King of Fighters 94...the first in what would become SNK's most iconic series. It's kind of weird and janky, but this is where it all began.
So how's the translation? It's in the same vein as Fatal Fury 1 and 2, oddly enough. The editor took this game off. Overworked from Fatal Fury 3 and World Heroes Perfect? Perhaps. After Art of Fighting 2 and World Heroes Jet, the editor skipped SNK's other two 1994 releases for reasons we'll probably never know. But it leaves KoF94 with a very straight and dry translation, with a bit of interest in how stripped-down the win quotes had to be. The lack of space and variable width font create probably the most brutal editing in the series.
It seems that SNK recognized this was a problem, however, and took the simple expedient of adding more screens to the story sequences. As a result, the story is generally much clearer and shows less editing than the win quotes. The reasons for this are much more obvious here than they were in, say, Art of Fighting 2.
Even with the relatively small cast for a KoF game, this is still a big project for me. KoF94 features unique win quotes for every team in English and Japanese, a practice that the English versions would quickly drop. So even though it seems small, in practice it's closer to monsters like Art of Fighting 2 and Fatal Fury 3 than you'd expect.
Status
Complete!