Listening to NPR recently, I was reminded of an old saying regarding the ways of war: “Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics.” This phrase stayed with me while I was playing NeverLand Card Battles. The game itself is a blend of a collectable card games such as Pokemon or Magic the Gathering and a tactical role-playing game such as Final Fantasy Tactics.
NeverLand Card Battles opens with an overly epic introduction best-suited to 1980’s anime. Long ago, the god Hellgaia got mad at humans and decided to destroy them all. A group of other gods thought this was a bad plan and sealed Hellgaia into cards and also made super cards of themselves to keep him locked away. As you might guess, the point of the game is to collect these super cards and keep Hellgaia sealed away.
While I wasn’t a fan of the opening story setup — it was too long and overdramatic — but it did get better as you progress. It won’t win any awards for voice acting, but it was nice to hear the story unfold in their own words. While the story gets more fun, you never get any options, even meaningless ones for what you’d like to say or do. But enough about the story for now, hopefully you aren’t playing tactical card games for the nice stories.
After the overlong intro, you’re summoned to the shrine where Hellgaia is sealed, and the guardian teaches you how to use your cards for battle. He tells you that people with the cards are called dominators. Turns out, your cards can summon units to fight with you and spells to help you or hurt others. The game is played on a basic grid of squares; units have movement points, hit points and attack points. Unlike Final Fantasy Tactics, units and spells cost points to spend. You get points by controlling squares on the grid, usually by walking over them. The object is to lower the hit points of the opposing dominator to 0.
Battles play out like an odd version of Battle Chess. Every time units fight each other, there is a cutscene in which you can choose to use one support spell card if you have one in your hand. Then you see the animations of the units fighting. The first time this happens, it’s pretty cool. Unfortunately, there is no way turn it off, so you’re stuck watching the same animations over and over. So you (hopefully) win the battle and are rewarded a pile of semi-random cards depending based on who you beat and how well you beat them.
As you beat story battles, you (well, get more of the story ... but also) get to fight new dominators or at least old dominators with some new tricks. I was excited by the way each opponent has their own distinct personality — some serious, some silly but all with their own reasons for fighting. But while the stories for each dominator are distinct and interesting, the AI is exactly the same.
The AI has a decent grasp of tactics and will do a good job of taking out any of your units you leave in its grasp. Unfortunately, it has no concept of logistics. The AI makes no serious attempt to gain and hold land, so it is easily subdued by simple attrition. Also, since they all act the same, they don’t really alter their tactics based on the cards they get.
Between battles, you can fix up your deck with cards you’ve won. There are three slots for custom decks, so you can build and name decks for different occasions. I was sad there was no store; the only way to get new cards is to win battles, and even then you have no say in what cards you get. So you mostly end up getting extra copies of cards you can’t use.
Alright, back to the story. So after you work your way through the shrine, you come to Hellgaia himself, the battle rages, you win ... and the credits roll, really. But the game doesn’t end there. After the credits, the story resumes, and you find out you only beat Hellgaia’s shadow. There is another battle you can fight, but you’re told you can’t really beat the game until you get all the super cards to repair the seal. I got rather annoyed with the game because there was no indication of how to do this, and it sort of leaves you hanging. It turns out you get some cards just based on your fight count. I’d love to tell you about the multiplayer options, but after weeks of trying to find someone online, I never found anyone to battle. (Ed. — game doesn’t have wi-fi but has ad-hoc multiplayer.)
Overall it isn’t a bad game — just too easy and short. If you like tactical battle games with fun stories, you might enjoy playing this for a few hours. Or if you’re interested in something to kill a few minutes at a time for a while, the tactics aren’t bad. I just hope the next one pays more attention to all the logistics.
