Anyone who had the original Neo-Geo handheld probably at least heard of the original card themed SNK vs Capcom games. Recently SNK Playmore revived the series, and brought it to the DS, and it’s….. well…… blah.

There’s just really so much more that could have been done with this game, as it’s just riddled with things that make it appear like the people that made the game just did a rush job.

For starters, the Story mode is about the equivalent of one of those half-assed Sunday morning cartoons that they show and hope 6 year old kids can get into, since they don’t know crap when they see it anyway. It’s basically the same scenes repeated fifty million times, and they consist of “OH NOES YOU’VE BEEN BRAINWASHED I DO CARD BATTLE TO WAKE YOU!” then follows with “ZOMG YOU SNAP OUT OF IT LETS BATTLE SOMETIMES LAWLZ!”

Okay, so it’s not exactly like that, but it’s pretty damn close. This is repeated god-knows-how-many times as you progress through the game. Hell, even the NPCs you run into are the same damn kind repeated over and over, only with different color swaps. Seriously, did they think anyone that wasn’t a chimp with down syndrome wouldn’t notice? The AI isn’t exactly the most challenging thing on the planet either, and you’ll find yourself losing more to just bad luck with drawing the right cards instead of actually being beaten by the computer. Sometimes they’ll just sit there when you’re health is in the red and let you rebuild your defenses, or allow you ample time to plow through their own. Thankfully the game has an option for online battles, which lets you go against, you know, humans that are (hopefully) smarter than a Preschooler.

To make things worse, the in-game text is a scrambled mess. It’s not bad enough that the dialog has to be a grammar Nazi’s worst nightmare, and the script the equivalent of an English report done by a 6 year old. The card descriptions, thanks in part to terrible translation work, will leave you scratching your head in confusion, as some of them are incredibly vague in telling you what the damn-hell-crap the card you’re looking at does. You’ll find yourself getting frustrated when you find that a card that you think is supposed to deal 500 damage to all character cards ends up doing 500 damage spread out.

Really, the only saving grace for this game is the card battle system itself, which actually works fairly well. It’s actually rather addicting too, you know, once you get past the horrible grammar, decide to ignore the storyline, and just try to enjoy the whole mess. It’s like finding that one Avril Lavigne song that doesn’t make you want to smash your face against a brick wall.

It’s really hard to recommend this game for any reason because of all the problems that infest it, despite the good battle system. It would be nice though that if SNK decides to do another part of this series, that they actually put some effort into making it instead of this half-assed thingy.

Graphics: 3.5
Sound: 2.5
Gameplay. 3.5
Entertainment: 2.0
Overall: 2.5
Analysis: Not exactly a Yu-Gi-Oh! killer.

Note: Earlier this year, SNK Playmore ended their recall of copies of the game that had a severe glitch that stopped progression on the second playthrough. Bug-free copies of the game should be available at stores, though whether you want to deal with it is your call.