I saw this first in a Nintendo Direct, though I think it was announced a bit before. It looked pretty interesting presentation-wise. The demo came out, it was pretty fun but a bit slow. I picked it up after playing SMTV because I figured I’d get a smaller, simpler RPG experience after the 50+ hour of difficult RPGing that was SMTV.

Also this is a Yoko Taro project, so I figured it might be somewhat interesting.

Let’s check it out!

Developer: A-lim
Publisher: Square Enix
Release date: October 28th 2021
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4 (Switch version played)
Genre: Console-style RPG

Review

I guess I gotta talk about the presentation because it’s the big thing with this one. This is a JRPG, but it’s presented as a tabletop RPG using cards… a LOT of cards… as well as just pretty simple math for damage calculation and dice for RNG (except crits, but it could be moved to crits). The game is played on a very large table, where you move a wooden piece around on top of cards. If you move next to a face-down card, it flips face-up. Outside of towns, each movement you make has a chance of starting a random combat encounter, at which point another small wooden board is place on top of the world map, and a different card game is played for battle. Overall the game looks great as it’s very strict about making everything cards, or boards, including menu options, story dialogue, NPCs (some cards are re-used in that case), the world itself is massive grids of cards that span multiple tables, and a few interesting things especially near the end. There’s also only one voice actor, who is basically the DM, as he tells you what the NPCs say or explains a few things, as well as sometimes commenting on something that happened in battle (like getting a crit or losing a character). The VA in english is pretty decent, I think he could be a bit more “intense”. As far as voice I prefer the japanese one a bit, but I chose english just to better understand what is being said. I can’t think of any games presented this way, it’s pretty interesting. If I have one issue with it, it would be that some things are a bit too slow, waiting for cards to flip and stuff.

On the story side, you paly as Ash, an adventurer, and his monster buddy Mar. You start in some castle, where the Queen declares she’ll give a high reward to whoever kills the dragon. So, guided by greed, you decide you’ll go on that quest. You’re pretty quickly join by Melanie, a mage who wants the dragon dead for non-reward reasons. You’re kinda constantly running into a group from the Ivory Order, a bunch of so-called good guys who do good charitable work and healing and provide medicine and stuff. And, honestly, that’s kinda the story. You’re a kinda rag-tag group of adventurers trying to find the dragon to kill it. There’s some revelations later, pretty good ones actually, but it’s still a pretty simple plot. Does the job pretty well.

If I have any story complaints, it would be the ending. There’s 4 endings, and which one you get is determined by a dialogue choice right after beating the final boss. See, as you play this game and help random NPCs, you get these Mystery Cards. There’s 10 of them. Normally there’s 3 ending choices. If you have all 10, it gives you an extra choice for an ending. This is… not telegraphed at all. So I assumed the extra choice was not actually an extra choice, and the way it’s written, I assumed it was a “worst ending” choice. It’s not. So I got a lame ending where nothing really… happens. It was a pretty dumb ending. I could fix this by just redoing the final boss and choosing the good choice, I guess. I don’t really wanna refight that final boss and see what the good ending is.

So gameplay! I already explained one of the basic mechanics, that being that moving on the overworld and in dungeons flips face-down cards to face-up when you get next to them. Moving on the overworld and dungeons has a few possibilities. You can land on an event (some in pre-determined locations, some random). Some events are gonna give you a piece of paper with a hint to where treasure is hidden (so you can try to find it), some may be enemy ambushes, or old women you can help, or travelling merchants… stuff like that. Some spaces are specific things, like rocks blocking your path, mountains blocking your path, towns to visit, dungeon entrances and the such. In towns, you have stores that sell different things (most important is the Armory, the other shops aren’t very important), game parlors (not sure if those are very useful, there’s cosmetic things you can unlock and the game that you play in it is complete luck garbage). And there’s NPCs. Some of them will give you story details, some of them will have mini-sidequests for you that will give you a Mystery Card… and the one you need to talk to for progress will always be shiny so… there you go, that’s how you progress. The Mystery Cards are optional but for a not-lame ending you should get them.

So now that we established that you progress through the game by talking to the flashing people in town and doing what they say to do, we have the most important part of any RPG to talk about: combat!

This uses a turn-based system. Turn order is determined by your speed stat (if there’s a tie it’s random). Characters and monsters all have 3 stats other than speed: Attack, Defense and HP. If you do a normal attack, damage will be roughly the attacker’s attack stat minus the target’s defense stat (with some minor variance, and of course there’s resistance and weaknesses to take into account), with a minimum of 1 damage. There’s a random chance attacks will crit. Every time one of your characters has a turn, a gem will be added to the gem box on the battle board. You can use these gems for some of your non-normal skills. Those can be healing, elemental attacks, AOE attacks, multiplied attacks (things like 2x or 3x or 4x attack), and status effect attacks (those require a high enough dice roll for the status effect to apply, and latter enemies tend to resist those anyways… also the game is generally unclear whether it’s gonna use D10s or D6s… a bit weird). These skills can take anywhere between 1 to 5 gems from what I’ve seen. You can also use items instead of attacking, which can heal or recover status effects.

You build your team kinda as you want from a choice of 5 different characters (by the end). Each has a weapon, armor and accessory equipment slot (there’s very few accessories to care about, and weapons are character-specific, and armor will fit one or two characters). There’s generally a best choice for equipment at every moment unless you REALLY like the speed boost a certain piece is giving you but… not a lot of actual choice when it comes to equipment unless you want to just be weaker. Each character has 4 slots for skills, you can choose whichever ones work with your strategy, or switch some around if you find that some don’t work too well. With 5 characters and at least 7 moves each, you can build a pretty decent variety of teams. When you level up, this will increase some of your stats, sometimes all of them, by 1 or 2 points (I think HP can do a bit more). Sometimes they’ll learn new skills, and sometimes they’ll learn new abilities (which are still called skills which is a bit misleading). Abilities are passive skills that are always equipped, usually things like elemental resistance or some forms of healing. It’s pretty standard stuff, but it works real well.

Difficulty isn’t very high for most of the game. It starts a bit tricky, almost instantly becomes so easy you can’t possibly lose for basically 5 chapters. Then Chapter 6 decides the game was too easy and starts putting up enemies against you that have a small chance of dealing damage to you, finally. Sometimes they might even kill one of your characters. But overall the game is pretty simple, and by the end you kinda develop a strategy for pretty easy wins. The only really tough part of the game is the second final boss form, and even that was… pretty easy. It looked cool though.

Overall

The presentation is really cool, even in english the voice acting from the one dude is pretty good, the combat system is simple but pretty solid. It’s a pretty unique game in presentation, but the gameplay is pretty standard. It’s pretty fun stuff, and doesn’t take too long to beat. Not really anything to complain about overall, it is a bit slow but it’s short enough that I don’t mind too much.

Not really much else to say on this one, it’s interesting, but nothing you haven’t played before, despite the very unique presentation.

I’d give this a recommendation, maybe at a discount.