GamerEscape

Inti Creates and I have a complicated relationship as a studio. I’ve mentioned before that the studio can do a lot with a little or a little with a lot, which gives you some idea of how wildly it feels the overall output can swing from one end to the other. They’ve made games I really like and games I didn’t, and they also seem bound and determined to continue the legacy of classic sprite-based games from the 8-bit era up through the 32-bit-handheld era. They’re like the A24 of video game nostalgia, I guess.

Being as I am in exactly the target demographic for this particular dose of nostalgia, I find myself in the crosshairs of a lot of their work. So it goes when I wound up reviewing Card-en-Ciel, which advertises itself as a JRPG roguelite deckbuilder that’s actually also a stealth homage to Mega Man: Battle Network but also not. So does it come together or not? Well… that’s what there’s a review for, after all.

All According To Cardkaku

In Card-en-Ciel, you play as Neon, a 40-year-old’s idea of what a 20-year-old thinks a cool guy looks like. He calls himself the “Gaming Chair Detective” (and if you’re thinking of that bit from the Clerks cartoon wherein Randall proclaims himself to be “Sexy Randall the Pharaoh Wizard,” you are old and also I was thinking the same thing) and his whole thing is that he solves mysteries related to fully immersive VR games via hacking the mainframe. Anyway, he gets sent a random email by a woman named Ancie about something going wrong in a new game, he goes and fixes the problem because he’s such a cool guy he can hack the dungeon, and something something now you have to do a bunch of dungeon crawling.

Now… in fairness, the plot does not pretend it is particularly deep. It gleefully is reveling in stereotypes, because the whole conceit is that the cards you are building your decks out of and the dungeons you are exploring represent several different long-running game franchises. That’s fine in concept, but… the problem is that these aren’t actual beloved game franchises. Which means that all of them are actually hammered down to the most generic possible elements of familiar ideas of game franchises.

In other words, imagine if Ready Player One had to make do with bland knockoffs based on what the author thought were the important parts of these media franchises.

Now imagine that these thin caricatures are speaking voice lines at you constantly, and if you feel a deep cringe within the most human parts of your soul, I can empathize with you. A generic maid character in my deck constantly saying that she’ll do anything for me, her master. Random anime protagonists talking about the burning justice in their soul. Some random member from a harem game or something talking about boys. It’s… well, yeah. It’s cringe. It’s a made-up selection of characters from nonexistent games that keep acting like I’m supposed to know who these characters are and I kind of hate all of them.

And some of the more powerful cards are female characters who get idol songs (in Japanese) and full idol cutscenes which is just… yeah. No. I am not a fan of this. I am not a fan of many, many choices of presentation here.

I’ll Never Cardgive You!

The things I am not a fan of have to be covered in more depth here, because they include so much about the graphics. The individual sprite work can look decent, but most of the sprites have few to no animations. Static art for the cards is okay. But those idol intros are barely-animated sequences at best and barely-animated cheesecake at worst.

What makes things even worse is that the dungeons, despite supposedly being set in all of these different game worlds, are made up of the same bland tileset every time. It’s downright ugly. Same background, same tiles, and no sense that you’re facing enemies from this game world or anything. The game’s interface is functional but equally ugly, and about the nicest thing I can say for it is that it least has a nice rainbow color scheme to keep some visual interest.

The music is bland when it isn’t grating, and the idol songs that can pop in when you fulfill certain conditions are absolutely grating. This is not a genre of music I particularly care for in the first place, but it coming out of nowhere feels completely… well, out of nowhere. It doesn’t mesh with anything else, like people just composed a bunch of different tracks and never asked if they would flow together in anything approaching a cohesive whole. And the non-vocal tracks aren’t much better.

I Want Sempai To Card Me

You want to know what the worst thing is about Card-en-Ciel? The graphics aren’t very good, the music isn’t good, the plot is a joke, the random character interruptions are annoying, and the UI feels boring. But the worst part is the core gameplay is… actually pretty good. Yes, that’s the worst part, and I will explain.

Each turn, Neon gets three “cost” to play cards from his hand. You can play a card for its equivalent cost, or you can use the card to move one space in its indicated direction for no cost. Each time you act, timers in front of your enemies will tick down, and when they reach zero an attack will go off. You can use cards to dodge these attacks, or you can use Break abilities to reduce enemy attack power so you won’t take damage. Applying enough Break will stun the enemy, giving you one extra cost and preventing them from acting. When you can’t play more cards, you discard your hand and then draw a fresh one.

There are a few more wrinkles and specific keywords like boost abilities and so forth, but the core mechanics are actually very much like a more turn-based Battle Network title and the actual fights? Entertaining and satisfying! Having the various idol characters who have different effects when you fulfill their requirements helps, too, because it lets you start to focus in on more specific builds. Maybe you want lots of zero-cost cards to keep up a certain activity pattern. Maybe you want high-cost cards and want to move a lot first. There are lots of options and lots of different emergent properties.

So why is this the worst thing? Because when so much of the rest of the game is obnoxious or unfun, it means that it feels like you’re wading through mud for a game that is actually a good game at the heart. It didn’t need all of the baggage that makes it ugly or bland or annoying. It had a good game at its core! It’s just… a good game hampered by every other decision possible.

Card On Repeat

If it weren’t clear by this point, I did not care for Card-en-Ciel as an aggregate. Not because it’s a bad game, because the core game parts are actually pretty good… but every single part around that game makes me not want to bother engaging with it any further. I like the ideas on display but I also do not want to play this game. The annoying stuff makes it feel actively hostile and unappealing. It’s easier to just not.

That’s kind of a shame, and I suspect – or hope – there are people who can look past the melange of stylistic issues that made me dislike the game and enjoy the pretty good card battles at the heart of the title. But for me? I just wanted to be done with it. If you like card battling, I hope you either like the style or can overlook a lot of potential irritations.

~ Final Score: 6/10 ~

Review copy provided by Inti Creates for PC. All screenshots courtesy of Inti Creates.