Queen Fighter 2000 (Game Boy Color)

Also known as Nv Wang Ge Dou 2000, this is an unlicensed fighting game that bucks the usual trend by having an all-original cast of characters, rather than being a knock-off of an existing fighting game, or a bizarre mish-mash of random characters and real life people, like Top Fighter 2000 MK VIII. Well, it goes half way to bucking the usual trend, at least. The characters themselves, in design and name are all original, but if you look closely, you'll see what lies beneath.

 

What the developers of this game have done is trace over a load of characters from various Neo Geo Pocket Colour fighting games with their own original character designs, with the results being interesting, at the very least. Some of the characters' previous lives are instantly recognisable from just their pre-fight animations, like the ones based on Ryu and Athena, while others, like the one based on Felicia have been re-interpreted so wildly that they're pretty hard to clock. I really like this aspect of the game, to be honest: Ryu re-imagined as a big, strong woman, Iori Yagami in the form of a moody tough girl, and Nakoruru as a knife-wielding maid are all pretty cool. Also, the character that has Athena's animations for some reason looks just like Sakura Kinomoto from Cardcaptor Sakura, and has different costumes for each of her special moves.

 

As for how it plays, it's not a disappointment there, either! The Game Boy is a system with more good fighting games than you might expect, thanks to all the great Takara-published ports of arcade fighters in the mid-nineties, but Queen Fighter 2000 stands tall among them. It's a little choppy, maybe thanks to the big sprites that were originally intended for the more powerful NGPC hardware, but other than that, it's still pretty fast, the special moves work like you'd expect, and it's just generally a fun little game. The lack of any proper story is a little disappointing considering the all-original cast, but I guess it'd be in Chinese if it were there anyway. But there's single player and vs modes, and you can play as single characters or teams of three.

 

This game wasn't really playable without a (now very rare) original cartridge, since like a lot of unlicensed Game Boy games (for example School Fighter, which I covered a few years ago), but thanks to the efforts of the tireless pirate preserver Taizou Hori over on Handheld Underground, now everyone can play it! And I recommend you do, it's good. It won't change your world or anything, but it looks cool and it's a lot of fun, and isn't that really all you need?