There’s a particular kind of melancholy that attaches itself to commercial failure in video games. Not the spectacular flameouts β the Virtual Boys and N-Gages of the world, which fail so loudly and absurdly that they become legends in their own right β but the quieter ones. The handhelds that arrived with genuine ambition, sound engineering, and a small but devoted library, only to be steamrolled by Nintendo’s marketing machine and PokΓ©mon-fuelled juggernaut. The Neo Geo Pocket Color and the WonderSwan Crystal are the two finest examples of this melancholic category, and a quarter of a century after their release, they remain the great “what ifs” of portable gaming.
I’ve been carrying both of these machines around in my bag for the past six weeks, switching between them on train journeys, in cafes, late at night when sleep refused to come. I’ve replayed games I haven’t touched in two decades and discovered titles I never managed to track down at the time. I’ve prodded at their build quality with fingers that have spent fifteen years prodding at other people’s failed hardware. And I’ve come to some conclusions that might surprise you β particularly if, like me, you spent the late nineties and early noughties evangelising for one of these machines while dismissing the other.
Because here’s the thing: in 1999, the choice between the Neo Geo Pocket Color and the WonderSwan seemed obvious to anyone paying attention. One had SNK’s stable of fighting game royalty and a beautiful clicky microswitch stick. The other was a Bandai oddity locked to Japan, riddled with anaemic monochrome graphics, and seemingly designed by a committee that couldn’t agree on which way up you should hold it. Twenty-five years later, that calculus is messier than you might expect.
The Twilight of the Third Way
To understand why these two machines exist at all, you have to remember what 1999 actually felt like. The Game Boy Color had launched in late 1998 in the West, a refresh of an eight-year-old architecture that Nintendo had milked with such ruthless efficiency that “Game Boy” was effectively a synonym for “handheld”. PokΓ©mon Red and Blue had detonated like a cultural neutron bomb the previous year. Nintendo’s grip on portable gaming was so total that even Sega, who’d put up a credible fight in the early nineties with the Game Gear, had effectively waved a white flag.
Into this hostile climate, two Japanese companies decided β apparently independently, though the timing is suspicious β to roll the dice. SNK, riding high on its arcade pedigree but already showing the financial cracks that would lead to its 2001 bankruptcy, launched the original monochrome Neo Geo Pocket in Japan in October 1998. Bandai, fresh from the Tamagotchi gold rush, launched the WonderSwan in Japan in March 1999. Both companies recognised that fighting Nintendo on Nintendo’s terms was suicidal, and both tried to find a third way.
SNK’s Arcade Gambit
SNK’s pitch was straightforward and aimed squarely at the kind of teenager who’d spent too much pocket money on King of Fighters cabinets: we’ll give you arcade fighters in your pocket, with a proper joystick. The original monochrome Pocket sold poorly, and SNK pivoted with breathtaking speed, releasing the Neo Geo Pocket Color in Japan in March 1999 and globally later that year. In the UK, it landed in autumn 1999 at Β£69.99, undercutting the Game Boy Color by a tenner and arriving with a launch library that included SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash, King of Fighters R-2, and the inimitable Sonic the Hedgehog: Pocket Adventure.
Bandai’s Yokoi Connection
The WonderSwan’s origin story is more poignant. The system was designed by Gunpei Yokoi’s company Koto Laboratory β the same Gunpei Yokoi who invented the Game Boy itself before being unceremoniously sidelined at Nintendo following the Virtual Boy debacle. Yokoi died in a car accident in October 1997, before the WonderSwan launched, and the machine became his posthumous statement: a return to first principles, optimised for battery life and affordability above all else. The original monochrome WonderSwan launched in Japan in March 1999 at Β₯4,800 β roughly half the price of a Game Boy Color β and used a single AA battery that lasted absurdly long. Bandai released the WonderSwan Color in December 2000, and the upgraded WonderSwan Crystal β the model we’re concerned with here β in July 2002, with a vastly improved TFT display that finally fixed the original’s smeary, ghost-ridden screen.
