing to hear. I also enjoyed the sound the moves made, the punches and kicks actually sounded like you punching or kicking someone’s face in when you landed an attack. Overall, the sound was not that horrid, except for the English voice actors, whom were just utter garbage.

Gameplay 10/10
A great improvement this game made over the last is the mechanics. Although the engine is the same as the last game they have added some new techniques to keep things fresh. There are 2 new techniques in this game which are super cancel and parry. Super Cancel allows you to cancel a special move right into a super move. Parrying lets you deflect the opponent's attack and leave them stunned. Overall, if you are a season veteran of KOF games you will love the controls since the are relatively similar to other KOF games on the Playstation 2.

Another part of the game is the missions that you could do. These range from fighting with mines on the floor, to having to collect medals that drop when you hit the enemy. While some of these are fun, some are just horrid to play. Like in the mine battle, the enemy can walk on the floor, but you cannot since you have to dodge the mines on the floor. Overall most of the missions are doable, but some will just have you cussing at the television in frustration.

Another change is the new judgment system. This system helps prevent combos that would kill off all of your life in the original KOF games. Now you rarely see combos that do 50% of damage. The way it works is anytime a special move or super move is involved in a combo with normal attacks, the damage of the moves drops significantly. This was a good concept since in the last game, Maximum Impact, many computer characters on hard would kill you with one combo. This system was simply a great addition.

In my opinion there is one major flaw that kills the game, some characters are just to god like. The more popular characters, which is a group of like 10 fighters are simply faster, stronger and have better move sets than the rest of the fighters. I understand that they want to put the spotlight on their best characters, but come on, that makes its so much harder to win with the rest of the characters who are not all super strong. I also hate some of the new combos that have been put in the game, some characters after finishing the simplest of combos will pose for you while the battle is still going on. This always leaves you wide one for any type of attack, which gets annoying after a while.

The King of Fighters 2006 also has a bunch of game play modes, which range from story mode, practice mode, versus, time attack and survival mode. Practice mode is like the mode suggests, you practice. I actually used this section a bit to master some of the controls for some super moves. The versus mode is your standard fight against a computer or friend, you can also select tag and team battles, which are 2 on 2 or 3 on 3 depending on which one you choose. The survival mode makes you go against a rampage of fighters in order for you to win money and other things to unlock certain stuff.

You can unlock 14 characters through story mode, and the first time you beat story mode with each character, you will unlock their profile. You will also get alternate outfits for the characters as you progress through a story mode. The only problem I have is that I had to go through story mode like two million times to get everything. In my opinion, the unlockable characters are not worth it since many of them are just copies of the regular fighters. Or in other words they have similar moves. The unlockables in this game are still good though since there are tons to collect besides characters.

Replay Value 10/10
Like most fighting games, the replay value is exceptionally high. If you are a King of Fighters fan, you will be playing this for hours to try to unlock everything. If you done unlocking everything you can go through the tournament with every character or just fight you friends or computer in a versus match, tag battle and team battle.. There are also a bunch of random missions that you can try to complete, but I must warn you some of them are infuriating because of the degree of difficulty. Some of these challenges, in my opinion, seem just impossible. All in all the replay value is definitely tremendously high.

Overall, I recommend buying this game since it is one of the better King of Fighters game ever. The gameplay is simply superb and it has one of the better fighting engines for any fighter game. Also the deep roster and many modes will keep you playing for hours and hours. Simply a great game for the Playstation 2.