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.
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 Oogami 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:
Reiji Oogami, new member of the Hero Team, is a representative for Chizuru Kagura. He asks Kyo to join him as his teammate in the championship competition so that they can investigate the waves of mystery that are interfering with the "Orochi" seal.
Jun Kagami, new member of the Yagami Team, is a classy and gregarious woman who likes the simple things in life. She joins with Miu Kurosaki to the King of Fighters tournament, and helps the girl to join with Iori Yagami and works to join Miu and Sinobu (Miu's younger brother) together again.
Miu Kurosaki, other new member of the Yagami Team, is a quiet and lonely girl. She acts as though she doesn't care for much of anything, but she really will act for those close to her. She enters the tournament (joining Iori Yagami's team, along with Jun Kagami) to find her kidnapped younger brother, Sinobu Amou. She is worried that he has fallen to Orochi's power.
Sinobu Amou, the boss of the game, is Miu's younger brother. He is a normal kid who was captured by Gustav Munchausen for his evil plans to reviving Goenitz. He also is very shy and doesn't want to talk so much. He once was very happy with his sister, but his personality changed to what it is now because of the experiments he suffered by Gustav. While possessed by Goenitz's spirit, Sinobu loses his mind, entering a state similar to the Riot of the Blood (Iori and Leona's riot state).
Solely in this game, an oddity exists where Ryo's + command normal (the Gedan Uke) and his original crouching have swapped commands. Other than that however, the two moves still function properly as per the rest of the series.
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