Crucially, the WonderSwan never officially left Japan. Where the Neo Geo Pocket Color had a brief, doomed Western release, the WonderSwan family was Japan-only across its entire lifespan, supported by a Bandai library heavy with Gundam, Digimon, and β most consequentially β a string of Final Fantasy ports that Square exclusively licensed to the platform between 2000 and 2002.
Build Quality: The Joy of Holding Failure
Before we get into the silicon, we need to talk about what these things feel like in your hands, because both machines have radically different physical philosophies and both, in their own way, are small masterpieces of industrial design.
The Neo Geo Pocket Color: Built to Be Beaten
The Neo Geo Pocket Color, particularly the slim “Anthracite” model I’ve been using, has a substance to it that feels almost confrontational compared to modern handhelds. The plastics are thick, slightly textured, and resistant to scuffing in a way that suggests the designers expected this thing to be thrown into rucksacks, dropped onto pavements, and generally abused. Mine is a refurbished unit I bought from a dealer in Osaka for around Β£120 in 2022, and aside from some minor yellowing on the white plastic around the screen bezel, it could pass for new.
The headline feature, of course, is the clicky stick. SNK’s eight-direction microswitch joystick is one of the great pieces of handheld engineering, full stop. It clicks with a satisfying mechanical precision that no D-pad can match, and crucially, it makes the system genuinely viable for fighting games in a way that no other handheld of the era β and arguably no handheld since, until the Analogue Pocket’s add-ons β has matched. The two face buttons (A and B) are large, responsive, and laid out at a slight angle that fits the thumb naturally. There is no shoulder button. There is no second analogue input. The minimalism is the point.
The original “fat” Neo Geo Pocket Color is more ergonomic but bulkier; the slim version is pocketable but a touch cramped during long fighting game sessions. Either way, the build quality is genuinely excellent β better than the Game Boy Color it competed with, in my view, and not far off the legendary tank-like construction of the original DMG.
The WonderSwan Crystal: The Featherweight Champion
The WonderSwan Crystal, by contrast, is a study in restraint. It weighs about 95 grams with a battery in it β less than half what a modern smartphone weighs β and feels almost suspiciously light when you first pick it up. The plastics are thinner than the NGPC’s, but they’re not flimsy; they’re just optimised for weight rather than impact resistance. The translucent shell variants (the Crystal Blue and Crystal Black models are particularly handsome) show off the green PCB inside in a way that feels gloriously turn-of-the-century, like a piece of iMac G3 industrial design that wandered into the handheld aisle.
The control layout is the WonderSwan’s most controversial feature and the source of its greatest peculiarity. There are two D-pads. Yes, two. The left side has a standard four-direction pad, and beneath it, a second four-direction pad oriented as a diamond. The idea was that you could rotate the system 90 degrees to play vertically-oriented games (of which there are a surprising number, including the entire Final Fantasy line) without losing access to a directional input. It’s an elegant solution to a problem nobody else thought needed solving, and it works better than it has any right to.
The face buttons are small and a bit mushy compared to the NGPC’s. The Start button is awkwardly placed dead centre, requiring a thumb reach that breaks the flow. And there’s a single “Sound” button on the front, which is exactly what it sounds like β a hardware mute. This is the kind of thoughtful, slightly bonkers design touch that pervades the WonderSwan. It feels like a machine designed by engineers who actually used handhelds on trains.
The Display Question: Where the Years Show
This is where the comparison gets brutal, because handheld displays from 1999-2002 have not aged kindly, and the gulf between these two machines on this front is significant.
