The wait continues
A large part of the fighting game community was pumping up to finally see what The King of Fighters 15 was going to look like after years of waiting, but it seemed like everyone would have to keep the anticipation for a while longer.
SNK announced today that they have postponed the announcements for KOF15 and Samurai Shodown Season 3, which was originally scheduled to take place tonight.
The raid on an announcement comes via SNK’s official Twitter account, where both reveal that they are no longer taking place as previously planned.
No official reasoning or replacement dates have been included with the SNK post, but they apologize for the last minute.
This sudden change of direction seems rather strange, as SNK continued to tweet about the event this morning, while other representatives do the same two hours before the postponement. The announcement also dropped at 1:30 a.m. local time in Japan.
The developers have been promising the first trailer of King of Fighters 15 for over a month after releasing a short teaser video showing early concept art for a handful of characters.
We sincerely apologize to everyone who was looking forward to the announcements. We will notify our fans as soon as the new date and time is confirmed, and appreciate your kind understanding. #SNK
– SNK GLOBAL (@SNKPofficial) 6 January 2021
Returning favorites like Kyo, Benimaru, K ‘, Leona and Shun’ei were all included in December’s teaser, and now the wait to see them in action is being turned into a question mark.
In addition to KOF, the company would also reveal the first two characters of Samurai Shodown’s Season Pass 3, with one of the fighters wearing a crossover from another SNK series, The Last Blade.
SNC producer Yasuyuki Oda said earlier that they are making KOF15 the highest masterpiece of the series and that they are using ‘new technologies’ for development, but concrete details about the project are still scarce.
King of Fighters 15, which was only announced to investors at the end of 2018, will only be announced at EVO 2019, where only a logo was displayed, with SNK going to be radio silent about the project later this winter.
It also comes just weeks after another bizarre news from SNK with the company planning to release a brand new console at some point in 2021, which is possibly the NeoGeo 2 – a system that is said a semi-open platform games and a sequel to the original NeoGeo released in the early 90’s.
King of Fighters 15 is poised to be a direct sequel to KOF14, which was released in 2016 and was the start of SNK’s new push to seize the fighting game market in the realm of HD and 3D.
SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy and Samurai Shodown have followed suit over the past few years, although many have been eagerly awaiting a new KOF all along.
Unfortunately, everything is fine again with everything coming out of the studio, but we can hope that this delay is short.