|
 Today,
SNK announced Blue Mary as the final DLC character coming to The King
of Fighters XIV in the upcoming version 3.0 update. The fan-favorite
grappling goddess, who first appeared in Fatal Fury 3, returns in KOF
XIV with her bone-snapping throws and hard-hitting strikes. Blue Mary
will join KOF XIV on April 12th alongside Heidern, Oswald, and Najd
as DLC. Check out Blue Mary's official trailer, screenshots and images below!
[UPDATE]
Added new
screenshots.
This afternoon, Playstation.blog
also posted a write-up about Blue Mary's KOF XIV appearance
featuring commentary from SNK producer Yasuyuki Oda.
| For
the uninitiated, Blue Mary is a veteran of both the Fatal Fury and
KOF series. I was involved in her creation when she made her
original debut in Fatal Fury 3, and she quickly became one of the
most popular characters from that series. Her popularity meant
that she was also selected to make her KOF debut a couple of years
later in KOF ’97, after Japanese fans voted for her via gaming
magazines. A total of three characters were chosen that way to
form the ’97 Special Team, and now that same team can be
re-created in KOF XIV!
Blue Mary has
always had a very unique fighting style, with moves that are based
on the Soviet martial art, Sambo. Her move set includes a lot of
grapple moves and as you can see in the trailer, we worked very
hard to faithfully recreate all of those bone crunching attacks in
KOF XIV! Blue Mary has always been a challenge to design as a
result of how complex her grapple moves are to animate. Back in
the day, when we were designing her for Fatal Fury 3, not many
people on the team knew much information about Sambo. At one
point, one of the designers working on Blue Mary, Youichiro Soeda,
actually used me as a training dummy to show off some of the
attacks he had in mind to the rest of the team. Just watching this
new trailer of hers, I think I can feel my neck hurt a bit…
We got to have a
lot of fun while creating Blue Mary for KOF XIV thanks to the new
engine. It was always difficult to put an emphasis on her
grappling moves when they were created with 2D sprites, but with
KOF XIV we were able to use the 3D camera and go crazy with the
cinematic shots for her flashier moves, which meshed really well
with her unique fighting style. |
Stay tuned on FightersGeneration.com for continued
coverage of KOF XIV.
|
(April
9th, 2018)
