A neat little curio that channels a cult piece of hardware, and some of the fighting greats.
The concept of retro gaming can be a fuzzy business at times, but
here's something that comes with a laser focus; a 2D fighter that harks
back to that small handful of games released on the Neo Geo Pocket,
SNK's beautiful late-90s handheld. Cardboard Robot's Pocket Rumble has
finally emerged from a prolonged development on another handsome
handheld, Nintendo's Switch, and it's a most curious exercise.
On the surface, this is an eerily accurate facsimile of the likes
of King of Fighters R-2 or Last Blade: Beyond the Destiny, from its
limited pixel count and cut-back colour palette. It apes the chibi style
of those games, and even takes the two-button control scheme
necessitated by the Neo Geo Pocket's layout and goes about making a
virtue of it, all in the name of accessibility. It's a cute idea,
executed with no small flair and imagination, though more often than not
it can come across as something of an awkward fit. There's a decent training mode that comes complete with hitbox information.
Part of it's that slight mismatch between concept and hardware. The
games that inspired Pocket Rumble were built around the limitations of
the Neo Geo Pocket - that chibi art-style was the perfect way to
maintain that SNK character with a fraction of the processing power -
while also playing to its strengths. Who can forget that exquisite
microswitched digital d-pad on the Neo Geo Pocket - as close an
approximation of a joystick there's ever been with on a controller of
its ilk, and something that's sadly rarely been replicated since.
Certainly not by the Switch, anyway, whose JoyCon always come up short
when it comes to fighting games.
Pocket Rumble's solution is neat enough, with Cardboard Robot doing
away with quarter circles and allowing specials to be pulled off simply
by combining one of the two attack buttons with a diagonal input. Even
then - and this is a damnation of the Switch's design more than it is of
Pocket Rumble - there's a fuzziness that doesn't feel quite right when
playing on JoyCon, and a little of the flow of a good fighting game
seems to be lost in the blunting of special executions. Still, with a
decent fight stick it works, and works well too.
It does go some way towards highlighting a contradiction that's at
the heart of Pocket Rumble, though, and one that runs through the whole
thing. This is a fighting game that purports to allow all-comers to
play, but it's one that's almost impenetrable from the off. The
tutorials are ferreted away in a sub-menu, and the single-player
offerings are slim and brutally hard. You'd be forgiven for
walking away having been repeatedly beaten in the arcade or survival
modes, or the career mode that's not much more than an offline
approximation of the online experience, with a succession of fights with
random AI fighters. Online play is reliable, thanks to GGPO, and well populated at the moment.
It's no-frills and more than a little frustrating, but stick with
it and you'll find a fighter with no small amount of charm, and a fair
number of neat tricks of its own. It's an eminently readable fighting
game, the health bar broken into twelve distinct chunks that are whittle
away with each attack, and success comes from being able to chain
together attacks as effectively as possible (even though, in one of
Pocket Rumble's many contradictions, that accessibility is undercut by
an input window that can seem punitively small). There's real variety
here, too, even if that might not be instantly apparent given the slim
roster of eight fighters. What's important is that those eight fighters
are totally distinct, and each is a real joy to play.
There's Parker, a besuited brawler who can parry or lay down orbs
across the stage, setting up traps for opponents to fall into. There's
the hulking Quinn who can cling to walls before leaping in with his
claws, and can turn into a werewolf; Hector, meanwhile, can heal after
pulling off a special and then there's Keiko and June who seem to have
stumbled in from BlazBlue, one drawing on a cat that explodes, the other
teleporting across the stage and able to summon up a mirror image of
themselves. If the visuals hit the mark, the sound isn't quite as effective. The music tends more towards annoying than evocative.
The interplay between them can be delicious, and I love how they
draw upon other fighting series, mashing together the works of Capcom,
Arc System Works and, of course, SNK, in one fascinating whole. There
are some inspired moments, and it's a more than worthwhile effort that
has one other significant problem; it finds itself on a platform that's
not short of fighting games, and one that plays host to some truly
exceptional examples, not least of which are SNK's Neo Geo originals,
all handsomely emulated and looking splendid on Nintendo's handheld.
Should that stop you playing Pocket Rumble? Not at all - it's a
neat little curio, full of splendid touches and a cute identity of its
own. It's not without a handful of its own problems, though, and it's
hardly the most full-featured of fighters. Just know that, as much fun
as Pocket Rumble can be, there are plenty of better options out there.
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