If you're a fan of classic King of Fighters, this is a very special game, because it's like the swan song of an era. It's the last time SNK would ever go back to that classic Neo Geo engine, and they made sure to make it count. Every playable character from KOF 99 to 2002 is here, and all of them have pretty much their entire classic movesets intact. It almost feels like the inverse of KOF 2000, a game SNK developed with the knowledge that they were going out of business, where they went all out trying to push themselves to the limit knowing it could be their grand finale. By contrast, this game feels like a love letter to the past before they moved onto a brand new chapter. A "see you later" rather than "farewell" I suppose.

As a fighting game, this is of course based on the classic KOF 2002 but with a ton of adjustments. Many bugs and strange design choices/oversights were corrected. Mechanics are tweaked and added so that the entire game system feels more refined than the original. Even if your favorite characters aren't the strongest, they'll still almost always feel good to play as. It's not perfect, but as a final chapter to 15 years of classic KOF, I'm not sure you could realistically ask for much better.

Also if you like K' he's really broken and easy in this game so have fun with that.