This Week in Retro: SNK Gals Fighter (2000) (Patreon)

SNK's Gals Panic on the Pocket

by Diamond Feit

The year 2000 was, for a lot of reasons, a very strange time to be alive. The ’90s had ended, and there had been no apocalypse, either biblical or technological. For many Americans, we were riding high, and everything looked great as we witnessed the dawn of a new millennium. ("There was no year zero" people, do not @ me). You think end-of-decade lists are silly, try to imagine how many end-of-century lists there were. Now imagine they weren't lists on a website but full-fledged television specials. We were collectively patting ourselves on the back for flipping our calendars over to a number we hadn't thought possible; everything released that year had to have the number 2,000 in it somewhere, or it was old news.

What we didn't know—video game fans especially—was how quickly everything was about to change. If you were a kid in the 1980s, you witnessed the rise, crash, and then worldwide resurgence of video games. Arcades weren't quite the center of attention anymore in 2000, but they were still easy to find and full of new experiences... especially if you liked fighting games, the most popular kind of video games around!

By the year 2000, I was already a 15-year fan of fighting games, starting with Yie Ar Kung Fu (a 1985 game—January, to be precise, making it 35 years old in the here and now), continuing with beat-em-ups such as Final Fight (1989) before I was completely captivated by Street Fighter II (1991) and all the titles that followed in its wake. Fortuitous circumstances led me to have regular access to a Neo•Geo, turning me into a lifelong advocate of SNK. 

By 2000, I had my own Neo•Geo, a modified Dreamcast, a sizable MUGEN collection, and a Neo•Geo Pocket Color. I could play the latest fighting games at home, online against anyone in the world, or even on the go (which in my case meant my friends' houses).

It was in this environment that SNK delivered unto me SNK Gals' Fighters, a handheld fighting game that drew on the company's already deep roster of characters to deliver a battle royale with an all-female roster. By this point, SNK was already well-known for fighters more than any other genre, and the Neo •Geo Pocket already had multiple portable versions of home-screen favorites like The King of Fighters as well as original creations like SNK vs Capcom (yes, the handheld version predated the arcade crossovers). These games featured a simpler, exaggerated art style, giving all the characters big heads and long limbs to better fit onto the small screen while retaining their familiar moves and controls.

SNK Gals' Fighters follows in that vein but with a comic twist: Most of the portable SNK games were straight adaptations of existing brands, while Gals' Fighters seems more like a parody. The women all have their regular moves but with a silly, lighthearted feel due to some slight changes. Mai Shiranui can burn herself up, Looney Tunes-style; Athena Asamiya can summon a limp-bodied Sie Kensou to block projectiles; and the whole enterprise centers on a "mysterious" fighter named Miss X who is clearly Iori Yagami in a dress (though she denies it).

With its humor and wacky animations, SNK Gals' Fighters qualifies as a rare "comedy fighter," a game which exists in a subset of fighting games that seeks to elicit laughter by goofing on established characters, tropes, and the players' expectations. It's a game that can only really exist and make sense with a deep bench and history to play off of, along with otherwise solid combat regardless of the silliness; Capcom's Pocket Fighter (1997) works for these reasons, while the Clayfighter series (1993-1998) does not.

SNK Gals' Fighters is also notable for its eponymous, single-gender lineup. The fighting game genre as a whole tends to fare better than other game genres when it comes to female representation, even if that usually amounts to a single lady fighting with six or more men. Given the scarcity of playable women in most video games in the ’80s and ’90s, every Chun-Li or Sonya Blade made a big difference. But Gals' Fighters delivers a complete roster of 10 women, and it does so without leaning on the characters' sex appeal. None of these women are damsels in distress, nor do they lose their clothes when they take damage; they're just women fighting each other, end of story. Contrast that with SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy (2018), another SNK fighter starring women and played for laughs but all of it drenched in "fanservice" by making the entire cast prisoners of a creepy pervert who forces them to dress in skimpy clothes so he (and anyone willing to buy the game) can stare at them.

While I am certain I had high hopes that the popularity of fighting games and the sheer breadth of choices available to me in the year 2000 was an indicator of future trends, history would prove otherwise. Within a year, both the Neo•Geo Pocket and Dreamcast would be dead and SNK would go bankrupt. Arcades in the U.S. would die another death, and the fighting game genre would shrivel into nichedom. Thankfully, the genre has since recovered thanks in part to indies and esports, and SNK lived to fight another day, but no one tried to make another SNK Gals' Fighters ever again. There are all-female fighters such as Skullgirls (2012) and Neo•Geo Pocket wannabes like Pocket Rumble (2018), but nothing quite ticks all the same boxes that SNK did 20 years ago: Sensible heroines engaging in stellar combat with silly flourishes.