For a long time i played 99 i liked it i still do but the game has lots of problems, i’ll just give my brief opinions on the good and the bad
The good
Graphics and sound, for me it’s one of and still is one of the best looking and sounding kofs it’s so colourful and vibrant and has the best ost out of any kof game to date.
Errrr now i’m struggling to find other good points, probably the fact it’s quite balanced to this day you’ll struggle to find a tier list everybody will agree on, so in some ways you gotta give it credit, most people say king jhun maybe clark.
Other than that i can’t really think of any other reason to play it over 98 because here comes the bad
The bad
Less characters, kof 98 has 47 including EX not including omega rugal kof 99 has 32 not including krizalid of that’s a lot of missing character’s
Not to mention quite a few of them were new because it was a new saga, K whip maxima jhun and so on.
And to some those new characters were kinda poopy or considering the ones that they replaced were popular like yash chris and so on, it was a mistake to kill off so many popular ones and replace them with ones that were kinda shitty, this is my own personal opinion
Crap system mechanics
wow where do i begin? 98’s system was pretty good it wasn’t perfect but it was ok, 99 threw it all out the window and went ham
Roll was replaced by a slide forward, which a lot of people did not like (i myself did not have a problem) but it was kinda hard to spot, you also had a slide attack which was kinda shitty because you couldn’t cancel it unless in max, if you slide forward and see an opening why the fuck would you do the slide attack and not punish them with a combo?
Roll back was replaced by a weird backdash foward dash which was pretty fucking useless, there wasn’t any invincibility in the backdash so you couldn’t even be cute and back roll to avoid a DP you’d get hit every time
Getting bar aka super was retarded in 99, you’d build meter way way way to fast, it wasn’t uncommon to have 3 full bars by the end of your first round, you had no access to sdms till you was almost dead, which was stupid.
But within the stupid meter system you had two new sub systems MAX and ARMOUR modes and these were completely fucked up, see max mode bao or armored chang, but all in all the meter system was bad
strikers
Strikers in 99 are fucking terrible bar one or two, most of them have bad bad bad start up which makes them a complete waste of time, some have effects which are borderline useless take takumas striker, it’s slow as fuck it does shit damage and you can’t even follow up after it, why would you pick it?
And that was 99’s striker systems problem you had a handful of decent ones and bagful of completely shit ones, even the good ones were handicapped with limitations to, namely your foe had to be standing on your toes, like clarks yuris you couldn’t use them as you please
I think lings was popular because it ate opponents super meter like fuck, but so what? you build meter so fast anyway
Glitches
Kof 99 is one of the most glitchy games fighting games you’ll play, there’s lots of strange things things you’ll see and experience namely because it was a new system it wasn’t tested enough, but this was a different era before beta tests and online patches, but some of the weird stuff will make you laugh out loud, like the time kyo did sdm orochinagi and i walked up and threw him not a command throw a normal one, not on the start up when he was holding the flames for fuck sake
so you’ll see lots of weird and strange things, there’s a lot quite a few infinents, jhuns headstomp kensou corner gayness, and so on and so on
That’s just the actual system problems next comes the biggest problem in kof99
Character changes
This for me is 99’s biggest problem there’s so many things that just do not make sense, lets take ryo for example
In 98 he’s a good chracter he’s no daimon no chizuru no iori he’s just a good chracter and they nerfed the fuck out of him in 99, why?
standing B in 98 was good it wasn’t god like he was just a good poke in 99 they nerfed it lol his DP in 99 is fucking terrible the horizontal hitbox on it is dreadful, ranbu not being able to combo? WHY!!! none of them combo in 99 it makes no sense, ok if they were super fast and fully invincible or did MEGA damage i could see that as a viable trade off but they were not you’d see ryo get hit out of his ranbus so many times in 99 and then you couple that with it dont combo, then you negate the move to useless and in 99 there’s so so so so many supers that got nerfed to fuck for no reason
But ryo’s qcfx2+P no longer combos, and does big damage on counterhit, WOW i mean do you know how hard that is to actually land in those specific conditions, especially with no invincibility and slower start up? you’re gonna have to have the planets aligned and it to be a leap year and a full solar eclipse for that shit to happen.
ryos low jump D why change it? was it god like? no in 98 it wasn’t even that good in 99 they nerfed the fuck out of a move that was not even that great, ryo’s QCB+P in 98 it was a half decent combo tool, in 99 it dont combo has no auto guard has no follow ups it’s just a poop move
Hoah shokoken does not even connect in combos, ok that’s fine, but either make it super slow like a zoning tool or make it super fast so you can punish shit, but it dont do either it’s just there just another bad move.
And that’s just ryo! i could go on obviously some were a bit better like king and clark choi maybe kensou and mai but for the most part there was lots of weird and strange changes that made little or no sense.
There’s no reason to play 99 over 2000 or 98, 99 kinda reminds me of kof12 it feels like an experiment
If you aint played 98 they go play it, play ryo in 98 and then 99 or blue mary in 98 then 99 and then you’ll see the problems 99 has
I didn’t really give the problems with max mode, but i will briefly go over them, when you max you are able to super cancel as you may know or not, i think only certain moves super cancel so for ryo it’s his DP and maybe his QCB+P (i think, my memory is quite hazey)
Which is fine but for some reason snk didn’t actually test what could be and more importantly could NOT be done in max mode, ryo for example can’t even do standing HP > DP > super cancel ranbu, hell he can’t even do DP ranbu because the ranbu start up is too slow lol!
for some strange reason snk decided play around with the start ups with supers in max mode, so what it led to is a case of the haves and have nots
So the haves are those that are good in max mode, like kyo for example who is mega busted because his super cancels and damage are so broken
So in max kyo can do down LK LP hcb+LK (super cancel first hit) into QCFX2+p super, this is so fucking good because it’s a super easy confirm and does major major damage, the longer you can hold the super the more damage it does it’s almost like a sort of just frame in that if you hold it to long you fuck it up because it wont connect because youve prolonged the start up, but you hold it for the right amount of time you get a damage boost of around 10 15% from a normal dm in a piss easy confirm, you’re looking at around 65% off of a lk
And then on the have nots you have joe, in which none of his supers connect because all the start ups on them were increased in max mode for some strange reason, so no tiger kick screw upper or his ranbu, nothing no super cancels into anything max mode for joe is completely pointless