The King of Fighters '98

The King of Fighters '98 carries the subtitle The Slugfest outside Japan and Dream Match Never Ends at home, and the second one explains the design. SNK released it on Neo Geo in July 1998 and deliberately gave it no story whatsoever. Nothing in it is canon, which is precisely why it could include everybody.

The roster gathers fighters from every entry between 1994 and 1997, the largest line-up the series had assembled to that point, and adds alternate versions of several characters that run their earlier movesets. Matches are three-on-three, you work through a tournament bracket, and Rugal Bernstein waits at the end despite having been killed off in the 1995 game.

The structural decision that matters is the choice of two play styles at the select screen. Advanced fills a stock gauge as you fight, lets you run, adds a quick evasive roll and a temporary MAX state that raises your damage. Extra reverts to the early games: you charge the meter manually by holding buttons, you hop rather than run, you sidestep rather than roll, and dropping to low health puts you into a state where desperation moves come out freely. These are not difficulty presets, they produce genuinely different matches, and players still argue about which one the game is really about.

The reason it survived is balance. Roles are legible, aggression can be punished, defence costs something, and very little is decided by chance. The pixel art is SNK at its most confident and has aged into a style rather than out of one. Two warnings before you start. The single-player difficulty is old arcade cruelty and the final fights exist to eat credits. And there is no modern training mode with move lists, so learning a character means going elsewhere for the information. Even with that, this is the entry point most people recommend, and one of very few fighting games that works equally well as a casual pick-up and as serious competition.