SNK Vs. Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash – An epic crossover on a tiny screen

Year: 1999 |Publisher: SNK|Developer: SNK|Original format: Neo Geo Pocket | Version played: Neo Geo Pocket

Collectible card games were all the rage in the 1990s and my friends and I played a ton of them, both popular and obscure, good and bad. We cut our teeth on the seminal Magic The Gathering, of course. The local RPG shop got us into Rage, based on the Werewolf: The Apocalypse. A parallel obsession with comics led to the Marvel CCG OverPower. There was one summer we refused to cut our hair and played a game based on The Crow while listening to Rage Against The Machine. And, naturally, we went in hard on the Pokémon trading card game.

Such games were a great hobby for passionate, geeky teenagers in the Nineties. Not only did they offer endless hours or deep tactical play at an age when free time was in abundance, there was also something magical about the collectible format. That feeling of opening a booster pack and not knowing which cards would be in there; whether they’d depict a favourite character or one that would give the upper hand in your next game, was an exhilarating and supremely addictive one.

Naturally, as the games industry glommed on to the popularity of collectible card games, they started to appear in videogame form too. While videogame RPGs with card systems are arguably more popular than ever now, they were only starting to trickle out in the 1990s and were exceptional enough to draw attention. A quick Wikipedia search tells me that there were only a handful in the early part of the decade, including a trio of Japan-only Dragon Ball games and HAL’s interesting looking Arcana. I’d never heard of any of these at the time, so when SNK Vs Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash came along in 1999, it felt truly noteworthy. Here was one of my favourite hobbies, transported into the videogame realm and set free from physical limitations. It was on the coolest handheld of the day (probably of all time) and starred hundreds of familiar faces. How could I resist?

Those familiar faces were such an important part of SVC’s appeal. Though some might have you believe that arcades were in decline by the Nineties, I have no idea what those people are talking about! Over here in little old Wakefield we had a thriving arcade scene, and in the 90s both fighting games and Neo Geo dominated. I can still picture the sight that greeted anyone who walked into our local arcade, Playland, around this time. Yes there were tons of Sega racing games and lightgun shooters, but there was also a row of huge sit-down two-player cabs with giant screens. Among them… Street Fighter Alpha 3, Metal Slug X, The King Of Fighters ‘98, Street Fighter III, and plenty more. I was a student at the time and in the city most days, which meant I was in the arcade almost every lunchtime. These games got a lot of play and not only were they the very best that gaming had to offer at the time they were stuffed to the gills with huge casts of memorable characters.

I can’t understate how exciting it was that SNK and Capcom had made an agreement for their greatest characters to cross over. Not in a comic book or anime, or a stage play in Japan, but in actual playable videogames that would make the best not just of the cast and the art but each company’s game mechanics too. These fierce rivals were the kings of arcade gaming in the 90s and to see them work together in this way would be like Marvel and DC jointly producing a crossover movie today! I loved the idea too that this wouldn’t just be a one-off co-production but actually a series of crossovers, with each developer taking a crack at their own interpretation of the other’s characters. Simply put, SNK would make an SNK Vs Capcom fighting game and Capcom would make Capcom Vs SNK. Both fighting games but each done in their own style.

Actually in the end, we got a large handful of crossover games from the project and almost all of them are excellent, must-play games as far as I’m concerned. But what was really cool about the first in the series, Card Fighters’ Clash, was just how surprisingly different it was. As a card battling RPG some might have called it a cop-out, a cheap swerve from the real deal that fighting game fans expected. If they did say that, I certainly didn’t hear them! I’d grown up with collectible card games throughout the decade, I had a Neo Geo Pocket for about a year and absolutely loved it, and I was wild about the hundreds of characters who would feature!

I was also pretty pumped about Pokémon around this time, which is pretty important because Card Fighters’ Clash borrowed more than a little influence from Game Freak’s portable phenomenon. While Pokémon had boiled the JRPG down to miniature form for Game Boy, Card Fighters reduced it even further. There wasn’t quite the overworld to explore – instead you selected distinct areas from a map before exploring them – and the simplified mechanics meant there was no real leveling up to do. But the presentation of this world, the way you explored these top-down environments, interacting, trading with and battling quirky little NPCs, was instantly familiar to anyone who had been playing Pokémon at the time. Which was a lot of us! The formula clicked straight away and was perfect for a handheld like Neo Geo Pocket, which had an over-abundance of fighting games and action hits but not an awful lot of high quality long-form experiences. Like Pokémon, here was an adventure you could pick up and play for five minutes or equally lose yourself in for hours at a time, and all presented in a dinky style that just felt so right for a system you held in the palms of your hands.

