It’s really a rarity for me to jump into retro games as far as reviews go… mostly because they’re old and generally a well-known thing. It’s not because I don’t like them, I actually do have a somewhat sizeable game collection, spanning from the Magnavox Odyssey to… now. I have a lot of appreciation for all of gaming and I do feel like gaming used to be considerably more interesting.

That said, this game shows a massive gap in my gaming knowledge. I vaguely knew about the Neo Geo Pocket Color but I never touched one. So there are actually some pretty cool-looking games for it I never played. This is one I heard a lot of good about. This recent shadow-dropped Switch release includes both the SNK and Capcom versions (and you can trade cards between them), though both games are essentially the same, just a different starter deck and a few minor differences otherwise.

So let’s go and talk about this cool game!

Developer and Publisher: SNK
Release date: November 21st, 1999 on Neo Geo Pocket Color – January 12th, 2022 on Switch
Platforms: Switch, Neo Geo Pocket Color (Switch version played)
Genre: Card Battle Game

Review

There’s not much of a plot here. You play as one of 4 main characters. There are 2 main characters you can pick from in each version. You are randomly told you should participate in the card game tournament. So you participate in the card game tournament. You have 5 areas at first, each of which has a strong card game player for you to fight. If you win you get a special coin. When you have all 5 coins you can get to the semi-final, where you fight against 3 “elite” players, then you go to Las Vegas to fight the champion in the finals. That’s about it. You’re not playing this for the plot, at all.

The game looks good. I assume it uses the same emulator as the NGPC collections that are currently on Switch. It displays a Neo Geo Pocket Color and the game shows up on that NGPC’s screen. You can pause the emulator and zoom in to have the game take more of the screen. You can apply filters to make it look a bit closer to the original screen. Visually it looks like something out of the GBC, maybe a bit better quality-wise but not quite at the level of the GBA. With those limitations in mind, the chibi depictions of the characters on the cards look really cool still. Outside of the battles, this kinda looks like the Pokemon TGC game.

Your base deck is okay (I think the starter SNK deck is a bit better than the starter Capcom deck, not like that matters much in the end), but the main point of the game is to build a better deck. There’s not much to talk about outside of the card battles so I’ll get through the non-fighting stuff first. There’s 5 locations, some that are a single screen to move through, some that have a bit more to them. Some have “stores”, where you basically get a random selection of decent cards and you have to trade 3 of your cards to get the one you want (their selection changes as you play card games). Big cards cost 3 B to A rarity cards, while slightly lower ones cost 3 C to A rarity cards. There’s some crane games, though only 2 in the game actually work and one of them only works once. The one at Joy Joy gives you a random card once per card game you play. There’s a slot machine where you bet one D rarity card, and then you get copies of that card if you win (777 gives you 30 of that card). This sounds dumb, but there’s trade machines where you can plunk in 10 D cards and get a random card of random rarity, so this is a way to get better cards. You can git gud at getting 777 in the slot machine (it’s all timing-based) or you can cheat in the Switch version by rewinding. There’s a combination of cards or two that give specific S rarity cards, you’ll need to figure that out for yourself… And that’s about it, there’s a few NPCs that just say random shit, and a few that give hints, and a few that want REALLY GOOD CARDS to trade for some rare ones (no, fuck you, you’re not getting my Terry card), and a few that will card battle you. Winning a card battle gives you cards (some battles specifically give you very strong rare cards, but those are tough battles). So let’s talk about the card battling!

At the start of a battle, it randomly decides which player will go first. This is a big deal because first player pretty much gets the advantage. Each player has 3 slots to place character cards in, if they’re all full you can’t play more character cards until one of them dies. You have a certain number of life points, and the goal is to get the other player’s to 0. Most matches is 2000 or 3000 LP, there’s a couple with 1000.

There’s a few things you can do on your turn. You can play a character card in one of the slots (doesn’t matter which slot). Character cards have a BP value which is how much they hit for, but it’s also their health (so they hit less as they take damage), and a + SP value which gives you that amount of SP. There’s action cards, those require a certain amount of SP and they’ll do some effect. Finally, each character card has a list of Back-up characters. Say you have Leona on the field, you can play Clark on her as a back-up, which basically increases Leona’s current BP by 300 (back-up is always 300BP). Each card on the list can only be used once on a character as long as they’re on the field (for example, Strider can get 2 options played on him as back-up total, and one other character, I forget which). So on your turn you can play as many action cards as you want if you have enough SP for it, 1  character and 1 back-up.

Characters not only have BP, but some have abilities. There’s an icon to show what type of ability it is, and you can read the data to see what the effect is. A triangle effect activates as soon as you play the card. A square effect is activated on your turn if you want to, though that freezes the character to apply whatever the effect is. A circle effect is just a passive thing the character always done (for example, Morrigan heals her player by the amount of damage she deals to the enemy player specifically (not to other character cards)). Effects can do a variety of things. Steal SP from the enemy, gain SP, deal specific amounts of damage, sacrifice a character for some effect (some do healing, some do damage, some just straight kill an enemy card), sacrifice an action card for some effects, freeze enemies, keep enemies frozen, draw cards… stuff like that. Action cards have similar effects as well.