NGPC: Reflective But Readable
The Neo Geo Pocket Color uses a 2.6-inch reflective TFT LCD running at 160×152 pixels with a 4,096-colour palette (146 colours on-screen simultaneously). It is, like the Game Boy Color screen it competed with, completely unlit. You need an external light source, and the brighter the better. In direct sunlight, it’s beautiful β colours pop, the pixel structure is sharp, and the response time is good enough that fighting games don’t suffer from motion blur. Under a desk lamp, it’s perfectly readable. In a dim living room at 11pm, you’re squinting and tilting the screen around looking for the sweet spot.
The colour reproduction is notably more muted than the Game Boy Color. SNK’s artists clearly knew this and designed around it, using bold flat-shaded sprites with strong outlines that read clearly even in marginal lighting. The aesthetic β somewhere between Neo Geo arcade pixel art and the simplified colour palette of an early-90s 16-bit game β is genuinely lovely and has dated better than most contemporary handheld art styles.
WonderSwan Crystal: The TFT Revolution
The WonderSwan Crystal, released three years after the NGPC, benefits enormously from being a later-generation machine. The Crystal upgrade specifically replaced the WonderSwan Color’s frankly awful FSTN passive-matrix display with a proper TFT panel, and the difference is night and day. The Crystal’s 2.8-inch screen runs at 224×144 pixels and supports 4,096 colours from a 32,768-colour palette, with 241 colours on-screen at once.
The TFT panel is sharp, fast, and β critically β has wide viewing angles that the NGPC simply can’t match. Side-by-side, playing Final Fantasy IV on the Crystal and Card Fighters’ Clash on the NGPC under the same desk lamp, the Crystal is unambiguously the better viewing experience. The colours are more vibrant, the contrast is higher, and the screen doesn’t require the constant micro-adjustments that the NGPC demands.
It’s still reflective, mind. Neither of these machines is backlit, and both will benefit enormously if you decide to go down the IPS modding route (more on that later). But of the two stock experiences, the Crystal’s screen is the clear winner β and given that the WonderSwan family’s biggest knock at launch was always its terrible original display, this feels like a hard-won victory.
Performance and Internals: David vs. Slightly Smaller David
Both machines are built around 16-bit-class architectures, which gave them a meaningful theoretical advantage over the 8-bit Game Boy Color. In practice, what matters isn’t the raw spec sheet but what developers actually managed to extract.
NGPC: The Toshiba TLCS-900H
The Neo Geo Pocket Color runs on a Toshiba TLCS-900H CPU clocked at 6.144MHz, paired with a Z80 co-processor at 3.072MHz dedicated to sound. RAM is split between 12KB of work RAM and 4KB of sound RAM. The graphics hardware supports two scrolling tile layers and 64 sprites. Audio is handled by a four-channel SN76489-compatible PSG chip plus a DAC for samples, producing a sound profile that’s recognisably SNK β bright, punchy, and slightly chiptuney without ever being grating.
What this means in practice is that the NGPC is excellent at sprite-based 2D games with tight gameplay and limited scrolling. Fighting games run beautifully; SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium is genuinely one of the best portable fighters ever made, with smooth animation and zero slowdown. RPGs and card games, like the magnificent Card Fighters’ Clash series, run flawlessly. Where the system struggles is with complex 3D effects, parallax scrolling beyond two layers, or anything CPU-intensive β but virtually no developer pushed those boundaries, so the limitation rarely shows.
WonderSwan Crystal: The NEC V30 MZ
The WonderSwan Crystal uses a NEC V30 MZ CPU at 3.072MHz β a 16-bit chip closely related to the Intel 8086 architecture, which is to say, the same general family that ran early IBM PCs. This is a deeply weird and consequential choice. It made porting from old DOS games and certain Japanese PC titles relatively painless, and Square took full advantage when porting Final Fantasy I and II to the platform. The system has 64KB of work RAM (vastly more than the NGPC), supports three tile layers, 128 sprites, and a four-channel sound chip with one channel dedicated to PCM samples.
