365//365: Day 197 – SNK vs Capcom: The Match of the Millennium (NGPC)

Up until the release of the PlayStation Portable, fighting games on a handheld unit were as reliable as performing a hurricane kick across your bedroom — no matter how many times one is tried, the experience often sends you tumbling head first into a brick wall. That’s not to say the handheld world was devoid of any passable fisticuffs titles, as the Game Boy Advance produced Super Street Fighter II Turbo: Revival, which was surprisingly thorough, regardless of the lack of a fifth and sixth button. However, before Revival, even before the Game Boy Advance, the Neo Geo Pocket Color created a fighting title on its handheld, which featured two buttons, as well as an analog stick as your means of control. The game was also a collaboration between fighting game powerhouses SNK and Capcom — SNK vs Capcom – The Match of the Millennium.

The Neo Geo Pocket Color wasn’t the most advance handheld ever, with its rival, the Game Boy color, sporting a heftier color palette across the board, though less simultaneous colors onscreen at once than the NGPC (NGPC having 146 colors on screen out of a palette of 4096 while the GBC was aided by 56 different colors simultaneously on screen from its palette of 32,768). This leads to most NGPC games having a rather bland and recycled look to them, although character models usually prove to look rather potent. This should sum up the visuals to SNK vs Capcom, although in all honesty, it’s not as clear cut as that.

Even with a limited number of colors to work with, the developers managed to create a clean, proper look for each combatant, resulting in a very stylish visual presentation.

The character models are miniature versions of each of the SNK and Capcom fighting avatars. Thanks in part to the limited color palette, each character only has a small handful of colors to them. However, the beneficial side to this is that each character is distinguished by their specific color arrangement, which not only sets them apart from each other even more so than they are already, but gives the overall look quite a bit of style to it. They are a far cry from the source material, but the end result was a rather clean, extremely workable and overall enjoyable look to the characters. The animations are on the light side, but are in no way a sideshow of any sort. The backgrounds suffer from the lack of color variation, however they are, for the most part, emulations of backgrounds previously seen in other Capcom and SNK brawlers. Again, even with the color issues, the overall style works immensely in favor of the overall package.

One would think the rather unorthodox inclusion of an analog dpad on a handheld system, would make a fighting title on the unit seem like you have one arm tied behind your back, but that’s not the case here. Although not as comfortable as a traditional dpad, this analog dpad provides enough precision with your moves and commands to help further entrench you in your battles. With the little clicks you hear for hitting each of the eight directions, you can almost pinpoint what you’re doing wrong when a shoryuken is performed, yet a fireball is produced. Even the limited number of buttons on the Neo Geo Pocket Color isn’t a hindrance to your battles. Tapping a button will produce with a punch or a kick of weak stature, while holding it down for a split second will enable you to pull off your heavy attack. While there’s no middle ground, the control scheme is set up in a commendable fashion, leading to some familiar combos and tactics found in other SNK or Capcom fighters.

Another surprising boost to the overall package is a rather strong rendition of some of the classic tunes featured in throughout several different Street Fighter and King of Fighter titles. While a bit whimsical, this mostly light hearted approach works wonders with the already simplified mechanics and overall clearness and ease of the graphical presentation. You can clearly tell which songs are from which character or which game, as they retain all the similarities fans have grown accustomed to. Same can’t be said about the sound effects, which sound nothing like they should belong in a fighting game of any sort.

Occasionally, the backgrounds show some absolute brilliance, though the limited color palette hindered any further eye opening scenery.

The standard Arcade Mode is renamed to Tourney, which lets you play through the single player story in either a one on one battle, two on two tage team battles, or even three on three elimination battles. With somewhat meaningful endings, at least when compared to Marvel vs Capcom 2 or Tekken 6, you’ll actually want to play through with each character, checking out what is said at the end of the game for each character. If you are playing with two or three people in your group, the first character selected will have the more meaningful ending, with random quips from your partner(s).

You’ll also have a Vs Mode for two player link play (good luck finding someone else with another copy of SNK vs Capcom, let alone someone that owns a Neo Geo Pocket Color), a training mode under the name Sparring, Record mode, which lets you check your win/loss records and such, and a Entry mode, which lets you put together your own team, with their own music as well as their own win phrase.

Finally, there’s an Olympic mode, which enables you to play through various different “events”. Survival has you taking on 100 fighters in an endurance event, while there’s even an event called Cat Walk, in which you manipulate Felicia into dancing along to six different BGM tracks of various difficulties. Think Dance Dance Revolution, using up, down, A and B. Its quirky, and downright silly, but it’s yet another aspect of SNK vs Capcom that brings together this package in such an amazing manner.

The only true negative, outside the feeble sound effects, is the character roster. While you’ll initially have 18 characters to choose from (nine from each SNK and Capcom), there’s a lot of characters missing, that could have added more variety to the line up. While the SNK crowd have a more distinct fighting style, thus separating each other in terms of move sets, the Capcom bunch are not as lucky. With Ryu, Ken, Morrigan, Sakura and Dan representing the over-saturated “cut and paste”, there very little diversity on the Capcom side. There are secret characters that can be unlocked, however the lack of identity does hurt somewhat. Regardless, having as many fighters in the game as they do, the complaint is somewhat diluted.

Yes, the roster is larger than you'd expect for a handheld fighting game, but the Capcom line up feels a bit too repetitive.

Cartridge based handheld fighting games are not supposed to be this good, nor have this much care to it. Across the board, the production quality of SNK vs Capcom: Match The Match of the Millennium is almost second to none. The controls adopt the two button and analog dpad scheme seamlessly, the quaint visual style elevates the charm of the title, and the plethora of ways to play the game just seals the deal in the players favor. Although finding a Neo Geo Pocket Color will not be the easiest thing in the world, nor the game at hand, this is hands down the single best title on the handheld system, and explicitly worth hunting down on ebay or your local vintage game dealer.

Rating: 8.9