But what you need to know most is attacking. Once you attack, that will end your turn after the attacks resolve. When you attack, you choose which of your characters will attack. Note that a character cannot attack the turn they’re summoned, much like Magic the Gathering. When your attackers are declared, your opponent can select non-frozen characters to defend their life points. They can place one defending character per attacker. Then, in some order, attacks happen. 2 character facing off will hit each other for their BP value, and if any of them get to 0 they’re discarded, otherwise their BP is just lowered. So even if a character starts with 1000BP, they won’t stay at that as they get defended against. Enemies you used to attack are frozen, so they can’t defend against the opponent on their turn, so there’s some pretty tough choice-making here, since you need to make sure you can actually survive your turn if you attack with everyone, or if you should keep some characters to defend. But this seems too simple, right? Well…

Another option when you attack is Unite. This lets you select several characters to attack together. So you only get one defender against 2 characters. I like to put a character with low LP as a bit of defense for a stronger character. A defender will go through the 2 characters in order. Unite attacks have a few quirks, namely because any leftover damage after you killed the defender goes straight to hit the enemy player. So Unite attacks are VERY useful for actually dealing damage, since the opponent will generally have characters for defense. The other quirk of Unite attacks is that they cost SP; 5 SP for 2 characters to unite, 10 SP for 3 characters to unite. And the last quirk, and that’s a weird one, is that, if the enemy defends when you Unite, WILL prioritize the unite attack. So you can technically unite with 2 shitty characters to lure a big defender, and do a single attack with a third, strong character, for guaranteed damage if the opponent only has one character to defend with. The CPU in general is a bit weird when it comes to defending, it doesn’t always make optimal choices (and sometimes decides not to defend at pretty awful moments), but as I said you can totally manipulate it to defend against weak unites which is always nice.

And that’s about it. Play a character, play a backup (forgot to note earlier that you can’t play a backup on a character you just summoned, you have to wait a turn), play actions, use abilities, then attack. The only other thing to talk about is deck-building. I already explained how you get cards, the main one being fighting. The deckbuilding interface is ass and a half, but it’s fine-ish for a portable game of the time. You can put up to 50 cards (actually I never tried to put less than 50, I know you can’t go above that though), and up to 3 of any individual card. I’m not super familiar about the best strats for deckbuilding, but I assume it’s good to put like 5-6 good action cards, then for characters you should try to have things with good ability synergies (which I have no idea what they are) and build around good backups. A simple one on the SNK side is Leona, Clark, Ralf and Heidern, who all back each other up. Some have no backups but have good effects, like Wild Leona who has 500 BP and deals 400 damage when you summon her to any enemy character. I will note very quickly that you can mix and match between Capcom and SNK character, and that, in fact, some of them happen to back each other up. Also a few characters have a summoning cost, in the form of an effect. On the Capcom side when you summon Blodia you’ll lose 10 SP, and if you don’t have 10 SP it’ll explode… so be careful. Some characters are a bit useless on their own, like Rain who will only return herself to your hand if you summon her alone, but if you have a strong character on the field that’s about to die (or you want to re-use its summon ability on the next turn) you can use her to return that character to your hand for later use. Fun! There’s some strategy here for sure… though an important one overall is using characters with high BP. 1500 is just better than 300, you know. Or using very strong summon effects, as some of those are broken as fuck, like Akuma just straight up killing an opposing character for free when you summon him (AND he has decent BP… way too good).

Overall

It’s a pretty simplistic card battle game, but it’s really fun. The card collecting may annoy some due to the heavy RNG of it and some of the cards being secrets (there are some cards you can’t get without beating the game even). It’s not super long with basically a few key matches to win (some of the “gym leaders” require you to beat other people before you can fight them), then a tournament against 3 elite players (the “Elite 3”, if you will), and then the finals against the champion… Very familiar, huh? But there’s some extra play time going on here since you can’t just do all the fights and win, that champion battle WILL kick your ass if you don’t build a solid deck (in fact the first Elite 3 will own you as well), this game is not easy (and there’s a large luck component, of course).

It looks good, it plays well, it’s simple, it’s fun, it’s challenging… Not too much to complain about here. We’ve got a good one here. I am pretty tempted to get the NGPC collections on Switch (I think there’s a couple with a bunch of games), just to see if any of these other games I never played are also good. Because this one is very nice.

I fully recommend this game. There’s plenty of gameplay in there, moreso if you’re a completionist, and it’s fun. And it’s fairly low-cost at, what, 10$? Especially compared to trying to find an actual cartridge of it (and a Neo Geo Pocket Color to play it on lol).