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The King of Fighters Character Encyclopedia, released in the series’ 15th anniversary, has a lot of character-specific data, illustrations and rankings for things like ages and height, also includes this near the end: Her usual outfit helped make her famous, in part because of the animations it enables, but that only helps to emphasize a category where she doesn’t actually excel in the KoF series. Mai is best known for wearing something in the second category, although there are several official illustrations of her in more casual clothing. If you’ve read something about kunoichi like the ones that worked for Chiyome Mochizuki, you’ll be aware that most of their work outfits were more about concealment in public places, or about getting men off-guard so they’d more easily expose their secrets or vital organs. Maybe something about it didn’t sit well with some of its members by the end of the 20th century: Maybe an abundance of assassinations carried out by Shiranuis over generations left too many angry restless spirits behind for generations of Mochizuki priests to deal with? Curiously, religious education was one of the disguises under which Chiyome Mochizuki trained her agents, so maybe the SNK Mochizukis aren’t just priests, but also ninja rivals benefiting from an extra skill set, better PR and a good excuse to stay away from prying eyes? That wouldn’t be the only mystery the years without a new Fatal Fury have left without an answer.īut back to Mai and the dwindling Shiranui legacy. This conflict hasn’t been heavily developed on.
#Mai shiranui kof xiii series#
Check the entire topic if you’re curious enough about other bits of trivia.Īs a side note, since I mentioned Chiyome Mochizuki above, there’s a character in the Fatal Fury series with the same family name, Sokaku Mochizuki: a religious man who fights and sometimes controls spirits, whose clan has some latent conflict with the Shiranuis according to a very small part of the Fatal Fury 3 story. There’s some extra information about that calligraphic pun and a few other things in this translation and trivia post at the forum. If you’ve played KoF XIII long enough, there’s bound to be something familiar about that: If you draw them in order, but on top of each other you actually get the kanji for “woman” written in the proper stroke order. ノ : “no” in katakana, generally used for foreign words.く : “ku” in hiragana, generally used for native Japanese words.
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The NeoGeo Battle Coliseum official site has a story section for each character, and for Mai it states that the Shiranui ninja arts have 400 years of history ( translation available here).Ī curious fact: over 400 years ago there was a woman called Mochizuki Chiyome – for a more entertaining look at her influence in Japanese history I recommend the Badass of the Week article about her, but long story short: she was a descendent of a ninja clan who recruited, trained and organized a network of female ninja spies and assassins, the accepted term for which is kunoichi.įunny thing about the word kunoichi – it’s tricky to track its exact origin, but it’s interesting to notice it can be written using one character from each of the three Japanese character sets (maybe a way to obfuscate encoded messages?): Not much is known about Hanzo’s life, although there’s a mention of a battle he and Jeff Bogard had with a young Wolfgang Krauser in the Fatal Fury timeline (which has a few differences from KoF’s – namely, the actual dates and passage of time matter more in that series). He refers to Hanzo Shiranui, Mai’s deceased grandfather, under whom Andy learned the Shiranui ninja arts in Japan. In her match with Takuma, he mentions someone called Hanzo: Mai was therefore given considerable focus in XIII’s promotional materials, so she seems like an interesting character to start with. She doesn’t have a major role in KoF XIII’s primary story, but as a famous character she was heavily requested during XII’s release. Since the stories and characters SNK has developed over the years are among the strongest aspects of their body of work, it’s worth trying to clarify some of them. Some of those conversations reference story elements from previous games, and not just from the KoF series, so new players might not be familiar with some of the referenced names and events. In the process, you may have read or skipped all the pre-match exchanges between every pair of characters that meets in the game’s Arcade mode. Even if you play KoF mostly for the competitive side of things and don’t really care about the game’s story, you must have at least spent some time in XIII’s Arcade mode to unlock Billy and Saiki.