Right, I just returned from playing the game a bit. I didn't play it a lot, so I can't comment the gameplay too greatly, but I'll try to be as detailed as possible about things. This is the Japanese import I played (well, obviously. the English version isn't out yet)
I wished they had another intro, but the intro in the game is identical to one of those trailers except by the end of it there's lots of cards flying around showing all the fighters. The intro also shows a short glimpse of a person who's probably the end boss. And yes, when the intro is over we see the logo... and... K O F, MAXIMUM IMPACT! Yeah, I *DESPISE* that announcer voice. Everytime I hear I feel like screaming. It sounds really *really* horrible. We don't hear him that often, just for "round 1, fight, "ko" and stuff like that, but he sounds simply horrible anyway.
The menus in the game looks pretty with fancy animations each time you select something. But having just played games like Tekken 4 and Soul Calibur 2 it does feel very limited, I doubt this game has any much to unlock. There's one option for Profiles, which has a ton of subchoices which are locked. Logically I'd assume that each suboption is profile for each of the characters, but there's a *ton* of these profiles, a lot more than there are characters. Why's that? Is there two profiles for each character just for their different outfits? Profiles for other KoF characters not in the game? At first I was trying to think optimistic and have a slight hope there's a good deal of unlockables characters, but in the character selection screen there's only one box with question mark. Which is probably the endboss you can unlock. I'm afraid that's the only unlockable character.
The game has a surprising amount of English even though it's the Japanese release. All the menus are in English except some descriptions which are in Japanese, but that hardly makes any difference, I doubt anyone needs explanation what the option "Sound Volume" is all about. So you don't need any Japanese knowledge to be able to enjoy the Japanese version of the game. Well, perhaps except for Mission mode, where each mission is explained in Japanese, and I got a feeling those descriptions would help. All the babbling in the story mode is in Japanese as well, but that's not exactly any big surprise.
There was no options for team play on the main screen which really worried me. But fortunately once you click on VS you get four choices: single play, single vs, team play and team vs. So it's there. The menus have one really annoying thing about them. You can't go back from all of them. If you just decided to be curious and check out which mission you're at, then you'd have to select Mission mode, and you get the information you need, fair enough. But then you can't just click a button to go back to the main menu. To do that, you'll need to select a mission, select a character and then load the match, and then press start and select exit. Why the heck didn't they just let the player press one button to go back one menu like a normal game? This is nitpicking though, so it doesn't really matter.
As I mentioned, the character screen only has one box with a question mark in it. So I don't think there's any more than one unlockable character. But, the method you use for selecting different outfits is like in Dead or Alive where you select a character and then you get the list of outfits you can use. With this interface they could easily add more outfits without messing up the interface (*cough*Tekken 4*cough*), and I heard rumours about someone seeing Kim in the game. So I'll bet that you can select Chae Lim and select Kim as an "alternate custome" later on in the game.
The game definitely feels like a KoF game, even if you just move your character a bit you see it's the same system. It does look faster, but I don't think it's technically any faster, there's no longer any short "pause" when you hit someone with a move and this may just make the game look a bit faster. The controls are designed for a 4-button controller in mind. So if you've magically destroyed every button on your controller except the directional buttons and 4 others, then you're in luck. Or, if you're like me and use an arcade stick with few buttons, then you're in luck too. This is a bit unfriendly for the players with the normal PS2 pad though, they could easily have simplified the controls by letting the player use R2 and L2 for sidestepping, but instead you have to press LP+LK (which you can also map to any button) to sidestep upwards, but you'll have to press down while doing this to sidestep downwards. It does get a time to get used to, and I feel they could have simplified it for those have more buttons to spare, but ah well.
I also noticed the game is a bit friendly for pressing two buttons at one time. If you go to practice mode and press LK+LP with a slightly delay on the second button, you'll see it actually gets accepted as LK+LP instead of LK->LP. Which is a good thing, since I've had trouble in some fighting games to do certain moves where you have to press two buttons on the same time, but sometimes I'd mess up slightly and it'd end up wrong. This game seems to be more friendly about that. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any shortcuts to any of the movements. For instance, I can remember just being required to input dwn->bk->fwd to do Kim's DM, but in this game you have to input the whole thing dwn->dwn+bk->bk->bk+dwn->fwd, that's a pain in the ass to do, well, for me anyway.
Visually the game looks pretty great. The surroundings may look bland but the characters looks really good. Some of them may look a bit odd compared to their 2D versions, but the characters looks way better than I'd imagine. And the animations are smoooooth. They're really *really* smooth. Just about every move looks identical to their 2D version just a billion times smoother. There's certain moves which may look a bit simple and it looks like they just made a simple interpolation to make it smooth but otherwise the moves looks great. I think they could have done a better job with some of the moves (I miss Yuri's arm motion after her SDM), but they look great overall. And I just simply can't find enough words to explain how smooth all the moves really look.
Every character seems to have been given a few short quick moves they can do for a 2-3 hit combo. Like Mai can now press fwd->strongpunch three times in a row to do a quick combo. Each character has very similar things they can do and most of them has 2 of these combos. It does add a bit of Tekken feel with this kind of stuff. Sidestepping is really slow, and I was only able to avoid one attack with it, otherwise I got hit each time I tried to avoid by sidestepping. And sidestepping is basically the only 3D element in the game, otherwise the game feels like pure 2D. You can kick an opponent into the wall and he'll come flying back ala KoF2001 and this happened each time as well. It gave me the impression you could do some nasty combos with this, but after I hit the opponent after being thrown into the wall the combo counter didn't increase, so there's a chance the opponent has a chance to block after this. I wasn't able to confirm this yet.
The game seemed to have a bit of slowdown in some of the special moves. But this was just barely noticable and nothing major. The music is really really dull. Of what I've heard so far it seems to be a dull mix of hip-hip, jazz and other stuff. It's at least a lot better than the music in KOF'2001, but I think I might as well turn the music off if there's an option for it. All the characters seems to still have their right voice actors. Terry is still unable to pronounce any English phrase.
Right, I think that's just about it. I know I didn't write any much about the gameplay, but I haven't the played the game much more than a half hour and the stupid AI kicked my ass even on the normal difficulty -.-
