The King of Fighters 2000

The tag button is the tell. In the previous year's entry, calling your fourth teammate onto the screen was a defensive bail-out and a bit of fan service. Here the striker can be summoned mid-combo, and because those calls cancel your recovery, skilled hands started stitching chains together that run far longer than any 2D fighter of that era was meant to allow. Maniac Striker combos, they got called. Nobody involved seems to have wanted to shorten them.

That single change is what separates this from every other King of Fighters. The engine underneath is still the 1999 rework — Counter Mode and Armor Mode drawn from your Power gauge, three-on-three plus a striker, the tight walk-forward spacing SNK had spent a decade sharpening. But the striker roster balloons into something closer to a museum: Another Strikers pulled from across SNK's back catalogue, alternate versions of the main cast, oddities that exist purely so someone would find them. Kula Diamond arrives as the sting in the tail behind Zero, and stays as one of the series' better new additions.

Context matters for this one. It was the last King of Fighters the original SNK finished before the company collapsed, with the following year's game farmed out to other studios. You can read that either as a team going out swinging or a team with nobody left to say no to the combo system. Both readings hold up.

As a PlayStation 2 conversion it is straightforward work: the Neo Geo sprites intact, loading trimmed to nothing much, versus play the reason to keep the disc in rotation. Western buyers mostly met it packaged alongside the 2001 game rather than on its own, which had the odd effect of presenting the studio's last work and its immediate replacement side by side on one menu.

Competitively it has always been the awkward child, admired and distrusted in equal measure. Play it with someone who knows the striker cancels and you will spend a lot of the round watching. Play it with someone who does not, and it is the sharpest the series ever felt.