really REALLY fun once you figure out what everything does, however cant really give a hard rec due to how much RNG the game relies on for card drops and the crazy difficult decks the endgame has you face off against. You gotta grind pretty darn hard to finish this game. I'd love to play this with other people, and while the switch port does have local multiplayer, it's both on the same screen so like that entirely defeats the purpose. Maybe you could do an honor system where each player closes their eyes when the other is doing things, or put a physical screen divider between the players, but that's kinda dumb ngl. Shoulda had switch local wireless or online support but that was probably outside of their scope. This game is cool as hell, I just wish it wasn't such a singleplayer focused experience.

[Capcom version]

A comfortable opportunity to relive the magic of my right-time-right-place experience playing Pokemon Red/Blue in the 90s. This is a chunky, quirky collectathon that replaces pocket monsters with collectible cards featuring two of the most iconic video game rosters of all time, and boasts a deeper backbench than even SVC Chaos or Capcom vs SNK 2. It’s indisputable that these two developers were both in their prime during the late 90s and early 2000s, and this game’s diversity of godlike design is a testament to that fact - it’s no coincidence that Akiman, Shinkiro and Akira Nishitani all get outright name-checked in the game’s text. A huge pleasure for SNK and Capcom nerds alike, who will no doubt take great pleasure imagining the outlandish scenarios these Card Clash battles draft for you; in a lategame match, I had Ken Masters and Terry Bogard riding atop the shoulders of Jin Saotome’s Blodia CyberBot in order to kill a super-charged Rugal who was defending Shinji Mikami as we fought in the Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil.

Wild, right? The game is resplendent with this over-the-top charm that papers over the fairly obvious design cracks that Jax has already covered in exhaustive detail. I can’t see this appealing to anyone who doesn’t do shit like point at the screen and go “ZERO AKUMA!! NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH CYBER AKUMA, FROM MARVEL SUPERHEROES VS. STREET FIGHTER, 1997!!!”, but if you like looking at shit-hot pixel art of characters from 3rd Strike and Art of Fighting 3: The Path of the Warrior, this is well worth the single-digit price point they’re asking for a very well-made port. My tip? You can use the rewind function to re-roll card drops and save yourself literally hours of meaningless grinding for S-tier cards.

A shameless Pokemon TCG ripoff structurally, an MTG-for-babies mechanically, but still very much its own thing thematically. One half a wonderful homage to SNK and Capcom's best characters, another half a shameless advertisement for their arcade ventures.

I'm not really gonna bother saying positive shit about this game because it's a fucking trading card game. If you like this kind of shit, you WILL have a good time. It's that specific brain scratch that you can't try getting fancy-schmancy about - you get cards with big numbers on them and have a braindead time.

So I'm gonna bitch about the heinous atrocities this game commits instead.

Probably this game's biggest sin is the difficulty balancing and grinding. Trying to get new cards - let alone GOOD ones, - is a much slower ordeal than PTCG. In that game, you got two packs per win, each with ten cards. Cards being organized by packs and being consistent across enemies you chose to play against meant there was always an incentive to rematch different opponents, or to just focus on a single enemy in order to build a specific archetype. SvC CFC only gives you THREE SINGLE CARDS per matchup - five against boss characters. You're not guaranteed any certain rarities, so there's nothing stopping the game from rewarding a 15 minute battle with the same useless D-rank cards you've lined your pockets with. They try to balance this out by giving you trade machines and shops as an additional outlet for card-collecting, but those are equally stingy. The only 'good' way to build up a deck of stuff you want without losing your mind is to rewind-scum after a battle to refresh what you get. Cards aren't sorted into packs either, so there's literally never a reason to choose 1 opponent over another, and no way to aim in on a specific theme you want. Just grind and spam savestates on the same enemy.

This game is also just really unfair with the kind of cards it lets the opponent use. The problem with its 'fight any of the 5 bosses in any order' system is that there's no natural progression of difficulty, and they deck out every boss with high level shit from the get go. The semifinals are maybe the most insane difficulty bump in any game I've played in my life. Half of my playtime was devoted to just grinding to win through these fights. If the opponent isn't hurling the best A and S rank cards at you, they're tossing out cards that completely reset the board state as soon as you're ready to make a good move. And on that note, the player who wins the first turn coin flip is just objectively at a huge advantage, and you might as well give up if you go second. This isn't like Pokemon where your setup relies on getting the right trainer cards and shit at the right time - it's much more consistently paced, meaning whoever gets the first play is always going to be a full step ahead defensively.

And maybe I'm just malding but I swear on god's name, SNK just has the objectively better card pool. Not to say there aren't great or downright busted Capcom cards, but SNK consistently gets higher BP and more immediately aggressive abilities on their cards. This is such a defense-focused game that you can't really compromise on factors like that. The worst offender to me is the Terry & Ken comparison - both rivals from other SvC/CvS games, so they have the same design here too: Both give similar SP on activation, same rarities, and both have abilities that prevent them from freezing after attacks. Except Terry also has 300 more BP than Ken. Shit like that makes the game an upward climb if you play the Capcom version, because you just have to inherently put more effort in to win against these SNK titans that have 800+ BP by nature. Even the starter decks are skewed in SNK's favor.

But ye this game was still really fun to play. One of those games where no matter how player-unfriendly the progression is, you're still gonna have a fun time. Just building decks with your favorite characters and finding strategies/synergies between them is half the fun. I hope this game succeeds and inspires SNK to finally localize the sequel.