The King of Fighters 15 is the most anticipated fighting game of the year for many in the community, although we still don’t know much about it, such as where we can play it.
However, there’s a good chance we already know more than has been shown in recent trailers, at least as far as an unannounced character is concerned. Possible spoilers for the future list are revealed.
After it was recently announced that Tomohiro Nakata would be the character designer and lead illustrator for KOF15, some fans pointed to a previous page from SNK employees for the artist containing an interesting image.
It seems that Nakata is working on a fairly detailed portrait of the giant fighter Raiden, and what is intriguing is that the image does not appear to have been used since its creation more than two years ago.
This led some fans to theorize at the time that it could be conceptual art for King of Fighters 15, which seems more likely now that it has not reappeared in that time period.
Raiden is much more of a Fatal Fury character than a KOF, but he last appeared in KOF13 on Kim’s team along with Hwa Jai.
Nakata has worked in art for the King of Fighters All Star mobile game, but from what we can tell, Raiden has not appeared either.
It may seem strange for SNK to show off a KOF15 asset years before its debut, though it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a developer has shown part of games soon by taking photos or videos of employees ’desks, either on purpose or accidentally.
That said, though, there’s also the high probability that this could have been created for an obscure promotional poster or something similar, though it’s impossible to say for sure.
No other relevant information about the image can be found on the Nakata page.
We can’t say exactly when the page was published, but the earliest you can find people talking about it and the Raiden portrait is in January 2019, which is only a month after it was confirmed that KOF15 was in development for investors. .
Currently, only Kyo, Shun’ei, K ‘, Leona, Benimaru and Mai have been confirmed for KOF15, although SNK seems to be planning some sort of weekly revelations at the moment.
It would certainly be interesting to see the half-retired fighter return in the form of a 3D model, but I wonder if he would kick Gang-il off the team to join Kim or if he would relate to a new crew.