FIghting Against Boredom

User Rating: 4.8 | SNK vs. Capcom Card Fighters DS DS
I was never able to play Card Fighters on the Neo Geo Pocket, even though I always wanted to. The art for the cards would pop up on the internet every once in a while, and eventually became part of a LiveJournal fad, but I never had the chance to play it. However, when I saw that Card Fighters was coming to the DS, I was naturally drawn to it. Knowing that the release would be small, I jumped on it as soon as I could. The box art and manual made the game look pretty nice, and I was excited to get a chance to play the game.

Starting up, I ignored the story, knowing that a card battle game wouldn't have any major plot twists. However, I wouldn't have had an easy time with the story, had I cared. The spotty translation and painful localization made certain areas hard to understand, and other areas absolutely cringe-worthy. By the time I reached the tutorial, I realized that there was no hope for the game's translation. The tutorial sequences were grammatically bad and woefully terse, essentially teaching me nothing about how to play the game. So I played the game. I'm not sure how I managed the massive come-from-behind victory that was my first card battle. By the first boss fight, I had somehow mastered the basics and come through with a perfect fight record. However, by the second floor, I found myself bored. The AI was steady and predictable. I didn't see much increase in the game's difficulty, just increases in card strengths as I moved from one tedious battle to the next. The game didn't give me much to look forward to graphically, either. The still-standing characters with blinking eyes and moving mouths seemed more at home in an older game, and their jagged, gif-like edges detracted from the artist's effort. The card art was nice, but the simplistic battle animations didn't give me much else to look at. The translation would also rear its ugly head from time to time, reminding me that I wasn't sure why I was playing this game.

I was bored. I never even got to the ominous game-ending glitch that seems to plague the first lot of this game's release.

I returned the game to work the next day, deleted my save file and moved on with my life. Maybe someone else will be happier with it than I was... but I highly doubt it. If they don't fall out of their chair laughing at an old man that says, "Take a chill pill!", then they'll probably play long enough to realize that they should have waited for the poor game's price to drop.