The King of Fighters EX2: Howling Blood

The King of Fighters EX2: Howling Blood is a fighting game released by Playmore, MMV and Sun-Tec for the Gameboy Advance. It is based on The King of Fighters 2000 and is the sequel of The King of Fighters EX. It was also ported for the N-Gage as The King of Fighters Extreme.

Like its predecessor, The EX series takes place in an alternate timeline where the events of the NESTS Saga did not occur, as Kyo Kusanagi was found by Moe Habana rather than NESTS at the end of KOF '97, thus this game took place instead of KOF 2000 in the EX continuity.

Story
In this storyline, there are not three sacred treasures, but ten. A man named Gustav Munchausen is trying to revive the spirit of Goenitz by channeling it in a boy's body. The boy, Sinobu Amou, is one of the ten sacred treasures, and Gustav hosts the King of Fighters EX2 tournament to test his new weapon's power.

Description
Being the second installment of the KOF Series on Nintendo's 32-bit handheld, this title brings a lot of gameplay characteristics and elements taken from its arcade/console counterpart, The King of Fighters 2000 Such examples include the backgrounds and a good part of its musical repertoire.

However, a set of additional stuff was included, like the appearance of 3 all-new exclusive characters (the male Reiji Okami and the females Miu Kurosaki and Jun Kagami), 2 new backgrounds, a modified Striker System (where the 2nd and 3rd players of a team will assume progressively this function) and a "Ranking Mode", where you'll be rated according to your fighting performance (beginning from Newcomer until Master Orochi).

Furthermore, this game fixes many buggy and non-functional issues that the prior EX game housed, making it function far more tightly akin to all the other KOF games.

Characters
The new characters exclusive for this game are:

Trivia

 * Solely in this game, an oddity exists where Ryo's 3B/df+B command normal (the Gedan Uke) and his original crouching B have swapped commands. Other than that however, the two moves still function properly as per the rest of the series.