King of Fighters: Another Day

How good or how bad this anime will be will greatly depend on what you expect from it. For people expecting action and resolutions, there won't be much. Expect more of a "slice of life" genre from these episodes. For people who have little to zero knowledge of The King of Fighters games, stories, and characters, this will probably be the worst anime you've ever watched. There's no character development and no story progression, its run time is barely that of 2 actual 24 minute anime episodes as a large portion of it is the ending credits and the post credit descriptions of what's happening. ... The anime is meant to be a filler for the moments in between the games, so this anime itself doesn't stand very well alone.

With that said, for fans of The King of Fighters series, this WILL be a pretty interesting watch. You can consider this canon, or most likely, not. Some of our favorite characters show up but the timeline is not in tact with ANY KoF timelines. The show starts off by showing us Alba, suggesting that the show most likely takes place in the Maximum Impact timeline (a separate continuity from the main series), while the fact that Rock Howard is living with Terry despite his father Geese's death would suggest that it is in the Fatal Fury Timeline (as Rock's father Geese Howard is still alive in the KoF main timeline). Then, the existence of Ash, along with Iori losing his flames suggests that this anime takes part between KoF XI (at the end Ash steals Iori's magatama) and KoF XIII. Problem is, in K''s episode, it's shown that Whip and Kula were operating with K' and Maxima. In the main timeline, Whip joined K' after learning of her origins in 2000, Kula joins K' in 2001 after he saves her, Kula gets left behind in 2003, by 2004 (KoF XI) when K' and Kula officially becomes a team, Whip has already returned to her old squad the Ikari Warriors Team.

In short, in the main timeline, there's no way that this "Another Day" could have happened where Ash is in his bad guy period, Iori has his flames stolen, Geese Howard is dead, and Whip and Kula are both in K' and Maxima's team. It's as if they didn't know the timeline at all and tried to merge the events to Maximum Impact, Fatal Fury, and King of Fighters together all at once.

However, with that said, ignoring those details, if you want to consider this a not very lore friendly canonical forced entry in between KoF XI and KoF XIII, you can. At least, I would want to. There are some good scenes, most notably Terry Bogard's doting towards Rock Howard and Rock's undying faith to not follow his father's path and embrace his attachment to Terry. Being able to see the caring but dysfunctional family of K' with his cloned older sister, weird but powerful and worrying icy little sister, and a ballsy friendly big cyborg was pretty heart warming too albeit it only happens for the length of few seconds.

Is it worth a watch? For non-KoF fans or people who don't care about it at all, no, not at all. For people who are interested in the lore of show, somewhat yeah. For fans of KoF, yeah, definitely worth a watch. It's a super short and sweet. Just don't expect too much from it and take away from it whatever you want to.

Before the review, I would like to say that I am not fluent in English, so I translated my text by Google Translator, sorry if there is a mistake.

Honestly, it could be much better the anime, I think the only people who would like it and yet more or less would be the people who have already played King of fighters, for those who do not know, KOF is an anime about the game of the same name, not much liked the episodes Because in addition to having about 6 minutes, apparently has a lot of history to be counted in a few episodes. Moreover, ... it seemed that they took random stories and played only for the fans of the game, never played the games, but I would really like to understand the story by the anime, unfortunately they did not make a way to all understand their plot. Anyway, I recommend watching only those who know the game, and yet to know that the anime is not there such things.

I'll start by saying that I'm not a hardcore KoF fan. I've played some of the games and I liked them fine, but I never got into the franchise as a whole. So if there's a problem with characters being out of character or anything like that I didn't notice.

The story follows a simple formula. One or multiple KoF character(s) encounter more KoF characters, they fight and a reference to a fire is thrown in somewhere. I'm sure this seems like it should be good enough for a very short ONA, but there's another problem. The fight scenes are boring. They move really stiffly ... like they're practicing choreography for a community theatre production. You'd see more action playing KoF or watching a friend play it. Most of the fights don't even get resolved, instead something interferes to stop the fight and the characters involved go their separate ways. In the end it adds nothing to the KoF storyline, making it completely pointless.

The characters involved change with each six minute episode so they get no development. Once again, playing the games would be better since then you would actually learn more about these characters than just some one-dimensional traits.

The art is pretty good. A lot of effort went into making the characters and backgrounds look good. This leads me to wonder why the fight scenes look so unnatural. Clearly the artists knew what they were doing and I know that Production I.G can draw good action sequences from their work on titles like Blood+, Ghost in the shell, and Le Chevalier D'Eon so what happened here? Did they just get lazy when it came to the fight scenes? Were they trying to show of their animation by having the characters move slowly? Was it for padding purposes? Did they just not care? Your guess is as good as mine.

The music is decent enough. The voice acting is just poorly delivered. Most of the voice actors sound like they're bored and it's very obvious that they're reading from a script. They really sound much better in the games. To be fair, voice acting in fighting games tends to involve only delivering a few lines so maybe this project was just too big for them. Except that I know that Ikezawa Haruna can do better because I've heard her actually do really nice work with Maria Sama ga Miteru. Maybe she was the only decent voice actor and she just lowered herself to the level of everyone else or maybe she just got few enough lines that I didn't really notice her talent.

There's no yuri in KoF: Another Day. Since you learn basically nothing about the characters they don't have time for it. so its yuri factor is 1/10.

My final score for KoF: Another day is 4/10. Normally I'd give it even lower but since it was released on the Internet and as a bonus when buying KoF: Maximum Impact 2, I'm not going to be too critical. It may be below average, but at least it wasn't something people had to pay extra for. Honestly, I couldn't even recommend this to KoF fans. If you're a fan of the games, that's great, but this anime is just dull and you'd have more fun playing the games than watching this.