The extra RAM and the more PC-like architecture made the WonderSwan a more flexible development platform, particularly for RPGs and adventure games with large amounts of text and detailed environments. Final Fantasy IV on WonderSwan Color (also playable on Crystal) is a genuinely beautiful port, with enhanced sprite work and re-orchestrated music that arguably surpasses the SNES original. The clock speed is lower than the NGPC, but the wider data bus and larger memory pool more than compensate for most game types.
Where the WonderSwan struggles is with the kind of arcade-precise action that the NGPC excels at. Sprite flicker is more common in busy scenes, and the lower clock speed shows in the few action games on the system. But for RPGs, strategy titles, and puzzle games β which constitute the vast majority of its library β the WonderSwan punches well above its weight.
Battery Life: The Gunpei Yokoi Doctrine
If there’s one area where both machines absolutely destroy modern handhelds β and indeed embarrass the Game Boy Color they were competing with β it’s battery life. This was a deliberate design philosophy in both cases, and it’s one of the great pleasures of returning to these machines in 2024.
NGPC Endurance Testing
The Neo Geo Pocket Color runs on two AA batteries and claims around 40 hours of battery life. In my testing β six weeks of regular use on a single set of decent alkalines β I got approximately 35-38 hours of mixed gameplay before the low-battery indicator started flashing. That’s astonishing by any standard. Using Eneloop rechargeables (which I’d recommend), you get slightly less due to the lower voltage, but still comfortably north of 25 hours.
There’s also a separate CR2032 coin cell that powers the internal clock and a small amount of persistent memory, used by certain games for time-based events. This will need replacing every five to seven years if you’re using the system regularly; mine had a dead one when I bought it, and replacing it took about ten minutes with a tri-wing screwdriver.
WonderSwan Crystal: The Single AA Miracle
And then there’s the WonderSwan Crystal, which runs on a single AA battery and claims 20 hours of life. This is the Yokoi philosophy in its purest form β minimise power draw, maximise convenience. In practice, I’m getting roughly 18-22 hours per battery on alkalines, which means a single Tesco-brand AA from the corner shop will get you through a long flight, a weekend away, or several weeks of commuting.
The original monochrome WonderSwan actually managed around 30 hours on a single AA, but the Crystal’s TFT backlight… wait, no, it isn’t backlit either. The Crystal’s TFT does draw more power than the original’s STN panel, hence the reduced endurance. But “reduced” here means “still better than basically anything made in the last twenty years”. I’ve used the same battery for fourteen hours of Final Fantasy IV over the course of three weeks and it’s still going.
If you’re choosing between these two purely on battery life, the WonderSwan wins on convenience (one battery, easy to swap, fits in any pocket) but the NGPC wins on raw hours. Both are leagues ahead of anything modern.
The Libraries: Where Personal Taste Becomes Destiny
This is where the comparison stops being about hardware and starts being about what kind of player you are. The two libraries barely overlap, and your personal preferences here will likely determine which system you fall in love with.
NGPC Highlights: Arcade in Your Pocket
The Neo Geo Pocket Color’s library is small β around 80 games total β but the hit rate is extraordinary. Almost every release is either a fighting game, a sports game, or a puzzle/card game, and most are good to great.
- SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium (1999) β Still one of the finest portable fighting games ever made. The roster is enormous, the controls are sublime thanks to the clicky stick, and the Olympic-style minigame mode is a genuine delight.
- SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash (1999) β A criminally underrated collectible card game with proper deckbuilding, a charming overworld, and two versions (SNK and Capcom) with different card pools. Trading required two NGPCs and a link cable, which makes finding willing partners in 2024 a nostalgic challenge.
- The Last Blade: Beyond the Destiny (2000) β A masterful port of the arcade game, with story modes for each character and surprisingly deep mechanics.
- Sonic the Hedgehog: Pocket Adventure (1999) β Yes, a Sonic game on an SNK machine. It’s effectively a greatest-hits remix of Sonic 2 with new levels, developed by Dimps, and it’s excellent.
