SNK has announced that Blue Mary will join The King of Fighters XIV as a downloadable content character on April 12 alongside the previously announced Oswald, Heidern, and Najd.
Here is an overview of the character, via SNK producer Yasuyuki Oda on the PlayStation Blog:
Blue Mary has always had a very unique fighting style, with moves that are based on the Soviet martial art, Sambo. Her move set includes a lot of grapple moves and as you can see in the trailer, we worked very hard to faithfully recreate all of those bone crunching attacks in The King of Fighters XIV! Blue Mary has always been a challenge to design as a result of how complex her grapple moves are to animate. Back in the day, when we were designing her for Fatal Fury 3, not many people on the team knew much information about Sambo. At one point, one of the designers working on Blue Mary, Youichiro Soeda, actually used me as a training dummy to show off some of the attacks he had in mind to the rest of the team. Just watching this new trailer of hers, I think I can feel my neck hurt a bit…
We got to have a lot of fun while creating Blue Mary for The King of Fighters XIV thanks to the new engine. It was always difficult to put an emphasis on her grappling moves when they were created with 2D sprites, but with The King of Fighters XIV we were able to use the 3D camera and go crazy with the cinematic shots for her flashier moves, which meshed really well with her unique fighting style.
Additionally, SNK announced that the version 3.00 update for The King of Fighters XIV will launch “in the coming days.” In addition to support for the four new characters, the update will also include character balance adjustments.
The King of Fighters XIV is available now for PlayStation 4 and PC.
Watch a trailer for Blue Mary below. View a set of screenshots at the gallery.
