At a glance: Fatal Fury: First Contact · Neo Geo Pocket Color · SNK, 1999 · Fighting · Score: 8.0/10
Before The King of Fighters, there was Fatal Fury — the series that built SNK’s fighting reputation and gave the world Terry Bogard. First Contact, released for the Neo Geo Pocket Color in 1999, adapts Real Bout Fatal Fury 2: The Newcomers into pocket form, and like its stablemates it bets that super-deformed sprites, two buttons and the best little stick in handheld gaming can carry a full arcade fighting system. It is the slimmest of the NGPC’s big three fighters, but slim is not the same as slight.
The roster runs to thirteen: Terry and Andy Bogard, Joe Higashi and Mai Shiranui carry the classic banner; Geese Howard and Wolfgang Krauser supply the villainy; Billy Kane, Ryuji Yamazaki and the rest fill out a lineup that reaches across the series’ history, while Real Bout 2’s own newcomers, the Chinese martial artist Li Xiangfei and the all-American brawler Rick Strowd, make the trip — Rick being a particular treat, a fan favourite who rarely escaped the arcades. Everyone is rendered in the pocket line’s chibi style, with their signature moves — Power Wave, Burning Knuckle, Xiangfei’s counters — intact and input-friendly.
One plane, full speed
The big structural decision is the planes. The Real Bout games fought across two planes, letting fighters dodge into the background; First Contact flattens the action to a single plane, trading that layer of evasion for speed and clarity on the small screen. What remains is recognisably Fatal Fury: a line system of light and heavy attacks off two buttons with tap-and-hold, breakable combo strings in the Real Bout style, and desperation moves when the life gauge runs low. Bouts are fast — noticeably faster than KOF R-2 — and the AI keeps arcade manners, which is to say it will teach you respect for Geese the traditional way.
Modes are the leanest of the pocket fighters: arcade ladder, versus via link cable, and training options, without R-2’s making mode or Match of the Millennium’s olympic extras. SNK clearly positioned this as the straightforward conversion, and judged purely as a conversion it is faithful and fun. Where it wins its own ground is game feel: hit effects land with a crunch the other pocket fighters sometimes soften, throws feel meaty, and Terry’s Power Dunk has never looked this cheerful.
The slimmest of the NGPC’s big fighters, but the fastest-feeling — a faithful Real Bout conversion with a crunch the others sometimes soften.
The honest ledger
Set against its siblings, First Contact is the one you finish first. The roster is the smallest of the three, the single-plane simplification removes a series signature, and there is less to chase once the ladder is mastered — no cards, no customisation, no Dreamcast link tricks. Presentation, too, is a half-step behind: stages are attractive but plainer, and the music, while faithful, gets fewer of the lavish arrangements KOF received.
And yet: as the Fatal Fury series’ only original pocket outing in the West — its follow-up never left Japan in this line — it has a completeness of its own, and for series fans the chance to play a proper Rick Strowd and Li Xiangfei game on a handheld was, for two decades, available nowhere else. Its inclusion in modern NGPC Selection compilations has finally widened that audience.
The end of the line, and a beginning
First Contact holds a melancholy distinction: it was the last Fatal Fury game of the classic era to reach the West in its own generation, arriving the same year the arcade line climaxed with Garou: Mark of the Wolves. The pocket game is not in Garou’s class — nothing is — but it shares its DNA of respect for the player’s intelligence, and playing the two in sequence is a small education in how SNK’s design language scaled from flagship to pocket without breaking. The series then slept for a quarter-century before its modern revival, which makes First Contact, for a whole generation of fans, the Fatal Fury they actually grew up with.
It is also worth defending the flattening decision once more. Two-plane fighting was a Fatal Fury signature, but on a 160-pixel screen it would have halved the readable space and doubled the confusion; SNK chose clarity, and the choice is why First Contact still plays cleanly today while cleverer handheld fighters feel cluttered. Sometimes the bravest conversion decision is the subtraction. First Contact subtracted wisely, kept the soul, and shipped the fastest pocket fighter of 1999.
Sound and stagecraft, briefly: the pocket conversion keeps Real Bout 2’s international flavour — stages that globe-trot from South Town streets to Geese’s tower — and its soundtrack arrangements are leaner than KOF’s but faithful, with Terry’s themes carrying their usual freight-train cheer. The between-bout presentation is brisk to a fault; this is a game in a hurry to get you fighting again, and for a pocket fighter that hurry is a virtue disguised as a limitation.
There is also a collector’s footnote worth knowing: First Contact’s Japanese release and its Western editions differ in the usual NGPC ways — clamshell versus cardboard — and the Western print run, arriving in the system’s final Western year, makes complete copies scarcer than its siblings’. None of that changes the game, but it explains why the bronze medallist sometimes costs like a champion. Play it however you can; own it however you must.
Newcomers, start here if the bigger fighters intimidate: First Contact’s speed teaches the pocket fighting grammar — ranges, taps and holds, desperation timing — faster than its siblings do, precisely because there is less of everything else to distract you. Master Terry here and the whole Pocket Fighting Series opens up; the skills transfer cartridge to cartridge like a saved game for your hands.
And spare a thought for its historical placement one last time: a 1999 handheld Fatal Fury, released the year the series reached its arcade peak, carrying Rick Strowd and Li Xiangfei when almost nothing else did. The bronze medal, polished by time into something that looks increasingly like gold.
What lingers, playing it today, is the confidence of the small decisions: the way a round starts almost before the announcement finishes, the way throws feel like events, the way Terry’s grin survives every shrink the format imposed. First Contact never tries to be the biggest game on the system. It tries to be the fastest honest one, and on that modest, perfect brief it has never been beaten — not even by its two bigger brothers, who needed their olympics and their customisation quests to do what this cartridge does with thirteen fighters and a starting bell.
Verdict
First Contact is the bronze medal in the finest podium handheld fighting ever produced, which makes it better than almost every other pocket fighter of its generation. Fast, faithful and full of South Town character, it earns its place in any NGPC library — third in line behind two masterpieces, and proud of the company.