SNK vs Capcom Card Fighters
A war older than time itself rages on
Tags: SNK vs Capcom Card Fighters Categories: DS Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Michael Hanning on Jun 4th, 2007
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| SNK vs Capcom Card Fighters (title page) | 1 - 2 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Fighting | No | ||
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Phoenix Wright trampled by Servbots! Setsuna beaten up by the Darkstalkers mummy! The little sister of the sub-boss of King of Fighters 2003 joining forces with Hayato! Madness abounds!
If any of the preceding paragraph made sense to you, let alone piqued your interest, you’re the segment of the populace that SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters DS is aiming at. A straightforward card fighting game combining characters from two of gaming’s titans, it offers up the basic cardfighting game experience with a whole lot of name-dropping to keep you interested because holy crap Last Blade characters are in this!
The card system will be familiar to anyone who’s played Magic: The Gathering. (It may be closer in spirit to other CCGs, but Magic was the last one that I seriously played so it’s the one we’re using for this metaphor.) You generate Force which comes in five colors. Cards generate their own Force while in play or you can discard them to build some up for casting quickly. Some cards have special abilities that affect gameplay, but the majority rely on straightforward physical attacks. Throw in a few effect cards – most heal your characters, some refresh them once they’ve been tapped and a few do some damage – and you basically have a Lite version of the old Magic system.
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This isn’t to say that there isn’t room for strategy, because there is. The card mix that you bring in can dramatically change the way you play, but it’s also a fact of the system that your choice in characters doesn’t actually effect what happens much. You CAN bring the Ikari Warriors KOF team together if you’re a big fan, or fight with the cast of Megaman or even the entire law firm of Wright and Co., but these cards could have been anything without changing the core gameplay. The storyline only provides vague references to the SNK/Capcom nature of the cards (namely, you can take an elevator that says Capcom to fight all-Capcom decks or the SNK elevator to face all-SNK), but the rest of the outer game falls on the shoulders of our generic protagonist and his more or less faceless friends. Luckily you can skip most of these conversations by holding down the Y button.
Where the game begins to go seriously wrong is the story mode, which is so terrible that it makes the Pokemon cartoon look like The Sound and the Fury. The Card Tower has been completed, but then it turns evil while you’re in it! You play…a guy who’s really firey and has orange hair to show it. And there’s his rival, a blue-haired taciturn guy. A girl follows you around dispensing advice. I honestly cannot remember much more than this – it’s as if they put a sieve over every episode of Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon and dredged up the most generic characters they could. They conform to archetype just enough that you kind of recognize them, but they honestly left no impression on my consciousness. It tries to change things up now and again by fulfilling character requests and the like, but for the most part there’s nothing here you haven’t played before.
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There are a few concessions to the DS, such as using the touchscreen to cut open booster packs you buy and to navigate the stages. You only get around by tapping a dot on a map, though – no actual wandering, so why they spent time working on an overworld and sprites for it is anybody’s guess. Throw in the repetitive music and you’ve got an underwhelming presentation.
SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters DS is like an odd treat that has a good chocolatey center but an astoundingly bland candy shell. Hardcore fans of either company will relish the cards and the chances to recognize increasingly obscure characters, and fans of card games such as the Yu-Gi-Oh series or oldschool Magic players will enjoy the card system. There are a lot of ways that SNK vs Capcom: Card Fighters DS could have gone better, but as the new face of a cult classic – and the newest front in the eternal Capcom Vs. Everything battle – it succeeds admirably.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Adapts to the DS admirably + Tons of new cards, including enough favorites and obscurities to make any fanboy squeal + Cardfighting system |
7.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- The story mode is almost painfully bad. Luckily, you can skip it - I would have killed for the ability to just purchase specific cards instead of opening boosters full of the ones I already had, especially when the game asks me for a specific card before I can continue - It mostly just made me want to play the games the cards came from, and half of them are impossible to find anymore |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Fans of the old Cardfighters game or the Capcom vs SNK series in general will love this, but the cardfighting hardcore have probably already moved to Yu-Gi-Oh. | |
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Tags: SNK vs Capcom Card Fighters
Posted by Michael Hanning on Jun 4th, 2007 and is filed under DS Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
