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| Fitting image if you ask me |
Well, well, well it seems SNK really is getting more and more honest about reviving other IPs it wrongly neglected (and to a certain few abused). In addition they also want to "make new IPs" as well, meaning that they won't just be merely revisiting the older ones.
While this sounds good and all, I'm still quite skeptical of how SNK does things. I mean this is the same company that thought it was a great idea to rape the Metal Slug franchise with those garbage-ass tower defense games starting with Defense (or as I like to call it Derpfense), wasted their development effort with KOF XIII (what with that sprite overhaul) and went into pachislot-induced near irrelevancy, and recently making KOF XIV that is no doubt a full fledged game and at the same time giving the Slug squat except for... you guessed it ANOTHER RETARDED tower defense game (and having the nerve to make it it's "20th anniversary game")! I get it, I get it that KOF is the most well known SNK franchise known to the gaming community, but as far as I'm concerned that's no excuse given that from my understanding that SNK wrongly put a lot of resources into that one franchise at the expense of others. Not that I'm saying KOF should die or anything, I really don't care about the franchise normally, but I do if SNK keeps favoring KOF over anything else, almost like a kind of Apartheid inflicted upon video games. Yeah, if you think about it, it's almost the same way the Nationalist Party of South Africa did regarding the whites and the non-whites and if anyone is barely familiar with Apartheid you know which group the party favored but I digress here.
Anyway, while we all know that KOF XIV will do well given that as I said it's the most well known franchise (for shame) and that it will have a lot more content that Street Fighter 5 has, I'm obviously a lot more worried about what would SNK do in the future. As I said, SNK seem to be sending mixed messages lately with not giving the MS series a badly needed game while putting all it's effort on just KOF XIV. It quite tells me that SNK seems to not care about the Metal Slug franchise at all and just seems content to rape it to the ground with those mind-numbingly boring and low effort tower defense s--t. I'm not bothering to talk about why I think they're a disgrace for the series even though they aren't exactly the worst games ever made, no I'll save that for another time for the sake of my sanity. Instead I would add before all of that, SNK made pachislot games and non-tower defense games all of which do little to nothing for the series (except for maybe adding a few new characters and vehicles and such that deserve to be represented in more full fledged games), all of which made me lose interest in the series but after SNK made the news again regarding it's purchase by Leyou I can't help but keep a close eye on things regarding the company regarding it's intentions to make a revival of the mistreated franchise and give it the "Marvel" treatment.
And knowing of their track record, I'm very concerned since other franchises had suffered worse fates than being made into lame-ass tower defense games and I don't want to see Metal Slug get worse than that (Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 anyone?). It doesn't even help that most of the Nazca team and the others that made the post-Nazca games have left the company and I won't be surprised if there's none of them around. I bring up the Nazca team for a reason since the KOF team (or at least Ishizawa) want to make a Metal Slug game of sorts and I honestly am not sure how on earth would they do it. I can see them making another non-KOF fighting game given that the team are specialists in the fighting game genre (a genre that I despise a lot but I digress). but Metal Slug obviously is a mostly run-n-gun franchise and I just can't imagine them doing it without a team that are well-versed in run-n-guns and platformers. The question to me regarding a revival of the series is not when will it come but how can it be done? It's no secret that MS7 and XX didn't do very well in terms of sales despite being decent games and may have been an indicator of SNK's mostly neglectful treatment of the franchise (until the after mentioned tower defense raping of course) and that SNK would have to put a lot of effort into a revival of that franchise since after all it is SNK's most well known non-fighting game series of all time.
However, from my experience playing all the games (including XX on my birthday this year) it seems the franchise had gotten stagnant and the best it could do is have a weapon switching system which is quite convenient if you ask me; I mean yeah it was forgivable on an arcade platform but these days you need to make the next game (if it's going to be a sequel) a lot of umph, given that COD Infinite Warfare is rightly getting disliked a lot for a good reason; keep a gaming franchise fresh. Not that a franchise needs to have a wildly new innovative mechanic but at least a couple mechanics and features that differentiate one installment from the next (and preferably have the successor installments keep those features, mostly), you get the idea. For Metal Slug's case, not only would there be some new mechanics to add but a serious overhaul in general given that the way it is in it's current state is limiting it's appeal. You see, after contacting someone who was more knowledgeable with how KOF and MS were received over by a PM system in a forum I won't disclose he told me that the reason why KOF is more publicly received was that it appealed to hardcore gamers (or at least those above casuals) and MS while less known is more appealing to casuals despite having some amounts of high difficulty and I find this to be a problem given that MS control-wise are more accessible than KOF does given the way they play. That and having a universe that doesn't seem to care about itself (and by AH enthusiast standards ASB, meaning implausible as hell) despite the potential it holds from its interesting yet barebones backstory which IMO is not a good thing given that fictional universes with at least a lot of depth in terms of mythos can keep a franchise going in the minds of the people for a long time (even with the likes of Mario and Zelda). Not that I'm saying the series needs to be heavily story based or anything just give a damn about the world because there's so much to the world that is vividly rendered in those gorgeous aesthetics (at least in the Neo-Geo games and the portable non-arcadedy ones).That's the key to making a successful revival of the franchise but of course that would mean that it would have to take itself a lot more seriously and that would be a very controversial thing to do given that the fanbase in general is accustomed to the old Nazca-verse, wacky and goofy ways and honestly those ways just can't cut it anymore. Not that the series needs to be sooo grimdark and gritty but again give a damn because that's what the franchise needs. And of course that might mean to give it a reboot of sorts given that I feel there's not much to do with the Nazca-verse series; I mean by the end of 7/XX, Morden, the lead bad guy of the games, is still on the loose and will cause trouble again and the Metal Slug team (the protagonists) will be there to stop him and at this point in hindsight that's enough. It's obviously the story just stops and if there will be another sequel it would still be the same regardless of how good the game might be gameplay-wise but that's another discussion for another time.
In the meantime, I'll continue to keep an eye on SNK's developments, wading through the inevitable news of KOFXIV of which I will not care for since afterall, I never cared for KOF in the past and will not today and neither will I in the future.
