The King of Fighters 2000

Call in an assist here and you might get a Metal Slug soldier, a half-forgotten Fatal Fury face, or an alternate version of a character already on your team. The striker list is the strangest thing about this entry, and the most telling: SNK, deep in financial trouble as the Neo Geo wound down, filled its 2000 tournament with everything it had on the shelf. Maniac Strikers and Another Strikers pile cameo on cameo until the assist select screen reads like an inventory of the company's own history.

Mechanically it refines what KOF '99 introduced rather than rewriting it. Four fighters per team, three who fight and one who comes in on call, with a striker gauge that recharges and can be spent on pressure, combo extension or a bail-out when you are pinned in the corner. The Counter and Armor modes return, and the balance between them is sharper than the year before. Striker cancels are where the depth lives. Learn to break a normal into an assist and the game opens up into long, chained sequences that look improvised and are anything but.

That also makes it one of the more intimidating KOF games to come to cold. The defensive options are there — rolls, guard cancels, emergency escapes — but a player who knows the striker timings can keep you blocking for an uncomfortably long stretch. It rewards study. Casual play against the CPU is brisk and readable; serious play against a human who has put the hours in is another thing entirely.

The PlayStation 2 version arrived a couple of years after the arcade original, by which point SNK had collapsed and reformed as SNK Playmore, and in the West it was bundled with the following year's entry rather than sold alone. The port is faithful to the point of plainness: 2D sprites running at their native scale, loading between matches, none of the presentational polish the hardware was capable of. Nobody bought it for the menus.

What holds up is the art. The sprite work in 2000 is among the best SNK ever produced, with animation that still reads cleanly next to anything from the period, and a soundtrack that commits hard to its own swagger. It is a fighting game made by a studio running out of time, and some of that urgency shows in how much it crams on screen. Few sequels feel so much like a last word.