Often you will see people ask what makes The King of Fighters 'different', and typically they will use Street Fighter as a base for comparison, there is many detailed mechanics focused answers to this question, but having ruminated upon the subject for a little while, I have determined the fundamental paradigm: In Street Fighter, characters wear costumes, and in The King of Fighters, characters wear outfits. This paradigm can be applied to the entire genre, for example: Virtua Fighter is a costume fighter, and Tekken is an outfit fighter. Mortal Kombat you might think is a costume fighter but actually it's an outfit fighter. Broadly speaking Costume Fighters are more common, but outfit fighters almost always become a long running series. I have absolute confidence that this intuitive system will be a universal tool for fighting game categorization within a year.