Many dark aeons ago I wrote a round-up of various doujin fighting games, and one of the games I mentioned was an up-and-coming King-of-Fighters-esque game called Akatsuki BK. Now, Akatsuki BK has been released, and so far it looks like a very strong contender for Melty Blood ReACT’s “best PC fighting game” crown.

The first thing you’ll notice about the gameplay is that it feels very “meaty”; the game has a certain weight to it that’s hard to describe, but will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time with the King of Fighters series. The most impressive aspect to me, especially for a doujin game, is the variety of play-styles among the characters. The main character, Akatsuki, is your standard Ken / Ryu, and another character, Electro Soldat, has Guile’s sonic boom and flash kick from Street Fighter II, but beyond that there’s a nun who fights exclusively with revolvers (the only other firearms-only fighting game character I’ve seen was in Toshinden 3), a witch with an over-abundance of special moves reminiscent of the Samurai Shodown series’ Basara, a towering man whose special moves are mostly buffs and debuffs, a petite woman whose special moves are only throws and counters, and Fritz, a grizzled swordfighter with no special moves at all except dashes. This certainly seems like an odd hodgepodge of very different styles, but from what I’ve seen so far it works and balances out just fine.

The game’s story and expository text are very kanji-heavy, and my kanji isn’t so good, but from what I can gather the game appears to take place in a dystopian alternate-present where Axis-like powers won a WWII-like war. I use “-like” a lot in that sentence because there are no swastikas or other direct references to Nazism (aside from Elektro Soldat’s ultimate move being called “Sieg Heil”) or fascist Italy, or any country for that matter, so the impression that I got was that the game’s artists just really liked drawing jackboots and 30’s-style uniforms, and set the game in a “similar-but-different” world so they could make sexy, fascist-looking people without making the social blunder of actually revering Nazis.

A free demo of the game is available on the official homepage, and the game itself is available in a number of doujin shops in Japan. Efforts are underway to bring the game to American shores, but an American release will be unofficial at best, since the game begins with a stern warning that it is for play in Japan only, and if you’re not in Japan you shouldn’t be playing it. Exactly why someone would put the effort into making and publishing something and then expressly forbid most people from enjoying it is beyond me, but fortunately there are no laws that actually support their strange demands, and all they can do is scowl as you purchase and enjoy the fruits of their labors and blow them kisses of appreciation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 12:19 pm and is filed under video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.