Produced by: SNK
Genre: Trading/Battle Card Game
Players: Two, via link-up
Now a card game featuring the intellectual properties of both SNK and Capcom might seem like a wasted oppertunity to some, but Cardfighter's Clash is a quality piece of software, and deserves to be in your collection every bit as much as SNK Vs. Capcom: Match Of The Milliennium. Borrowing ideas from the Pokemon card game and Magic: The Gathering, Cardfighter's Clash (CC from now on) is a well rounded puzzle/card game. The main draw of the title is obviously the inclusion of the two developer's numerous characters. They're all here - Ryu, Ken, Chun Li and the rest of the Street Fighter crew (right up to SF3), Terry Bogard, Ryo Sakazaki, Kyo Kusanagi, and so on. They don't fight of course - they're just here as static artwork.
The plot, for what it's worth, is pure Pokemon territory. You play a small child gripped by Cardfighter's Clash fever. There's a big tournament coming up to decide who is the best Cardfighter, and you (like many others) are determined to win it. So, clutching your (pretty poor) selection of Poke...sorry, CARDS, you go out in search of opponents. The "RPG" part of the game is the same as Pokemon - you have a top down view of locations, and there are several NPCs to talk to (they very rarely have anything interesting to say though) as well as other cardfighters to do battle with. When you beat rival Cardfighters, you are awarded a handful of cards. (As luck would have it, when you lose to a CPU character, you don't have to give them cards.) There are 300 cards in total, and you'll need both the SNK and Capcom versions of the game to get them all, as well as someone else to link up with via the Link cable. Finding every single card is a mammoth task.
The gameplay is actually quite deep, and the rules of the game are difficult to describe. Anyway, here goes...both players start with a deck of 50 cards. At the start of the game, each player is given five random cards from his/her deck. The "playing area" (that is the area in which cards can be played) consists of three spaces on each player's side - it's in these spaces that cards can be placed, so they are "active" and "in the game". Each card has a HP (hit point) value and a SP (spirit point) value. The HP value tells you how much damage a card can both take and give. For example: a card with 500 HP will beat a card with 300 HP - but after the fight, the winning card will have 200 HP, because damage is inflicted by the losing card. The SP value is added to your SP reserve when the card is made "active", and is used when a card performs "special" attacks or moves. These powers range from attacking ablilties (inflicting damage to an enemy card) or defensive powers (restoring energy to a friendly card). Each card can attack on it's own, but if you have enough SP, you can link up two or even three cards for a super attack, which adds up all the total HP for one strike. The actual object of the game is reduce your opponent's life to zero. Each player has a health value (usually 1000 HP). When a card makes an attack, you can choose to counter it with one of your cards. If you don't counter it, the card reduces your life force, but suffers no damage itself. I hope you can make sense of all that. It's very hard to explain, and the only way you'll really master it is to play the game yourself. It may sound long-winded and confusing, but after about three or four games, you get into the swing of things and it soon becomes second nature, so don't be put off by my rather pathtic attempt at describing the gameplay.
The graphics in the "RPG" part of CC are nice enough. Nothing outstanding, but they do their job. It's the actual card artwork that really catches the eye - these images are stunning. They wouldn't look out of place on a 16-bit home console. They're full of detail and color, and there's 300 of them in total! For anyone who has followed the fortunes of SNK and Capcom over the past few years this is like a treasure trove - as well as the better known characters, there are some lesser known stars, such as Ryu from Breath Of Fire 3, Baby Head from Captain Commando, Damnd from Final Fight and Blodia from Cyberbots - and that's just the Capcom characters! Also, contained within the "RPG" section of CC there are several "in-jokes" and references to SNK and Capcom games. There's a shop that rises from the ground to the music from Forgotten Worlds, a King Of Fighters arcade game that plays the Psycho Soldier Team music and even a tiny Resident Evil mansion to explore. You can have as much fun just walking around playing "Spot the game reference" as playing the actual game itself.
Once you've attained all the cards (and that will take months) you won't come back to CC. Because it's not really a puzzle game at heart, you can't "pick up and play" in the same way you would with Tetris or Puzzle Bobble. However, it's worth buying the game just to see the wonderful artwork, and if you're a fan of either company, you'll want to own this game.
4 out of 5
