#41 - Freedom Planet - Nintendo Wii U / Switch
An actually good Sonic game X Treasure Co. charm. Enemies have to attack you to do damage which makes it so you don't get punished for playing the game, and you have a health bar instead of getting depressed because of rings. 10 / 10.
#40 - Garou: Mark of the Wolves - Neo Geo / PC
#39 - The King of Fighters XIII - PC
SNK is cool, their characters are the coolest, and Mark of the Wolves and KoF XIII are peak fighting games, both artistically and mechanically.
Besides the perfect pixel art animations, the sound design of these games are awesome, every attack, you feel that oomph, super satisfying. MotW has a great gauge system, the strategy part is when does the gauge come into play, between your 3 thirds of life, which allows you do to an extra move, and make it so that doing perfect blocks restore your health, could be used as your first option, or something that you leave as a last resort, while XIII is more of the great fast paced combat of KoF, bringing it more back to basics, by picking an order at the start and sticking to that for the match.
XIII as a fighting game also has a lot to do for the player, has a neat story mode with branching paths and unique dialogue depending on the teams you pick, arcade has both normal team and special endings, plus every character has a neat conversation with each other at the start of every match, and being invested into these characters, it makes me want to see if I can get every possible convo out of it, doing matches over and over unlocks color palettes so you can edit your character, the way it lets you edit is pretty expansive and well worth more than some extra costume, I take making Kula look like Vivio or Utena over any kind of DLC. A pretty solid package.
The * here is Street Fighter III: Third Strike, excellent fighting game, even tho I don't care about a good number of characters in that roster.
