Original Release: SNK, 1999, Neo Geo Pocket Color
Other Releases: Nintendo DS (2006), Nintendo Switch (2022)
Meant as the Neo Geo Pocket Color’s Pokémon equivalent, but patterning itself more on the trading card game than the original release, Card Fighters mixes up about 350 SNK and Capcom characters in a similar world
SNK vs Capcom: Card Fighters Clash (Neo Geo Pocket Color, SNK, 1999)
Where to Buy: Play-Asia
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
SVC Card Fighters opens with a very unhelpful tutorial, which really makes the game seem more complicated than it actually is. You’ll get much more of the gist from playing the game’s opening battle. It actually turns out to be a fairly simple card game in which the focus is busting through the opponent’s defenses to attack their HP pool directly, mostly through clever use of combination attacks and special abilities that you’ll just have to kinda memorize as you go. It’s really kinda like the battles of Kichikuou Rance in that way, I wonder if that game wasn’t a low-key influence on Japanese CCGs (O_O).
Whatever the case, the game turns out to be a tedious grind. Once you play a few matches you realize that skill isn’t nearly as important as having a deck of good cards on hand, and the only means of assembling that is trawling around the game world getting into long tedious battles of bad cards with NPCs to gradually improve your deck one by one. Honestly I didn’t put that much time in, but from reading around this is a plague mostly of the early game, apparently it gets faster and more strategic once you’re dealing with mostly “B” rank and up cards. But that seems to involve a LOOOOOOT of grinding through slow boring battles to get to.
Another disappointment is that there’s really little to the SNK and Capcom character appearances, I mean you get a cute chibi sprite of each on their card but that’s about it. Functionally, the cards could be any kind of creature or just a plain set of numbers and the game would move along just the same. There are no like special animations of characters battling it out or doing their super moves or whatever, it’s all pretty spartan.
On that subject the game does totally ape Pokémon’s overworld aesthetics, but wandering outside of battle is actually the most interesting part. You bop through a few different amusement parks and game centers in your quest for cards and battles, and though graphically kinda weak they are populated with lots of little cute surprises, like Shinji Mikami waiting to d-d-duel you in the Resident Evil manor (and a zombie that makes a cameo if you play around with the typewriter).
People sometimes accuse video games of being a waste of your life, and obviously I (mostly) don’t agree with that, but this is one of those games where I kinda feel that point while playing it. I think a simple CCG like this needs actual physical card ownership to bolster it; in vidya game form it’s just a drag.
Links
Info on the related real world SNK vs Capcom trading card game (released in 2000)
Videos