- Metal Slug: 1st Mission and 2nd Mission β Original handheld entries in the Metal Slug series, not arcade ports, and they’re surprisingly substantial run-and-gun adventures.
- Big Bang Pro Wrestling (2000) β A bizarre and brilliant wrestling sim with deep grappling mechanics.
- Cotton (1999) and Puzzle Bobble Mini β Solid arcade conversions that show the hardware’s strengths.
What you don’t get is much in the way of RPGs, adventure games, or long-form experiences. The NGPC’s library is built for bus journeys and lunch breaks β pick up, play a round, put down. That’s its strength and its limitation.
WonderSwan Highlights: The Japanese RPG Trove
The WonderSwan library is much larger β around 200 games across the family, with the Crystal able to play Color and original monochrome titles via backward compatibility β and skewed dramatically toward Japanese-language RPGs and adventure games. This is the platform’s blessing and its curse for Western players.
- Final Fantasy I, II, and IV (WonderSwan Color, 2000-2002) β Square’s exclusive deals with Bandai produced these gorgeous, expanded ports. Final Fantasy IV in particular is a stunning piece of work, with the kind of pixel-art reverence that fans still talk about today. All three are Japanese-only, but the gameplay translates well enough that Western RPG fans can muddle through with a guide.
- Romancing SaGa (2001) β A WonderSwan exclusive port of the SNES original, again Japanese-only.
- Hunter X Hunter, Digimon, Gundam licensed games β The WonderSwan was Bandai’s house platform, and the anime/manga tie-ins are unusually high quality. Gundam Vol. 1 in particular is a stunning vertical-orientation strategy game.
- Riviera: The Promised Land (2002) β Sting’s gorgeous dungeon-crawler RPG, which later got ported to GBA and PSP but originated here. The WonderSwan version has the best music.
- Klonoa: Moonlight Museum (1999) β A genuine charmer of a platformer that uses the vertical orientation beautifully.
- Judgement Silversword (2004) β A vertical-scrolling shooter released by Qute through Bandai’s official WonderWitch development kit. It’s one of the best shoot ’em ups on any handheld, period.
- Rockman & Forte: Mirai Kara no ChΕsensha (2002) β A WonderSwan-exclusive Mega Man game, never released outside Japan.
The library’s Japan-only status is a real obstacle. There’s a thriving fan-translation scene that has covered many of the major RPGs, but you’ll need to use a flash cart (the WonderWitch or modern alternatives like the WonderMagic) to play them. For monolingual English speakers, this is the WonderSwan’s biggest barrier to entry, and there’s no way around it.
The Verdict on Libraries
If you want to sit down and play your handheld in English with no faff, the NGPC wins by default β almost the entire library was released in English, and the games are designed for short sessions. If you’re willing to engage with fan translations, flash carts, and the occasional FAQ on GameFAQs, the WonderSwan library is deeper, more varied, and contains some of the finest RPGs ever made on a handheld. It’s a question of effort, not quality.
The Software Experience: Menus, BIOS, and Quirks
Both machines have surprisingly thoughtful built-in software, and both have quirks that reveal a lot about their designers’ priorities.
NGPC: The Personalised Pocket
The NGPC’s built-in BIOS includes a setup utility that lets you set your name, birthday, blood type (this is Japan, after all), favourite genres, and language. This information is then used by certain games to personalise the experience β SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium, for instance, will wish you a happy birthday and recommend characters based on your stated preferences. It’s a small touch but a deeply charming one, and it makes the system feel like yours in a way that no Game Boy ever did.
The horoscope app and the calendar are similarly delightful pieces of unnecessary software. Power on the NGPC without a cart and you can browse a daily horoscope based on the date and your stated birthday. It’s the kind of frivolous, joyful design touch that has largely vanished from modern hardware.
WonderSwan: The Spartan Approach
The WonderSwan’s built-in software is much more limited β essentially just a setup screen for the clock and language, and a memory management tool for save files. The Crystal does add a few more options compared to the original, but it’s fundamentally a no-nonsense affair. Bandai’s philosophy was clearly that the games should provide the personality, not the OS.