Card Fighters’ Clash also shares Pokémon’s love for collectability. While the latter shouted “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” in its adverts and offered the childlike compulsion of finding, collecting and trading 150 unique pocket monsters, Card Fighters did much the same with its range of 300 themed trading cards. Both games also capitalised on this by releasing in two slightly different versions. Pokémon had its Red and Blue cartridges, each of which was fundamentally the same game but with slightly different selections of monsters to encourage kids to make use of the Game Boy link cable and swap with one another. Card Fighters took the idea one further by naturally splitting the game into a Capcom version and an SNK version, with the selection of cards available in each weighted toward its respective game developer. In doing so, SNK wasn’t just offering an arbitrary choices between two colours and some monsters you’d never seen before… Were you a Capcom kid or an SNK believer? They were asking you to pick a side.

For me the choice was easy. I couldn’t resist seeing Capcom’s characters on SNK hardware and the vibrant yellow box art promised some of the biggest of the time. Brilliantly drawn cartoon caricatures of Capcom favourites almost squeeze themselves out from the box. Ryu is the biggest and most prominent of course and a couple of other Street Fighters feature with Chun Li, and Alex, who had debuted in Street Fighter III only two years prior. Other cover stars had featured in their own games that same year, such as Jill Valentine in Resident Evil 3 and Strider Hiryu in Strider 2, while perennial Capcom mascot Mega Man can only just be seen peering out from the crowd.

This was an all-star line-up of not just some of Capcom’s biggest names but the biggest names in 90s Japanese gaming full stop. Yet now, 22 years later, it almost feels like a time capsule. The Street Fighter stars remain world famous, of course, but how many gamers today would recognise the cast of Cyberbots or Captain Commando? I’m not sure that many would even know Darkstalkers’ Morrigan.

In the game itself, that natural CCG thrill of acquiring new cards and the surprise of who appears on them is both as inherently appealing and nostalgic as the game’s cover. When you got a new card in 1999 it was a thrill to see one of your favourite characters immortalized in SNK’s chibi Neo Geo Pocket style, but in 2021 there’s the added joy of seeing old friends who were once so big but now half forgotten. If this game were made today it would be a very different line-up. There’s no Devil May Cry, no Monster Hunter, no Dead Rising or Phoenix Wright. There isn’t even that much Resident Evil. But there sure are a ton of Rival Schools characters and the quirky cast of Street Fighter III is so prominent, it belies how much that game has become the series’ cult entry in the decades since.

It’s amazing how much SNK manages to capture a sense of character in-game, especially when there’s virtually zero animation. The card game itself takes place in just a third of the Neo Geo Pocket’s 160×152 screen, with no visible markings on any of the six cards in play. This might seem strange but in fact it leaves another third of the space free to show one highlighted card very large so you can really take in the beauty of each hero’s pixel art illustration. Aside from the picture and the name, there’s very little else here to give you insight into the characters. There’s no flavour text to tell you anything about their personality or back-story, not even which game they hail from. Instead, they’re fleshed out only by what you bring with you and the way their game mechanics feed your imagination…

The core goal of Card Fighter’s Clash is to wipe out the opponent player’s hit points before they destroy yours. You do this by introducing character cards into the playfield and using them to directly attack the other player, who in turn can deploy their own characters to protect them. Crucial to this is that each fighter card has a BP number, which represents both their strength and their hit points. It’s a nice little touch that introduces a clear risk-reward mechanic. Use a fighter card to defend an attack and you’ll protect your own hit points but you’ll also lower the fighter’s attack power in the process.

High-powered fighters are therefore a premium commodity and not easily earned, and you’ll soon grow strongly attached to anyone with a BP of about 700 or more. There’s a sort of Top Trumps quality to these values, and if you’re coming to the game with preconceived notions of each character then it can be fun just to see the hierarchy in play. Strider Hiryu is more powerful than Ryu? I can kinda see that! But Ken is 200 points stronger than Ryu? You’d think they’d be equally matched.* What’s that? Terry Bogard is way tougher than either of them?! Scandalous!

