First Time Completion: SNK Vs. Capcom Card Fighters Clash (NGP Color)

Card battling games are a total guilty pleasure of mine. I used to delve onto them a fair lot as a kid like Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic the Gathering and such, and greatly enjoy video game variations of them. Even now, I occasionally buy and mess around with whatever is the latest Yu-Gi-Oh game with the latest card roster. SNK Vs. Capcom Card Fighters Clash is a game I tried out on a whim when I was trying out a Neo Geo Pocket emulator with some games. I certainly did enjoy it at the time, but only played a little bit of it, and moved on to some other game. Recently, I got myself a plethora of Neo Geo Pocket (Color) games to mess with once more, and jumped on this game. I managed to beat it the second time, and was certainly hooked.

There is certainly something compelling about the fun with card battle games. The notion of beating the same opponents repeatedly, collecting better cards to slowly build up your ultimate deck, and beating the top, card fighting fellows to get to the championship league. I like all of that, and this game delivers. It also helps the actual card battling is quite good. The goal is to simply lower the opponents life points to 0. At your disposal are fighter cards to attack your opponent and defeat other fighters standing in your way. Several fighters have passive or manual abilities, and also have action cards that can do various kinds of effects. That's all the game really has, but it works because of it. It does not do too much, nor gets convoluted, so more effort was put into the few, established mechanics. The game can really get deep and strategically with all the various means to try winning with all the different abilities and action card at your disposal. Some things I did in the game was weakening other fighter cards, and get them stuck on the field purposely to prevent the opponent from summoning stronger ones or deliberately taking a hit so the opponent is left wide open to be dealt a heavy blow. Perhaps these strategies are simply the norm for most players, and the best means to win is good old fashioned brute force. I could simply be admiring all of the fancy maneuvers and strategies that the AI pulled off on me.

The only real frustrating aspect I had with the game is the grind and difficulty balance. When I win, I only get 3 or 5 cards, depending on the opponent, and most of them tend to be crap. I don't mind the grind in general, but it feels annoying to get the good cards, and get nothing at all if you lose. I felt getting 7 or 10 cards would've been better when winning, and throw in 1-3 for losing, but being a good sport about it. The issue really arose towards the end when the difficulty took a massive spike. I did relatively well for a while, then all of a sudden, the opponents have all these superior, rare, strong cards I have no access too, and getting constantly floored. It took me a few hours to get enough good cards to win, and still struggled in the last battle. I only managed to win where I manage to get the ride cards to beat the opponent in one shot while I barely hanged on by the thread. It didn't feel like a clean, well done victory, and just got lucky.

Still, it was fun, and still mess around, getting better cards to kill time during my train commute to work. There are more cards to get post game, but the opponents I beat easily before kicked up too much of a notch. I would have to overcome that too. There is a Japanese only second game released, but it does have an English patch. I'll mess around with that installment at some point. There is also a DS version that I did play, but I forgot why I did not really like that particular version. The Neo Geo Pocket games seem to be good enough anyhow.