The WonderSwan’s clock function is genuinely useful, though, because a number of games β including Final Fantasy ports β use the internal clock for time-of-day events and certain bonuses. The CR2025 coin cell that maintains the clock will eventually die (mine lasted about eight years) and replacing it is a straightforward but mildly fiddly job.
Accessories and the Modding Scene
Both systems have surprisingly active modding communities in 2024, and the options have expanded significantly over the last five years.
NGPC: Backlights and Beyond
The NGPC modding scene has exploded since around 2020, driven by the availability of high-quality IPS replacement screens. A backlit NGPC is, frankly, a transformative experience β the reflective LCD’s main weakness is finally addressed, and the colour reproduction becomes genuinely vibrant. Kits from suppliers like RetroSix or Hand-Held Legend run around Β£80-Β£120 installed, and they’re worth every penny if you plan to use the system regularly.
Other popular mods include USB-C charging (for use with rechargeable batteries), composite video output (more involved, requires significant board work), and shell replacements in non-original colours. The community is small but committed, and parts availability is reasonable.
Flash carts are the other key purchase. The Neo Geo Pocket Flash Masta from Flashmasta is the gold standard, retailing around Β£100, and it lets you load the entire ROM library onto a single SD card. Given how rare and expensive original NGPC carts have become (a complete Card Fighters’ Clash 2 can easily fetch Β£400), the flash cart is essential for any serious collector.
WonderSwan: WonderWitch and Modern Alternatives
The WonderSwan has a more storied modding history, dating back to the official WonderWitch development kit that Bandai released in 2000 β yes, an officially-supported homebrew kit, released by a major Japanese publisher, in 2000. This is part of why the WonderSwan has a homebrew library that puts most contemporary handhelds to shame, including titles like Judgement Silversword and Cardinal Sins.
For modern users, flash carts like the WonderMagic Color and various open-source alternatives are available, though they’re harder to find than NGPC flash carts. Expect to pay Β£150-Β£200 for a reliable solution. IPS screen mods exist but are less mature than the NGPC equivalents β the WonderSwan Crystal’s stock TFT is actually decent enough that many users don’t bother.
The other essential WonderSwan accessory is the official headphone adapter, because β and this is one of the system’s true design crimes β there is no 3.5mm headphone jack. None. Bandai’s reasoning was apparently cost-cutting, but the result is that you need a proprietary adapter that plugs into the link port to use headphones, and these adapters are now rare and expensive. The original WonderSwan Pocket Challenge V2 had a built-in jack, but the standard WonderSwan family does not. Genuine ergonomic failure here.
The Collector’s Perspective: Prices, Rarity, and Practicality
If you’re reading this and thinking about buying one of these systems in 2024, the market has changed dramatically over the last five years, and you should go in with realistic expectations.
NGPC Market in 2024
A good condition slim Neo Geo Pocket Color (the more desirable model) will run you Β£150-Β£250 depending on colour and condition. The Anthracite black and Stone Blue are the most common; rarer colours like the Crystal White or the Aqua Blue carry significant premiums. Boxed systems in good condition routinely hit Β£350+.
Games are where it gets painful. Common titles like King of Fighters R-2 can be had for Β£20-Β£30 loose, but desirable ones are scarce. SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash 2 regularly sells for Β£300-Β£500 loose and Β£600+ complete. Faselei!, the obscure strategy game, can fetch Β£200+. Biomotor Unitron sits around Β£80-Β£150. The total library is small enough that completionists exist, but expect to spend Β£5,000-Β£8,000+ on a complete English library in decent condition.
WonderSwan Market in 2024
WonderSwan Crystals are surprisingly affordable. Expect to pay Β£80-Β£150 for a good condition unit, with the rarer translucent colours (Crystal Blue, Crystal Pink) at the higher end. The Final Fantasy bundles β special edition Crystals released alongside the FF ports β carry premiums of Β£200-Β£300.
