The King of Fighters 2000

[Source]
The King of Fighters 2000 / SNK
SME / Scitron  SCDC-00035  Aug 23, 2000

Generated by MAME 0.152, modded by Valley Bell,
using the Jukebox Player accessible with the
Universe BIOs.

This was the final "King of Fighters" game made
before the old SNK went bankrupt, and they took
the opportunity to go out with a bang. It's
loaded with references to SNK's history, with
tons of alternate "Striker" characters you can
summon into battle from both KOF and almost
every other game the company ever made,
including characters who are canonically dead
(who appear in the game as ghosts). The game
also integrates the Striker system more
smoothly into the game, with the ability to
summon a Striker at any time even while
attacking, summon one to launch your opponent
after a throw for a juggle at the additional
cost of a super bar, and restore the "Striker
Bombs" used to summon them by taunting at the
cost of one super bar and the ability to move
till you finish.

They also put a ton of effort into the
soundtrack, with a powerful sound unlike any
KOF that came before it. It's dominated by
electric guitars and the sample quality is
excellent, as is the composition. It's
overall a generally rocking soundtrack
guaranteed to keep your blood pumping. The
few exceptions include "Ice Place,"
well-suited for the poor young girl who
fights you with ice powers on behalf of the
villains; and "Slasher Zero," the final boss
theme, which can be accurately described as
"pure evil in audio form." And I don't mean
that it's terrible; I mean that it's rare to
find villain music that sounds this
villainous in a fighting game.

This one wasn't hard to trim armed with
vgm2mid and vgm2txt for a few tracks, with
one exception: "Devil," the music heard
before you fight the final boss. For some
reason, the FM backing instruments are
slightly out of time with the rest of the
virtual band, and thus the track only
properly loops after it plays three times.
Attempts to find a nicer loop point to make
it loop earlier failed. Now you know why
the version of "Devil" in this pack is
much longer than it should be.

As far as the tracklist goes, the back of
the soundtrack album (at least) does not
list when each track is played in its track
names unlike previous albums. This is
preserved in my pack's tracklist, but you
can find when each track is used in the VGM
track notes. The album also features nine
versions of the credits theme, "Crystal,"
before the one that's used in the game
("Type A"). The album only plays the parts
that differ from the final track, but here,
you can hear what each version would've
been like if they were used. My pack also
includes a version of "Type A" that's not
looped. It would seem all of these were
meant for different teams' endings, and
there must not have been enough time to
properly integrate all of them. Finally,
the track names on the album are all in
English and feature (by now expected)
grammatical mistakes, specifically
incorrect capitalization. These errors
are fixed in the English tags but
preserved in the Japanese tags for
accuracy reasons.

Regardless of anything else, the release
of this VGM pack gives the old SNK's part
of "The King of Fighters" history a
proper send-off. The next game to be
released in the series, in 2001, was made
after the IP was sold to the Korean
company Eolith, and the result is not
pretty--to the eyes or the ears.

Enjoy!

— The Golden Horse

Source: VGMRips