Something that not very many people remember is that there was a cross-system link cable between the Neo Geo Pocket Color and the Dreamcast. This is one of the few games that uses that function! Obviously, I haven’t got any way to try it myself, but a little bit of research online suggests that strikers levelled up in this game can be uploaded to the Dreamcast port of King of Fighters 99, where they’ll have stronger attacks. The game itself is, in keeping with the Dreamcast theme, a King of Fighters-themed Sonic Shuffle-like (or I guess you could call it a Mario Party-like if you’re boring).

You pick a character, and you play a board game, and some spaces on the board trigger minigames. Oddly, the characters you play as aren’t King of Fighters characters, but a small collection of original teenagers. You do pick an actual KOF character as a striker to represent you in the minigames, though. Very strange setup. The aim of the game is to get stars, and there’s one space on the entire board where you can buy them for twenty coins each. There are spaces on the board that increase or decrease your stock of coins when you land on them, and you can also win or lose them in minigames. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself, now.

To go back a little: after picking your character, striker, stage, and game length, you’ll appear on the board. You take turns rolling the die, and occasionally choosing a direction to go in. Prety standard Sugoroku-type stuff. But there’s a few special space types! Exclamation marks will trigger a weird little event where your striker will interact with some other KOF characters, and you might lose a turn, gain some coins, or some other thing along those lines might happen. The VS. spaces are the game’s main draw, and they’ll trigger as soon as you get to them, you don’t need to actually land on them. Of course, they’ll pull you and your opponent into a minigame.

There’s a fair few minigames, and they all include references to the King of Fighters series, as well as other SNK games. Some of these references will just be cards with characters’ faces on them, but others are more deep. My favourite is the one where you’re given a clue, and have to pick the right character from a lineup of three. It actually requires some knowledge of these characters, their personalities and lore! That’s so rare in a fighting game spinoff! Other standouts include a little dancing game starring Mai Shiranui, which seems impossible to win (there’s even a FAQ written in 2001 that agrees!), a game that’s like SEGA’s ancient arcade game Head On, but it’s about Sie Kensou eating meat buns, and a game where Chang and Choi have to choose the right doors on their escape bid from prison.

After each game, whether you win or lose, you get a bunch of points, that gradually unlock stuff: new boards to play on, the ability to play the minigames from a menu, and most interestingly, a gallery of twenty pieces of pixel art with text attached. These can be ads for upcoming SNK games from around the same time, like King of Fighters 2000 or Cool Cool Toon, little design notes about this game or even classic SNK games, and more. It all really adds up to this game being a great little love letter and time capsule for SNK fans, especially now that there’s a fan translation.

And that really affects whether or not you’ll want to play it. Like I said, my favourite of the minigames really relies on the player having knowledge of SNK lore, and a lot of the appeal elsewhere is in the references to other SNK games and their lore. So if you’re a big SNK fan, you should definitely give it a try. One thing I can say in its favou is that it’s a lot quicker and less painful to play as against a CPU opponent than other games in this genre. I’d love to play it against a human opponent someday, but I don’t know how I’d ever be able to make that happen for a number of reasons (does anyone know anything about setting up multiplayer stuff on modern emulator handhelds? Is that possible?). I’ll bookend the review by bringing up another feature I wasn’t able to access via emulation: apparently, if you put the cartridge into a non-colour Neo Geo Pocket, there’s a remake of SNK’s 1979 arcade game Yosaku! Unfortunately, though, I couldn’t force the emulator I was using to load the ROM in monochrome mode.