KOF XIV: Xuan Dou echoes?? (Part 2)

'nuff said.

KOF XIV: Xuan Dou echoes??

Yesterday, SNK showed a new trailer of the upcoming game The King of Fighters XIV, introducing new features and a couple new debutant fighters.

Might be a trained eye but I think probably things come back and forth when it comes to SNK and Tencent relationships, since I identified a couple interesting thing that might be a reference to Xuan Dou Zhi Wang in some senses.

First we have Athena. The psychic schoolgirl is back and while she's mostly the same as always, there's an interesting detail this time: they added her a Psycho Ball supermove.
Athena had never had a supermove like that in KOF, and in the video we see her perform her Super Psycho Ball right after a regular one, by cancelling it:

What might connect here with XDZW is that Kaoru had that supermove first, even thought she was a "clone" of Athena, the Super Psycho Ball was one of her few original elements. The practice of cancelling a regular Psycho Ball into a Super was one of the classic techniques of Kaoru... could have SNK take notice?

Next we're introduced to "Luong", a new character in the series. While her gameplay resembles Lili from Tekken the most, we found an interesting detail: Just before she performs her super, Luong strikes an acrobatic pose just like Ciel from XDZW uses to. See it by yourself:

Finally there's Nelson. This new "handicapped" boxer with a robotic arm has a style that reminds us much about Andrei. His gameplay seems to be based on "target combos", just like Andrei in the game, and we identify some very similar animations and poses on his normals and target combos:

 

 

 

 

Even one of his DMs, that consists, is very similar to Andrei's Charge supermove:

Do you think  SNK could have taken a couple ideas from Xuan Dou Zhi Wang?

Xuan Dou Zhi Wang vs Tian Tian Xuan Dou | Character designs.

Our latest entry on the XDZW Character Reviews series is centered on Tian Tian Xuan Dou ("Fighting Days"), the beat 'em up spinoff from XDZW.

This game can be taken as an alternate universe that still features some of our favorite characters from Xuan Dou Zhi Wang, albeit slightly or -in some cases- drastically redesigned. You can watch the full video here:

A few highligts deal with the differences in design and personality of some classic characters present in the game.
Here you can see some side-by-side comparisons between the XDZW stand sprites compared with the ones of TTXD:

 

 

 

 

 Which ones do you prefer?