I played it on arcade too but since this is the main one I jump in, here I go:

KOF Peaked here. Hell, every KOF entry before this one peak in their own way.

The sprites are just so hypnotizing, they move so clean. The music as per usual never misses. It is a very beautiful game.

The gameplay can maybe feel a little bit "unresponsive" at first, specially if you are used to modern fighting games with a lot of buffer and leniency, but get passed that and you have peak neutral, peak combo expression, peak mixes.

Absolutely love this game.

KOF XIII is great.

The steam port is not. Crashes whenever it loads a video file on windows 10. Any fix that exists doesn't work, and when I can get the game to load, it will crash randomly while playing.

Pretty disappointed with this version.

- Very small roster.
- Effects look weird. (Especially fire effects)
- Shh!tty character design of Akari Warriors. (Ralf was my favorite KOF character but they have made him fat looking idiot. They removed his grappling moves and added fire bomb move or something... ωtf?)
- Controls feel stiff. Combos and specials are more complicated than the previous games.
- Ash is the least scary final boss in kof franchise.
- Sub-par music
- poor port

Overall, it's a step down from the old KOF games that I'm used to. A lot of KOF fans claim it to be the best KOF game but to me, it feels like a cheap & careless experiment.

Very miffed about this one. KoF is probably my favorite fighting game franchise (Alhough Plus R is probably still my favourite game) because of how solid the system mechanics are, no matter how unbalanced or stripped down the game may be, the games always feel like a dream to control. Having said that, I never actually played XIII until recently, but I kept experiencing it through osmosis via posts and comments saying how beautiful this game looked, how this was the best KoF, how SNK shouldn't have moved to 3D, etc, etc... With all that, actually playing the game, and knowing the game mechanics we had in the Ash saga until now (even including XII), it feels like SNK was putting all their chips into presentation this time around, when the Ash saga's whole deal until this point is that it carried almost no mechanics from the previous games aside from movement related ones.

XIII instead went back to the usual team 3-on-3 format we all know and love but did some serious changes in how the game is actually played. Max mode makes a comeback but uses a whole different gauge outside of the usual super meter, and it introduces EX moves into the series. While having a third version of a special to play around sounds interesting, specially for fighters that we all know how their movesets are going to look like, but this feels like a compensation for absolutely GUTTING some of the characters' movelist. Terry has no Power Charge, no Fire Kick, no Ground Wave, no Power Dunk, and has only access to the absolute bare essentials. Many characters are like this, to the point that i'd say only Ash and Iori (for lore reasons) had additions to their moveset. There is a lot of animation reusing and even some normals were straight up removed. It feels really weird having the exact same throw for C and D and characters not always having close normal versions.

What characters kept has been heavily focused, and what moves they traded or replaced have, a lot of the time, one direct goal, combos. Aside from probably 2002UM this has to be the most combo centric KoF game. Normal into Command Normal into special will no longer cut it, you are heavily encouraged to make use of the Drive gauge for meterless special cancels. Entering Max mode now gives you an auto run which makes it SIGNIFICANTLY easier to land a combo after any confirm. This has the rammifications of only keeping moves the developers had in mind for building combo routes. Clark's other 5 hundred grabs may be gone as he only keeps one this time around, but now he also has EX Vulcan Punch and a hit confirmable string in Close C > 3A which gives him a combo game that he NEVER had, seriously, Clark's big combo used to literally be a single Close C into his super, but had some of the most frightening vortex and call-outs of any grappler in the game, he feels like an entirely different character. He is not the only example, some characters got things added in place of other things, like Ash losing his command grab but now getting a proper Sans Culotte route from a low thanks to 4B links.

Do I like it? I wouldnt say I dislike it directly, I like it when games in a series keep enough of what's important but spice things up a little, I really enjoyed XI for that reason. Doing combos in XIII feels really nice but it does feel like the developers had to sacrifice a lot of other things in the character moveset so things like this grappler getting easy confirms into huge damage with also a lot of grabs to his name didnt get out of hand quickly. Same thing can be said with a lot of characters, that had most tools regarding more esoteric things in the older games, removed or repourposed for keeping that juggle going. You quickly realize this by looking at how much everyone makes a deal about the trials in this game, the developers really wanted to showcase this game's combo possibilites. This is a hugely subjective topic so a lot of my ramblings may feel like crazy talk for people who think this system is the best in the franchise, and I can see the argument of this game being someone's favorite KoF because of these decisions, but i'll just say that there is a reason why a lot of the XIII playerbase only really likes XIII, and a lot of people that play other KoF titles don't, the game was and still is a very divise product in how it wanted to shift priorities around.

What actually feels more plausible for the removal of moves however was that this game costed SNK tons of money. Yeah we have reached the point where we talk about the presentation. Yeah the sprites look good, we all know it, it's an accepted fact...or is it?

Now, I know this game took a lot of time to animate, like a LOT of time, but the end result looks...strange. Many people have commented just how obsessed this game is to giving steroids to every character. Terry plays basketball, he doesnt benchpress school buses, but why does Ryo have no pupils? Why is Takuma walking forward the scariest shit ever? Why is Yuri noodled-arm but when you beat her you can see her humongous rack? Why is the game so obsessed in making every nationality a caricature in the stages? Why did they think Iori's hair was supposed to be a tupé? Has any of the developers actually seen how a woman's boob actually jiggle or did they design Mai's idle pose looking at water balloons?

The game looks bizarre, I sometimes feel like I am looking at skinwalkers. Beautiful skinwalkers, sure, but some of these characters absolutely do not look like how they are meant to. We can talk all we want about how good this game looks on screenshots but seeing it in motion with these things plus the insane amount of 3D effects that look NOTHING like the rest of the game (looking at you Duo Lon's weird smoke-skull thingies). If there is one thing I dont see talked about is how good this game sounds (not even just the music), the sound effects are dope, I dont think I have been scared more in a fighting game than whenever my friend who plays Clark runs up, turns the world into a black void, I see the words Neo Max pop up, a speeding jet lets me know of my sudden, incoming death, just so I get Piledrived into the earth's core while I hear the ground itself crack open on my headphones GOD this game SOUNDS like a dream! But no, everything always comes back to the graphics, which I dont even think look like what KoF is supposed to look like.

This is a KoF game at the end of the day, I am bound to get my enjoyment out of it, I think this game has the best playable version of Ash crimson so my boy being so much fun gets thumbs up for that, but there's always something in the back of my psyche that my conscience doesnt always interpret right away, telling this and that are wrong and shouldnt be like that, but really, developers are free to do whatever they think will move a series forward (except for the racism and sexism please who the fuck actually designed some of these stages I want their names). We live in a era where most of the games are readily available via Fightcade or modern consoles with solid netcode (aside from this one but I'll bet solid gold Code Mystics wont take too long to add it to XIII) so it's not like people are forced to play one over the other (except for XIII god this netcode is cheeks), so if you disagreed on in this review means we both have different tastes and we both have options to satisfy them, which is cool

Except is you like propaganda-level caricatures as your game's stages if that's the case go fuck yourself.