Creative Talent
Writer/Artist: Wing Yan & King Tung
Translated by: TJ Zhao
Adapted by: Gayle Tan
What They Say
The King of Fighters top four teams' battles officially begin on "Highway Star Express." The first battle is Team K versus the High School Girls team. On the other end of the world, on a sailboat in the Nile River, the second battle - Hero team versus Wolf team - is taking place. Meanwhile, Shen-Woo and Terry Bogard will pull out what they have for the battle to come. The result is unexpected, but with results that will affect the entire world!
The Review
As I said in my review of volume four, King of Fighters made a bold move in taking the story past the end of the tournament. But considering where the story actually ends up going, perhaps <i>overbold</i> would have been a better word. There are still battles aplenty, but they aren't as involving in this go-round. One problem is that nearly all the fights are against the same bad guy. Another is who the bad guy turns out to be - or rather, where he comes from.
This last volume of King of Fighters makes one of the wildest transitions I've seen in a comic yet. One minute K' and one of his rivals are mixing it on board a large aircraft - the next, K' is somehow caught up in a conflict straight out of Japanese mythology. Three warriors corresponding to the three sacred treasures of Japan are protecting a sealed door from a big stoney guy who wants to release the Orochi sealed within. Practically the entire book consists of fights between the stoney guy and whoever else is handy, generally one or more of the three guardians or K'. The fights aren't bad, entirely. They have the same kind of visual flair the tournament bouts showed off. They do tend to get repetitive, however, which is hard to avoid when everybody has the same opponent and he uses the pretty much the same attacks each time. A further hindrance is the large chunks of expository dialogue that break up the action. These can range from redundancies in the "That attack again!" and "Why didn't my move work?" vein to headier "motive" speeches. Some of it is surprisingly philosophical for a work of this sort and - knock me over with a feather - kind of interesting philosophically. But coming in the middle of a battle the way it does makes it more of a distraction than otherwise. It gets you thinking, but about the wrong things.
So the last volume of King of Fighters winds up being not exactly dull, but not exactly good either. The fighters are more supercharged even than characters in the King of Fighters universe generally are. The special moves and intensity of the fights escalate; but what escalates with them is not excitement but incredulity. K' powers up through a plot twist that's befuddling for two reasons. First, the terms by which he receives the power are self-contradictory; second, nothing really happens as a result. The book ends with K' rejoining some of his teammates in the vicinity of the wreckage of the plane - the one he was on before all of the strange mythological events started happening - and wondering if it was all just a dream.
In a way I like the fact that the story tried to go beyond the King of Fighters tournament and do something a little more ambitious. But coherence was hardly the series' strong suit, and once outside the bounds of the tournament it flounders. The end result is just another mediocre fighting comic with a much better than average look.
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