Games are mostly cheap. The vast majority of the WonderSwan library can be found for Β₯500-Β₯2000 (Β£3-Β£12) loose in Japan, and even shipped to the UK most titles come in under Β£20. The exceptions are limited runs and homebrew titles β Judgement Silversword (a homebrew release from 2004) regularly sells for Β£400-Β£600 due to its tiny print run. Final Fantasy IV WonderSwan Color is around Β£30-Β£40 loose, which is remarkable value for a port of that quality.
For Western buyers, the WonderSwan is dramatically more affordable to collect for than the NGPC, with the major caveat that you’ll be playing Japanese games. If you can read kana, or you’re willing to lean on fan translations via a flash cart, the value proposition is unbeatable.
Living With Both: Six Weeks of Daily Use
Specifications and market analysis only get you so far. The real test of a handheld is how it feels to use day after day, and after six weeks of switching between the two on the morning commute, several truths have emerged that I didn’t expect.
The NGPC’s Pleasure Principle
The Neo Geo Pocket Color is a machine you reach for when you have twenty minutes and want to feel something. The stick clicks, the sprites animate beautifully, and Card Fighters’ Clash delivers a perfect little hit of strategic dopamine every time. The build quality means you can throw it in your bag without ceremony. The games are designed for short sessions. The English language support is total. This is the handheld I’d recommend to someone who’d never owned one before.
But β and this is a real but β the lack of long-form games does become a limitation. After a couple of weeks I’d hit the natural end of Card Fighters’ story mode, finished Sonic Pocket Adventure, and worked through Match of the Millennium‘s arcade ladder with most characters. The NGPC is a perfect appetiser machine, but it rarely serves a main course.
The WonderSwan’s Slow Burn
The WonderSwan Crystal is the opposite β a machine for the long haul. Final Fantasy IV took me 28 hours, spread across about three weeks. Riviera is good for 30+ hours. The vertical-orientation strategy games like Gundam Vol. 1 reveal new depths the longer you play. The lighter weight and single-AA battery make it the more practical commuter machine, particularly for longer journeys.
But the language barrier is real, and so is the lack of a headphone jack (which is an actual deal-breaker for me on the Tube). The control layout, while clever, never quite becomes second nature in the way the NGPC’s does. And the smaller, mushier face buttons are tiring after long sessions in ways the NGPC’s aren’t.
So Which One Aged Better?
This is the question we came here to answer, and after six weeks of testing, several thousand words of analysis, and more than a little internal soul-searching, my answer is genuinely surprising to me. Because I came into this comparison expecting the Neo Geo Pocket Color to walk away with it β it has the better controls, the English-language library, the cult of arcade prestige, and the recent surge of nostalgic re-appreciation that’s seen its games re-released on Switch and PlayStation.
And in many ways, it does win. The NGPC is the more accessible machine, the more pleasurable to hold, the more obviously skilled piece of industrial design. If you’re buying one handheld and you want to play it without any friction, you should buy the Neo Geo Pocket Color slim. It’s not even close.
But “aged better” isn’t quite the same as “easier to recommend”. The NGPC’s library, brilliant as its hit rate is, feels frozen in 1999 β these are arcade-adjacent games designed for a specific kind of pre-smartphone short-session play that the modern world has largely subsumed into mobile gaming. The WonderSwan’s library, by contrast, contains some of the deepest, most rewarding handheld experiences ever produced. Final Fantasy IV on Crystal hardware is not a curio; it’s a genuinely great way to experience one of the most important RPGs ever made. Romancing SaGa on WonderSwan is the canonical version of that game. Riviera on WonderSwan is, arguably, the definitive release.
