The wait continues
A large portion of the fighting game community were getting pumped up to finally see what The King of Fighters 15 is going to look like after years of waiting, but it appears as though everyone will need to hold that anticipation a while longer still.
SNK announced today that they have postponed the announcements for KOF15 and Samurai Shodown Season 3, which were originally scheduled to take place this evening.
The bummer of an announcement came via SNK’s official Twitter account where they state both reveals are no longer taking place as previously planned.
No official reasoning or replacement dates were included with SNK’s post though they apologize for the last-minute delay.
This sudden change in direction appears quite strange considering SNK continued to tweet about the event as late as this morning with other company representatives doing the same two hours before the postponement. The announcement also dropped at 1:30 a.m. local time in Japan.
The developers had been promising to reveal King of Fighters 15’s first ever trailer for over a month now after they released a short teaser video that showed some early concept art for a handful of characters.
We sincerely apologize to everyone who was looking forward to the announcements. We will inform our fans as soon as the new date and time has been confirmed, and appreciate your kind understanding. #SNK
— SNK GLOBAL (@SNKPofficial) January 6, 2021
Returning favorites like Kyo, Benimaru, K’, Leona and Shun’ei were all included with December’s teaser, and now the wait time to see them in action is once again turned into a question mark.
On top of KOF, the company was also going to reveal the first two characters of Samurai Shodown’s Season Pass 3 with one of the fighters being a crossover from another SNK series, The Last Blade.
SNK Producer Yasuyuki Oda previously stated that they’re working to make KOF15 the supreme masterpiece of the series and that they’re working to use “new technologies” for development, but concrete details about the project are still scarce.
First revealed to investors at the end of 2018, King of Fighters 15 wouldn’t get announced to the public until EVO 2019, where just a logo was shown, with SNK pretty much going radio silent on the project afterwards until this winter.
This also comes just a few weeks after another piece of odd news out of SNK with the company planning to release a brand new console at some point in 2021, which is possibly the NeoGeo 2 — a system said to be a semi-open platform for games and a successor to the original NeoGeo released in the early ’90s.
King of Fighters 15 is gearing up to be a direct sequel to KOF14, which released in 2016 and marked the start of SNK’s new push to grab the fighting game market in the realm of HD and 3D.
SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy and Samurai Shodown followed suit over the past few years though many have been eagerly anticipating a new KOF the entire time as well.
Unfortunately, everything is now back into limbo with anything that’s coming out of the studio, but we can hope that this delay is a short one.
