SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters' Clash Review

What happens when you take two gaming companies, SNK and Capcom, known for their fighting games and pit them against each other? You apparently get a card battle game… with cutesy chibi characters. This is exactly what happened in 1999 when SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters' Clash was released for the Neo Geo Pocket Colour handheld console. The game was available as two standalone titles featuring decks of either SNK or Capcom characters. Each had a different starting deck and exclusive cards that were only available to that title, besides that the gameplay was identical in both.

SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters' Clash on the Switch has both those versions to choose from, so at the start or any other point in the game you can switch between the two. The game allows you to trade between the two versions (as you can have separate save files for each) so there are character and action cards from both SNK and Capcom to collect and battle with. There are 300 different cards to collect and to use for making your own custom deck to draw from during battles. The card battles you fight in remind me of an easier version of Magic: The Gathering, if you haven’t played it before it is very easy to learn. In SNK vs. Capcom the maximum amount of cards (fighters) that you can have on the field is three. You gain Special Points when you place fighters on the field that are spent when you play Action Cards or perform combined attacks that have multiple fighters teaming up to attack the enemy.

Each turn you draw a card from your deck to add to your hand. You can choose this new card to lay in the field or you can choose one of the other cards from your hand. Once the card is placed you can choose to attack your opponent or end your turn. Keep in mind that you can’t have a newly placed card attack in the round they are laid down, so you may have to alter your strategy a bit. While an enemy attacks you have the option to counter attack or do nothing. If you choose to counter the attack the card that you choose will take damage equal to the amount of HP the opponent card has, if your fighter runs out of HP it will be a K.O and they are out of the round. If you don’t counter, your main character will take the damage. Once your HP hits zero you lose the match. I would look at the HP of the cards I had out before deciding if I would counter, if they only had 100 HP they wouldn’t be able to do a strong attack anyway so I wasn’t too upset if they were taken out. Most of the time my main character had a lot of hit points so it was okay to take some damage. I made sure to go after my main opponent and instead of concentrating on just taking out the cards I would try to attack them since I win once they hit zero.

SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters' Clash has nice retro pixel graphics and super cute deformed versions of the fighters on the character cards. It features music that sounds like you are ready to go into battle at any point. Even when you are just walking around in a toy store the music sounds like you are ready to drop everything and fight right at that moment. The interesting choice was making it look like you were playing the game on the Neo Geo Pocket Colour itself, just like you would have when it was originally released. This looks really cool, but the big problem is if you are playing on the Switch handheld, the game screen on the Neo Geo is incredibly small. So if you are having trouble reading the text or seeing what is going on you will want to have it hooked up to your television. The card battle game itself is very addictive to play and it’s fun trying to figure out new strategies with the new cards you collect. I always get excited when I win a battle to see which new cards I’ve earned to add to my deck. Though it’s always a bummer when you get a super cute card (especially the one that has two cats) and you see that it only has 100 HP. These kitties are going to get destroyed!

If you are a big fan of card and deck building games SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters' Clash is going to be a title you will want to check out, especially if you are a fan of any games that SNK and Capcom have released. It’s pretty neat to be able to go to the mansion from Resident Evil to have card battles against opponents. All in a retro pixel form, but still looks really neat! I can’t wait to play more and get cards of my favourite Capcom games, I’ll be ecstatic to get the Mega Man card to add to my deck. Knowing me, even if that card is weaker than other ones in my collection, I’ll still be using him just because it’s Mega Man!