One of the selling points of SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy is the customization. This is not only a game where you have a few different outfits for the women to wear. After playing enough to earn some cash, you can head to the Customize menu to purchase and equip costumes, accessories, voice styles, poses, expressions, backgrounds, frames, and stickers. That’s when other opportunities open up. A lot of them are pretty cool! There are quite a few ways to outfit a character! But, it can also feel like the game is missing options we have seen in other games that less us dress heroines up, like Senran Kagura.
To start, there are quite a few areas of each heroine’s outfit that can be customized. You can put on head, face, face paint, back, hip, hand, and leg accessories, for example. Most of these areas have a nice assortment of features, though there are very few back and hip accessories at launch. You can also choose which outfit to start out with each heroine. But, just like the back and hip accessories, the choices are limited. The is the base outfit each woman comes with, which was “picked out” by Kukri. The second costume is the standard outfit a heroine normally wears in a fighting game. The third is another original outfit. When you get an outfit together that you like, you can save up to three of them to slots and use these custom outfits in an actual battle.
Only having three outfits is limiting. SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy is not like a Senran Kagura game, where the base game comes with a ton of outfit and accessory options right away to choose from. When I headed into this game’s customization section for the first time, I felt like I was looking at a closet filled with placeholders for eventual DLC. Which is a shame, because some of the outfits included are really great! Mai has one that makes her look like a goddess that is rather detailed. Kula has the most adorable figure skater dress. Love’s cowboy costume is incredible. Athena has an incredibly nostalgic Princess Athena outfit that is identical to the one worn by her ancestor in Athena.
That’s not the only limitation. SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy is a game where you are constantly pairing characters up. Except when you get to the Customization section’s Viewer, you are limited to one character. I mean, we do get a lot of options for that character, which is great! It is awesome to be able to get detailed, make sure the pose and positioning is right, and have everything arranged the way you want. But, you can’t have your favorite tag team on screen together. If you are quick with the share button, you might be able to get a text-free image of the two together after winning a match in their custom outfits, but you can not control the poses or backgrounds in those situations.
One of the nicer options is an ability to create your own avatar in the game. In the viewer section, you can go ahead and take your favorite heroine and commemorate your love for her with a brief picture of her. There’s a good degree of control here, and I feel like it is probably one of the better uses of the Customization function. Especially since the Viewer mode is not the sort of Photo Mode you find in something like Shadow of the Colossus or Spider-Man. You do not have filters available or editing options. Everything is rather basic, though in a way it can call back to the Purikura trend.
There are positives and negatives to SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy’s customization options. The game gives you a decent number of slots for each of your custom character designs and pictures. Purchasing a full outfit gives you accessories connected to it. It is very easy to earn the in-game money for the items too. But, there really aren’t that many costume options for each character. Also, when it comes to taking a picture, you can only have one of the heroines in the shot. There were some smart decisions here, in terms of how many items you can equip, details like being able to choose where their eyes are looking, and option to make an avatar. But, it would have been nice if the customization options were more robust.
SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy is available for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.
