There's really no story to speak of, just fighting. With only 22 characters to chose from, the roster is pretty spare, although there's plenty of variety within it. Matches are three on three, with the team having the last man (or woman) standing moving on to the next round. There are no boss battles; after the fifth match, you either win or lose. The end. There are some anime cutscenes of sportscasters talking about the tournament, but that's basically all you're gonna get. No character intros, and no storyline arcs, either. Just pick three fighters and start pounding away!

Arcade Mode has you pitting your team of three against the CPU in a tournament of five matches, VS Mode allows you to fight three-on-three or one-on-one with a friend, and Online Mode lets you take the battles onto Xbox LIVE or the PlayStation Network. Unfortunately, Online Mode is rendered nearly unplayable by the frequent slowdown. Honestly, as the character select screen was animating onto the screen, the slowdown was so severe I thought the game had frozen up. So I wasn't optimistic for the actual battles. It turns out the actual online matches aren't completely broken, but still, in a genre where split-second timing is crucial for performing counters and special moves, having your opponent freeze in mid-air for even one second renders online play annoying at best and useless at worst.

The characters were all redrawn specifically for this release, and they're really large, well-animated sprites. Unfortunately, being sprites, they're also super-pixellated. They're drawn beautifully, with lots of nice detail, but those jaggies hurt. On my HDTV, it almost looked like it had been blown up to fill the screen, lowering the resolution of the fighters. The backgrounds are decorative, and full of spectators, but sometimes they're very busy, and the cheering throngs can be almost distracting (the large women waving their baguettes around in particular).

I found it odd that after playing through Arcade Mode on Normal, changing the difficulty to Easy actually seemed to make it more difficult. I thought it might have just been the fact that I chose a different roster of fighters, but even after going back to the original three I'd played in Normal, it still seemed annoyingly harsh. Of course, as I mentioned, I'm not particularly good at fighting games, so my opinion of the game's difficulty is kind of moot. Also, as KOF newbie, I can't tell you if their decision to remove the Tactical Shift System to replace it with the Critical Counters System is good or bad. It's just another special move to me.

What really disappointed me about KOF XII is that it's just not that much fun to play. There's no sense of accomplishment in winning because there's no storyline to enjoy. And the only unlockables are a series of art galleries that you get after beating Arcade Mode with that character. Yawn. Without the incentive to unlock bonus characters or new costumes or stages, I just never felt like there was a compelling reason to keep going back again and again. Presumably you could try going back online to fight your way to the top of the leaderboards, but as I said above, online battles are an exercise in frustration with the lag and constant disconnects (both from frustrated players and lost connections).

I can't really recommend King of Fighters XII to anyone aside from true SNK fans or hardcore fighting fanatics. And even for you guys, I'd suggest that you try before you buy!

5 out of 10