There are a handful of elements that can be loosely used to identify if a color palette is good or not. The first thing a good color palette should do, before anything else, is distinguish itself from the default palette choice. After that, distinguishing itself from other alternate colors is a huge plus (color 2 being different from color 1 doesn’t matter if it’s virtually the same as colors 4, 5, and 8). Another important factor for a color palette is the feeling of an actual alteration, not simply “x-character wearing a blue shirt instead of a red one.” This effect can be obtained quite easily, by altering things like skin pigmentation, eye color, makeup color, hair color, SFX colors, and overall tone of the outfit (dark scary colors instead of bright happy colors).
Those are the most important aspects, but there are subtler elements that make palettes good. We went over some of this in my last color palette article, breaking down why the layering of Balrog’s main and accent colors created excellent themes for his outfit in Street Fighter V. The main and accent colors play an important role in the feel of a palette, as do minor details and skin/hair tone. Proper use of these sections allow an outfit to highlight or hide specific aspects of an attire to create a unique visual feel. If you’ve ever picked a different character color and noticed something that you hadn’t seen before picking that color, you’ve experienced first-hand the importance of highlighting and building colors around key details, no matter how small.
When it comes to The King of Fighters XIV, I’m appalled at the fact that there are only four colors per fighter. Even in today’s age of DLC colors and costumes, such a bare start is unbelievable. Other than games that focus on costumes over palettes (NRS games, Soul Calibur, Tekken), very few popular games have had so few color options since 2002, and I can’t think of a single other game that has taken such a step back from a previous installment. KOF XIII had at least ten colors per character, though some had twenty, as well as the color editing mode which exponentially increased palette variance. That was the most recent installment, so clearly KOF XIV’s starting four colors per character (200 across the entire roster) leaves something to be desired. This didn’t immediately doom the game’s palette selection, though; if done correctly, four very good and distinct colors could be enough variance with such a large roster to choose from.
We would be here for hours if I talked about each character individually, so I’ll consider problems that are recurring in the general selection and pick out some of the worst offenders.
The first big problem that you notice is that there is very rarely any significant variance in hair or skin color. The only characters that have a serious alteration in skin tone are King of Dinosaurs and Antonov, and most hair color adjustments feel almost an afterthought to make it different. This is flat out ridiculous, especially in cases where the majority of a character’s palette is their skin and hair, like Gang-il, Alice, Angel, Mui Mui, and Joe Higashi. Using Joe as an example, skin makes up the vast majority his outfit. That being the case, it’s very odd that his skin is altered to a darker variant just once. His hair also uses the same dark tones that make clearly discerning it from other palettes difficult. Simply compare these colors to his KOF XIII colors, and you instantly feel the difference in quality.
The next issue that commonly appears in KOF XIV palettes is colors that feel bland and washed out. There are certain characters this is really prevalent with, making those characters seem like there’s no real change from color to color because each one is the same similar-toned amalgamation of vague colors. This is particularly bad for characters like Kukri , K’, Luong, and Ralf, but one of the best examples for this is Leona Heidern. Leona very clearly has a purple, a blue, and an orange color, but these colors are really muddied. There is a lot of gray/white/black on her pants that make the dark tone suffer, and the same is true of her hair. Again, the best way to visually see just how bland this is would be to just look at her palette choices from the previous installment. They weren’t particularly phenomenal, but they were very clear and decisive about what they were.
The last consistent problem that I can talk about being shared among large swaths of palette choices is the tendency to change only one or two colors in a palette, leaving the rest of both minor and major details unchanged. This comes off as lazy, to be frank. Some of the characters guilty of this are Chang, Goro Daimon, Kyo, and Geese Howard, but the worst perpetrator of this is Kula Diamond. Kula has two colors that change between all four models; her main jacket/pants color and her zipper (which is either gold or black). She isn’t lacking for elements that could be changed, as she has her hair, her skin, the gold and black on her gloves/boots, her arm band, and the two inside colors of her jacket/pants (the white and black). She also had the potential for her jacket and her pants to be different colors, as well as the potential of breaking up her jacket/pants into a main color and an accent color to help it be visually interesting. All of these flaws leave this palette selection with some of the least meaningful differences in the entire game, making her easily the best example of this game’s shortcomings in palette decisions.
Between the low count of palettes and these problems plaguing most of the cast, it’s hard to think highly of the game’s palettes. Now, despite the issues I described, all of the colors in KOF XIV aren’t terrible. There are some very good colors in this game, so instead of ending on a sour note I’ll end with a sample of the colors I believe this game handled well. These are strong because they’re aesthetically pleasing and make a serious effort to give a different feel from one another. My personal favorite selection is Robert and Love Heart.
That’s all the discussion I have for today. Look out for the next color article; I may revisit Street Fighter V, or I may find another game to cover. If you enjoyed this discussion please leave a comment, and feel free to check out a related article I did for our friends over at Kick-Punch-Block. That article focuses on Angel specifically, who suffers from some of the problems I mentioned in the above article. As has been done on KPB before, new palettes are created to help illustrate new avenues of color.
Sources: caddie.smeenet.org; KPB
