This shit AGAIN. Oh my god. I already gave you what you wanted, what more could you possibly want?

Troy went back and touched up a few anims to make them more consistent:

I really love Shingo's revised face here, it fits the mood so well. This spriteset has quite a few moments where Shingo's face becomes a lot more cartoony than his usual expression/sprite style, and now I honestly feel like the original KOF sprites are lacking for not doing the same!

拳にやどた、命の炎が...あいて、まだ終わってないて!
Kobushi ni yado ta, Inochi no honoo wo ga... Aite, mada owatenai te!
"The flame of life, enchanted by my fist... Wait, it's not over yet!"

赤、青、黄色、紫の、拳にやどだ...あ、まだだのに。
Aka, ao, ki iro, murasaki no, kobushi ni yado ta, a, mada da no ni.
"Red, blue, yellow and purple, enchanted by my fists... Ah, not yet."

Here is a concept for the special intro vs Sakura I plan to add:

Nothing here is final, I might decide on something else, but I think this would work pretty well.

---

I've been otherwise finishing up sorting through his various voice rips; I even figured out how to rip from Dreamcast games so that I could get rips of KOF 1999. No, not the first game in the NESTS saga, I'm of course talking about The King of Fighters: Dream Match 1999. Yes, Dreamcast has two games named KOF 99.

Anyways, I ripped those voices because they're much higher quality than the compressed and tinny-sounding sounds used in the Neo Geo versions. It's unfortunate that SNK didn't use any of the higher quality recordings featured in the console ports of this era for the UM games, but it's likely that they simply lost that data.

The 98 rips will be the primary source I'll be drawing voices from, but I'll also naturally have to use stuff from other games for moves/winposes/etc. that Shingo didn't have yet in 98. This lead me to checking out rips from KOF All Star (since Takehito Koyasu—Shingo's VA—is one of the very few VAs who was not purged and replaced by nuSNK for games starting with KOF XIV), and I found a really cool voice sample that is a really nice showcase of Koyasu's range.

I'd love to find some way to use it, but I don't actually know what he's saying, and there are unfortunately no translations of All Star dialogue that I could find. If anyone happens to be able to translate it, I'd really appreciate it.

---

And on the topic of translation: did you know that Shingo has a bunch of references to mecha anime in his voice lines, beginning with KOF 99? I was able to recognize a few obvious ones, but I'm like 99% sure a few of his other voice lines are references to... something. I just don't know what. I'm planning on doing something a little special to celebrate these references in the character, so I want to make sure I'm getting everything.

winpose where he starts singing, KOF 2000 said:

拳にやどた、命の炎が...あいて、まだ終わってないて!
Kobushi ni yado ta, Inochi no honoo wo ga... Aite, mada owatenai te!
"The flame of life, enchanted by my fist... Wait, it's not over yet!"

winpose where he starts singing, KOF 2001 version said:

赤、青、黄色、紫の、拳にやどだ...あ、まだだのに。
Aka, ao, ki iro, murasaki no, kobushi ni yado ta, a, mada da no ni.
"Red, blue, yellow and purple, enchanted by my fists... Ah, not yet."

These are all sourced from the SNK wiki, and as such can't be relied upon as exact, correct transcriptions of the dialogue. An additional point of difficulty is that for the quotes I was able to recognize, Shingo's rendition is not 100% accurate to the original quote (for example, his NESTS saga taunt has him quoting First Gundam's famous "Brightslap" scene, but Shingo says "not even my parents ever hit me!", where Amuro instead says "not even my father ever hit me!").

These two reasons made it pretty impossible to just Google the phrase and do some digging, but hopefully someone out there is able to recognize what the two remaining things are quotes of. If they even are quoting something...

Yup; I'm like 99% sure that both the 2000 and 2001 winposes are him singing lyrics to various anime OPs and/or EDs. I'm just not sure what they might be.