#833 King of Fighters XI (PS2) Bosses (1/7): Magaki playthrough.

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AdmiralMcFish - Bosses and Hidden Characters

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Published on February 10, 2018 7:42:15 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfp_CsdN6gA

Game:

The King of Fighters XI (2005)

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Let's Play

Duration: 12:25

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A playthrough of the final boss Magaki in the PS2 port of SNK’s The King of Fighters XI.

Well, it’s been a while. 3 years, to be exact, since I covered a canon KOF title.

First up, KOF XI is a seminal, fantastic title. It is a cut above the rest, and showed what SNK were capable of on a brand-new platform, and when they had more time at their disposal. KOF XI is a pretty fantastic title from the get-go, introducing a number of new characters from SNK franchises such as B. Jenet from Garou: Mark of the Wolves, who I covered in Maximum Impact 2, as well as Duck King from the Fatal Fury franchise, amongst others. It also sees the return of Eiji Kisaragi to the franchise after a whopping ten years! KOF XI also introduces a number of new mechanics such as team leaders. When a character is selected as a leader, they get access to their SDM move, which uses two supers instead of one. Also, certain techniques utilise a newly skilled bar for their implementation. You also have things like dream cancels, where a character is able to cancel their Desperation Move into their Leader Desperation Move. It’s rather advanced stuff and it’s doubtful the average player would really get into it, especially considering much of this stuff isn’t carried over to other titles, but the sheer amount of depth to the gameplay here is quite fantastic. The game also has a brand new button, the E button, which is mostly used for knockdown attacks (the purpose C+D used to serve), but also for some special moves and supers.

KOFXI definitely does seem more advanced than KOF2003. Maybe this is just my experience, but this and KOFXIII have some of the trickiest, tightest inputs in my opinion, and they get a bit of a while to get into, with combos being more temperamental than KOF2003 was. Regardless, it’s a fantastic game with a ton of content to satisfy all fans from casual to hardcore, and it’s one of the highlights (if not the highlight) of the entire franchise. Built off of the dreadful KOF Neowave, SNK used that as a basis to create one of the best fighting games in existence.

The story continues from KOF 2003 after Mukai broke the Orochi seal. Because if you can’t think of any new ideas, just repeat something you did before. Arcade mode here is one of the best in the series, namely because of the bright graphics, great music and the fact that you have the potential of fighting one of five different mid-bosses. While Adelheid acts as the default mid-boss, returning from KOF 2003, the other four stem from two of the more obscure titles in the SNK universe, with two of them in particular being familiar faces for this channel.

The end bosses of the game…well, that’s where things really drop off in quality. The cutscenes for this game are really beautiful, I should bring up, but the boss fights themselves are a bit bizarre. The sub-boss Shion is actually really good, but just seems like a very odd choice as a character; a critique I’ll get to in the next video. For now, I need to focus on the godawful final boss of this game, Magaki.

You know, I didn’t like Mukai. The reason I didn’t like him was because I thought he was generic and kind of dull. Compared to Magaki however, he’s fantastic. Everything’s bad before it gets worse, than it looks much better by comparison. Magaki is one of the most bafflingly awful designed bosses in existence. He is the one main thing which brings down an otherwise brilliant title. Why? Magaki is basically an extremely defensive, projectile-spamming boss in a fighting generally based on close-quarters martial arts. His entire moveset and tactics consist of spamming numerous, powerful projectiles, which hit hard and chain-hit into you, putting up defensive walls of projectiles to defend himself, or teleporting around. Or turning invisible too, that’s another thing. He only has one DM, which is turning invisible for some reason, but then he has a LDM. Can you guess what it is? What was Mukai’s SDM again? It was a full-screen super, and so is this one. So, not only did SNK construct yet another awful, generic final boss, they gave him another shitty, cheap, overused super move as well.

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