PS2

The King of Fighters 2000

FightingArcade

Time to beat: about 0.7 hours

Overview

The King of Fighters 2000 (KOF 2000, or KOF '00) is a 2000 fighting video game developed and published by SNK for the Neo Geo arcade and home platforms. It is the seventh installment in The King of Fighters series for the Neo Geo, and the final game in the series SNK produced before the original company's bankruptcy. The game was ported to the Dreamcast in Japan and the PlayStation 2 in 2002. The game, a sequel to The King of Fighters '99, focuses on a tournament held by the commander of the Hikari military forces, Heidern, who seeks to interrogate the missing K' and Maxima in order to learn about their former group, the NESTS cartel. The gameplay retains the Striker system of the previous games in the series involving assisting characters, but was modified to generate more combos.

SNK entered into bankruptcy while The King of Fighters 2000 was in development. As staff members left the company: including producer Takashi Nishiyama: the game was left with bugs and glitches. The biggest desire of the game was improving the Striker System assisting mode that KOF '99 created. SNK attempted to add further depth to the NESTS cast with K''s new enemy Kula Diamond; other new characters were intended to attract different audiences. The PlayStation 2 version of the game was released in North America and in Europe in a two-in-one bundle with its immediate sequel, The King of Fighters 2001, as the first two games to be published by SNK Playmore USA. In Europe, the bundle was published by Ignition Entertainment.

Critical reception to the game's fighting system and characters has been mostly positive due to improvements SNK brought to the franchise. There were mixed reactions to the company's handling of the graphics and backgrounds; this divided consensus about its status as one of the best games of the series as critics believed previous installments were more appealing. Two novelizations and an audio drama have also been published in Japan.