REVIEW: King of Fighters: The Orochi Saga

Developer: SNK Playmore | Publisher: Ignition | Format: PSP

Reviewer: Craig Jay Gallagher

The psp has seen it’s fair share of gaming collections and given the rich history of SNK it’s not unusual to find that so many of their titles appearing on game sore shelves. The latest series to find it’s self collected for gamers enjoyment is King of Fighters: The Orochi Saga.

The collection brings together the first 5 years of the franchise and while most gamers will find very little difference in the various versions all 5 are well worth playing. The differences from title to title generally involve new characters, moves and the ever evolving graphics.

The first thing that gamers will notice are the extraneous loading times. It takes obscene amounts of time for each of the games to load and you can look forward to further load times. There are even times when you find the game freezing during play as the game continues to loads. The control system is also a little iffy, the psp controls don’t really lend themselves to fighting games and can make the whole thing rather awkward.

It’s always good to get the bad out of the way and concentrate on the positive and when you look at it KoF is a truly fantastic title. The 3v3 game structure and ability to change the order in which fighters take the main stage adds an extra layer of strategy to the endeavour. As you play you discover which fighters best together and you use this to your advantage. The multiplayer contains several challenges which require the gamer to win a series of fights with various constraints on the combat. This adds an extra layer of value to a game all ready overwhelmed in sheer replayability.

For the price King of Fighters is simply put a grade an A plus title which has more bang for your buck than any other title out there at the minute. It’s been a long time since a PSP game entertained as much. Hopefully next time the load times will be sorted and a more