With 300 total cards and only 50 in a deck, you can spend hours in Card Fighters just deciding who to take into battle. At first it can be tempting to load up a deck with heroes from your favourite classic games but eventually the difficulty curve will take such a sharp incline that you’ll need every bit of strength you can get. It’s not just about raw power either. Some characters have extra abilities that can really give the upper hand in a tense battle. Represented by a square, a circle or a triangle, these are abilities that can respectively be triggered by the player, putting that card into a freeze until the next turn, passive actions that are triggered under certain conditions and those that happen automatically as soon as a card is moved from your hand to the play field.

Outside of the simple choice of who to play and whether to attack or defend, or even not defend, it’s these character abilities that add real tactical decision making and depth to Card Fighter’s Clash. By the time you reach the semi finals, where you’re required to beat three tough players in a row without a chance to save in between, you’ll be desperate for any kind of competitive edge and you’ll find yourself scouring each card for an ability that might snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

This gameplay tension also adds a sense of narrative for the imaginative player. On screen the dueling cards are merely a series of static images but in your head this is a dramatic battle between scrappy teams of legendary characters. Some bravely sacrifice themselves for their friends, others charge in like the cavalry and save the day, while sometimes the most inauspicious supporting characters will somehow manage to make the decisive move to secure victory.

The sense of drama and emergent storytelling permeates further still in the way character cards can team up during play. First there’s the Unite move. If you have enough SP then you can make two or three characters attack as one rather than concurrently. A regular Solo attack can be defended completely even by a card with just 100 BP, deflecting the attacking card and chipping away at its own BP. But when characters unite their attack power, even if two of them are killed off in the process, any BP remaining with the last fighter will land a direct hit on the opposing player’s hit points. When this happens and you see three beloved characters work together, it’s hard not to picture a bold anime-like scene of brave heroes charging forward and clearing the way for an ally behind them, sacrificing themselves for their friends and for victory!

Finally there’s the “Back-up” system, which is probably my favourite part of Card Fighters’ Clash and a huge imagination driver. Most character cards can be “backed up” by three other specific characters in the game, usefully adding an extra 300 BP to their total. This essentially allows you to add more than one character to the field in a single turn and can significantly power up a fighter so that they might take on somebody much stronger. But more importantly in my mind, these team ups represent epic alliances, especially when they fit so neatly into the established canon. Sakura lending her support to Ryu? Makes perfect sense! Of course Leon and Claire can work together. Zangief and Haggar? Well, the Street Fighter II manual did tell me that they were training partners! Zero from the Mega Man series can join forces with Cyberbots’ Zero Akuma… That’s insane!

The coolest part of back-ups is when you see a question mark on the card, indicating that character can team up with someone from the other side! So if they’re a Capcom character they can receive back up from an SNK fighter, and vice versa. Except, of course, you don’t know exactly which one. So you’ll have to think about which pair make thematic sense together and experiment to discover working combos. Finding one that works is a great thrill that rewards a deep fanboy appreciation for these classic arcade heroes.

22 years on from release, and two sequels of varying quality later, Card Fighters’ Clash remains an eminently playable card game that triggers nostalgia for both the collectible card game craze of the 90s but also for an age when beautifully animated 2D pugilists were the biggest superstars in gaming. Replaying now has scratched a tactical itch in a way that’s every bit as good as any modern game, but with each new card acquired I’m reminded of another world-class arcade game from decades past. The urge to go plug in the Dreamcast or the big boy Neo Geo, and spend more time with these eternal heroes is compelling and also testament to how effortlessly Card Fighters’ Clash captures the imagination with so little.

_{*In a bizarre coincidence, I was listening the Street Fighter II episode of Retronauts while finishing this blog post, and learned that a bug in the original World Warrirors arcade game unintentionally made Ken slightly harder than Ryu. So now I’m convinced that SNK knew this and reflected it in the card game. Which is kind of awesome.}

SEVEN LITTLE THINGS ABOUT SNK VS CAPCOM: CARD FIGHTERS’ CLASH THAT I RATHER LIKED

Finally, how about some music from SNK Vs Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash…

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