In fact, I believe the final member will be the often-missing third member of the three legendary clans of SNK lore, namely Chizuru Kagura. He doesn't fit very well in with dealing with serious business (although that was obviously also the case back in King of Fighters 11 when he was an official member of the team). I therefore believe that our next trailer will be for Kyo Kusanagi who will once again be teaming up with his eternal foe Iori Yagami, though I don't think that their final member will be Shingo this time around. The fact that Kyo himself did not fill this role but instead pushed his long-time ally Benimaru into it suggests that Kyo has something even more important to deal with, which brings my thoughts back to King of Fighters 11 where Kyo and Iori set aside their differences and teamed up to deal with an even greater threat. SNK's reasoning for why Benimaru teamed up with the two young Chinese martial artists is that Kyo basically forced him into this position. We already saw that Benimaru Nikaido ended up teaming with Shun'ei and his fellow disciple Meitenkun, something I called back in an earlier article due to Benimaru's new China-inspired clothing. It's likely that the first teams we see for this game will contain at least one of these characters for each team, at least that's my personal read on it.
SNK told us that we should be looking at many different teams this time around, but I also believe that it was a concious decision on their part to select the exact characters we ended up seeing in the initial trailer, those being Kyo Kusanagi, Benimaru Nikaido, K', Shun'ei, Mai Shiranui and Leona Heidern. My theory is that we'll see something similar to this in our new entry, albeit slightly different. In King of Fighters 2001 he formed a group with special agents Vanessa, Seth and Ramon while he in King of Fighters 11 took a surprising turn to team up with his hated rival Kyo Kusanagi and said rival's fanboy Shingo Yabuki to deal with bigger threats than constantly butting heads with each other. In many subsequent entries, Iori entered solo as the lone wolf he is, though he did have a few outings with official teams. There certainly was no love lost between the three, and it seems quite unlikely they'd see eye to eye for another team up. His original team was the strange grouping of himself, Art of Fighting's Eiji Kisaragi and Fatal Fury's Billy Kane. So who else could Iori reasonably be teaming with? Well, there honestly isn't much to gather from his past teams either. That's not to say that Vice and Mature won't be in the roster - I definitely think that they will - just on a different team than Iori's. In short, even though Iori's most recognizable team lies with Vice and Mature, it's highly unlikely that they'll be a team this time around as there simply is no story reason for them to work together anymore. On top of that, their original reason for teaming with him was simply to serve their master Orochi and manipulate Iori to his advantage. Given the events of King of Fighters 14 it is quite likelly that Vice and Mature have now been revived, meaning that their deaths should no longer weigh down the conscience of the young man.
They both returned as part of the Yagami Team in King of Fighters 14 as well. Vice and Mature would later return in King of Fighters 13 (Mature in the console version of King of Fighters 12) with the in-story reason being that they were ghosts who haunted Iori over his past mistakes.
#King of fighter 97 iori series#
When you look at Iori and his team, perhaps the most common one to think of is his together with Mature and Vice, two villainous characters with ties to both Rugal Bernstein and Goenitz, but unless you're a lore buff in the series you may not be aware that for a very long time, they were only a team in one canonical game outside of dream matches - King of Fighters '96 - which also happens to be the game where both of these ladies ended up dying. Iori Yagami is one of very few characters in the King of Fighters series who has been part of every single game since his initial inclusion - in fact, he is the only one to do such who wasn't part of King of Fighters '94, the first entry in the series.Īs Kyo Kusanagi's fated rival and an extremely popular anti-hero type of character, Iori is an integral part of not just King of Fighters itself but even SNK's identity as a company.ĭespite originating in King of Fighters rather than one of SNK's earlier outings and not even being in the first game of the series, it wouldn't be a stretch to say that Iori is just as iconic as other SNK headliners like his fated rival Kyo, Terry Bogard, Mai Shiranui, Ryo Sakazaki and Athena Asamiya.