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If beat’em-ups are one of your favored genres, then you are surely familiar with the King of Fighters series. So this news may bring some measure of sunshine in your life: King of Fighters XII is coming and it will probably be one of the best-looking KOFs out there, more than able to stand its ground before some re-re-revamped Street Fighter or MK vs DC Universe.

Producer Masaaki Kuhino recently announced (on a TV show in Japan) that the game will be released in Japanese arcades in April 2009 – so, maybe, us Westerners won’t have to wait too long for it. Anyway, this twelfth edition of the veteran series will be a special one, also because next year happens to be the 15th anniversary of the King of Fighters way of life. So, KOF XII will resurrect some of the good old stuff, as well as featuring a fresh new suit of graphics.

Don’t worry, it won’t go into the 3D craze. Kuhino promises some of the most refined, subtle and artistic 2D graphics we’ve aver seen. And it won’t be colored in cel-animation, like Guilty Gear X or BlazBlue. In KOF XII, we’ll see a masterful hard-dotted pixel art style, but enriched with a smooth and realistic feeling of 3D (because, as GameSpot tells us,  “the artists created 3D models, took a 2D image of them, and used that as a guide to draw the pixel art”).

Still, we can only wonder when will this King of KOFs be available outside Japanese arcades. And wonder we shall, with hope in our2 D-loving hearts.