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When SNK showed off The King of Fighters XIIat arcade show AOU in Japan and industry event GDC in San Francisco,the unanimous reply was: Nice cell shading. That, or it's "just" hi-res2D. Thing is, that's totally incorrect. And for SNK, who's been workingon the game for the past three years, frustrating! Today, I checked outthe game's latest build at SNK's Osaka office and saw a few stages thathaven't been revealed. Screens weren't available, but there was aFrench stage, complete with fat, rich women and an Egyptian one thathad loyal subjects worshiping before the Pharaoh. Colorful stuff andclassic SNK. The company set out to make the ultimate 2D fighter —unparalleled by anything else out there, attempting not only to raisethe bar, but snap it in half. KOFXII producer Masaaki Kukino tells Kotaku:
The game is one hundred percent hand drawn. There is zero cell shading in The King of Fighters XII.
Hardcore. That means that an actual human hands lovingly drew andcolored in everything in the game. Every single frame, every characterand every background. Everything — down to the game's in-gametitle. SNK gave us the full rundown, so here's how it worked: Theoriginal character drawings were modeled into 3D. Those 3D models werethen rendered back into 2D. That way the 2D characters could have agreater depth of motion. Since the 2D models were devoid of color anddetails, artists went through each character, background, image andpainstakingly added colors and drew in details pixel-by-pixel on atablet PC. In one day, one artist would be able to draw one frame and ahalf for whatever image he or she was working on.
"We knew it was going to be hard going in," says Kukino. "But wewanted to make the ultimate 2D fighting game." Up close, thatmeticulous attention to detail becomes apparent, and you're alwaysnoticing a flourish here or a nice touch there. Every inch of thescreen has something interesting going on. "We wanted the look of thegame to have more in common with manga or anime," Kukino adds. With KoFXII, it looks like SNK hasn't only created another stylized 2D fighter, but this time, a genuine work of art.