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The King of Fighters XIV adds in Geese Howard and Ryo Sazaki. I'm sure fans of the franchise will know who these two are, because I have no clue.SNK has the great pleasure today to release the 10th teaser in the character reveal trailer series for the PlayStation®4 exclusive title “THE KING OF FIGHTERS XIV”. This time, the new characters unveiled and confirmed in “KOF XIV” are “Geese Howard”, SNK’s most famous boss character since the beginning of the “FATAL FURY” Series, and “RYO SAKAZAKI”, the emblematic hero and karate master from the “ART OF FIGHTING” trilogy game Series!
Anyway, so Geese creates the first "The King of Fighters" tournament, Terry Bogard (blonde ponytail wearing baseball cap with jeans dude in various SNK fighters you may have seen, and speaks incredibly broken English despite being American) becomes the finalist, fights Geese as revenge, and during the fight Geese gets knocked to the edge of a high place. Terry, being a good guy who wants justice and not revenge murder, grabs Geese in an attempt to save him. Geese rejects his help, knocks Terry's hand away and falls to his death.
Later Fatal Fury games show he survived the fall for no reason (or rather fans liked him, so they brought him back). He fell to his death again (through much the same way), and survived again in another later installment. Point is, he won't die, but the brothers have their taste of revenge and kind of moved on. What's also interesting is Geese's son Rock Howard is Terry's best friend and protege, as Terry took Rock under his wing and trained him to be a pretty strong fighter. Rock still has to struggle to control his power, because apparently sharing Geese's bloodline meant his powers were evil so Rock has to fight the urge to go full-on evil every now and then. All this while trying to find his mother who is completely MIA in all of this (and presumably is a good person). Terry has yet to offer any useful help to find Rock's mother. He's just there to eat Rock's cooking and train him to fight to be honest. Oh and Rock Howard's theme song includes parts of the song Children by Robert Miles.
Right so that's Geese Howard's background, so now you know who he is, and then some. If you cross your eyes, the text will form a 3D image of Geese Howard punching Rock Howard's nose. I set it up quite carefully to pull off that effect.
As for Ryo Sakazaki? (Not Sazaki.) He's one of two protagonists (just like Fatal Fury's Andy and Terry) for Art of Fighting. He's basically SNK Playmore's response to Ryu. AND IN RETURN... Capcom created Dan Hibiki as a parody of Ryo Sakazaki. Dan's fireball is a direct reference to Ryo's projectile attacks, which were designed for combos and not for long-range attacks (Ryo can use a long-range fireball as a super move though, which is honestly a waste). Other than that, nobody cares about his background, other than he wants to be better than his father, and to successfully run a martial arts dojo to train everybody in Kyokugen Karate (which is also what Dan Hibiki is supposed to be a master of, but well... You know Dan).
One last thing to explain what The King of Fighters is. KOF is supposed to be a spin-off from Fatal Fury, acting as a compilation crossover fighting game from various SNK franchises. Capcom tried to do something similar with Capcom Fighting Jam/Capcom Fighting Evolution, but unlike Capcom, SNK succeeded immensely with KOF. So they treated it as a sports release with a new KOF every year or so (thus KOF was marked by years up to 2006). Unfortunately it cannibalized sales of every other SNK fighting game franchise, so all they'll do is KOF, which ended up continuing the stories of all the characters crossed over from their original games. And since 2006 sucked, they decided to pull a Microsoft Windows and stop slapping a year on it, choosing to label them by numeric installments instead.
So The King of Fighters went from crossover fighting game, to the only SNK fighting game that can exist until legal matters are dealt with to allow another Capcom vs. SNK fighter. Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, and anything else they had is pretty much gone.
And there's your history lesson. I mean, I'm not much of an SNK fan, but I've heard a few things about their fighting games. It's not like I play them or anything. I don't really follow their games and marvel over Falcoon's 2D sprites for previous KOF games. I'm not pissed that their Android game is complete trash. I'm not worried that the last 3D KOF fighting game (KOF 2006 formerly called KOF Maximum Impact 2) is what wrecked the franchise. Just somebody who's heard of a thing or two of common knowledge. That's all!