I agree about graphics and zoom. There's nothing ugly in to see pixels. KOF new sprites are the most cool sprites in the world right now, and their animations are impressively smooth. BlazBlue maybe has bigger sprites, what means pixels are less visible in-game, but they are standar manga/anime style, flat, vulgar and their animations are less smooth.
About gameplay, I think it was some kind of good try to give KOF a new fresh. Something new, something never seen before. And I liked. It had some interesting features like CC, clash system, parry, etc. But the game was lacking characters, moves, more deep gameplay (power bar system was really poor), and I never liked charge CD. And it didn't has a good online or a good AI, so I didn't played so much.