Those experiences have aged into something more substantial than the NGPC’s brilliant-but-bite-sized library. They’re games you’d choose to play in 2024 not just for nostalgic reasons but because they’re genuinely worth your time. The Neo Geo Pocket Color is a beautifully preserved museum piece; the WonderSwan Crystal, despite all its rough edges and language barriers, is a living machine with a library that still rewards serious engagement.
So my answer, with all caveats firmly in place: the WonderSwan Crystal has aged better. Just. By a hair. And only if you’re willing to engage with what it asks of you.
Practical Recommendations
If you have Β£300 to spend on one handheld
Buy a slim Neo Geo Pocket Color in Anthracite or Stone Blue, an IPS screen mod, and a Flash Masta. You’ll spend roughly Β£280-Β£320 and have a near-perfect retro handheld experience with the entire library available. Start with SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium, move to Card Fighters’ Clash, then explore.
If you have Β£200 and a willingness to read fan translation patches
Buy a WonderSwan Crystal in any colour, a modern flash cart, and download the fan-translated ROMs of the Final Fantasy ports, Riviera, and Romancing SaGa. You’ll spend roughly Β£180-Β£220 and have access to a library that includes some of the finest portable RPGs ever made. Sourcing the headphone adapter or accepting speaker-only play is part of the deal.
If you have Β£500 and want both
Get the NGPC for short sessions and the WonderSwan for long ones. They’re complementary machines that cover the entire spectrum of handheld gaming between them, and switching between the two has genuinely been one of the most pleasurable retro gaming experiences I’ve had in years.
The Forgotten Lessons of 1999
What strikes me most, after weeks with these machines, is how much the modern handheld market has forgotten what they got right. Battery life measured in dozens of hours, not single-digit hours. Build quality that survives genuine abuse. Software that boots in under a second and never asks for a system update. Games that are designed to be picked up, played, and put down β or, in the WonderSwan’s case, played for thirty hours of slow-burn RPG immersion. No microtransactions. No always-online requirements. No firmware that bricks itself in five years.
The Switch and the Steam Deck are technical marvels, and the Analogue Pocket is a love letter to handheld history. But neither of these 1999 underdogs feels like a relic in the way you might expect them to. They feel like roads not taken β proof that the handheld design space was richer and more varied before Nintendo’s gravitational pull flattened everything into iteration on the Game Boy template.
SNK went bankrupt in 2001 and the Neo Geo Pocket Color died with it. Bandai discontinued the WonderSwan in 2003 after a merger with Namco. Both companies have since recovered and thrived, and neither has ever returned to making dedicated handheld hardware. We’re unlikely to ever see anything quite like these machines again β small, weird, deliberate hardware made by Japanese companies with strong design points of view and a tolerance for commercial failure.
That’s the real reason both machines have aged better than they had any right to. They were never trying to win the handheld wars. They were trying to make something specific, for a specific kind of player, in a market that already had a clear winner. And twenty-five years later, that specificity β that confident, slightly stubborn refusal to compete on Nintendo’s terms β is exactly what makes them worth revisiting.
The Verdict
Neo Geo Pocket Color: 8/10
A beautifully built, perfectly conceived arcade machine in your pocket, with a small but exceptional library and the finest joystick ever fitted to a handheld. Held back only by a library that’s narrow in scope and a screen that demands good lighting. Easy to recommend, easy to love, slightly difficult to play for long sessions in 2024 without modern modifications.
WonderSwan Crystal: 8/10
A more peculiar, more demanding, but ultimately deeper machine, with a library that contains some of the greatest portable RPGs ever produced and the best display of any pre-DS handheld. Held back by Japanese-only software, the bizarre lack of a headphone jack, and a control scheme that requires commitment to master. For the patient and the curious, an underrated masterpiece.
They tied. Of course they did. That’s what makes the comparison interesting, and that’s what makes both machines worth your time and money in 2024. Buy one, buy the other, buy both. Just don’t pretend Nintendo was the only game in town in 1999 β because the people who knew, knew. And the rest of us, twenty-five years late, are finally catching up.