Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars

Yoko Taro (横尾 太郎 Yoko Taro, birthed June 6, 1970, in Nagoya), additionally composed ヨコオタロウ in Japanese and also Taro Yoko elsewhere worldwide, is a screenwriter as well as computer game developer. Specifically, he helped Caviar. He ended up being well-known for his work with the collection of RPG Drakengard and spins-offs to near and also reject: Automata.

The first thing is the first thing: Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars is not a game of cards but a game con cards. It is, for all purposes, a RPG in the style of Dragon Quest, with random and shift combats, with its villages and ducts, with its swords and even its limbs, that slug enemy that has become an icon of a whole gender. These enemies can be a good representation of the type of humor that works here Yoko Taro, here creative director but best known for being responsible for Near. Like everything in Voice of Cards, these limos have no physical presence beyond the letter that represents them; The wink to Dragon Quest is evident, but the thing is a step further in one of the towns you visit, where you know a non-hostile slime that is called Puzo, like the gelatinous pieces of the puzzle sequel.

It is just a nice guidance, I already say, not very different from those that there are also in the big games of Yoko Taro. Nor is it very distant to the imaginary of the Japanese creative the departure point of Voice of Cards, which puts us in the boots of a cocky hero and for which money is the first thing that the Queen offers a juicy reward to whom Give a legendary dragon that, freshly awake after a long lethargy, threatens to destroy the world. Willing to get the reward, the hero leaves to hunt the dragon touring half a world, knowing all kinds of characters and forming an unexpected group of adventurers, etc.; All the common places of the sword and witchcraft are here present, presented with grace and good taste but no less common.

It is in the transgression and the surprise where Voice of Cards makes it clear that it has, to be forgiven by the joke, an ace hidden in the sleeve. Like the protagonist hero, all the characters have their bend, some peculiarity that causes them to bend as archetypes and also as a metaironic comment of those same archetypes; This can be applied to the group that ends up accompanied by your adventures, but also to the rest of the characters with which you cross, from the mayor worried about the mascot of him to the sympathetic granny but with a suspicious knife. By the way he is willing, Voice of Cards is teaching his cards, sorry again by joke, little by little, unlocking additional information as you interact with different types of characters; Same letter (granny, young man, etc.) can represent different NPCs, something that is not as incongruous as uncomfortable: it is a pity that this layer of narration is not a little more integrated into the game, because in the end it ends Existing only elsewhere, outside the main fiction, in another stratum that sometimes is barely related to the world you explore.

The same just occurring with the main characters, although for different reasons. Voice of Cards is, I already say, something like a RPG -Lite with a neatly traditional development; His only concession has to do with the duration, much lower than usual in the genre and therefore also much more assumable and even pleasant. It is a game that can be completed in two or three afternoons; A completed game should not occupy more than a week if it is taken with desire. This grateful synthesis capacity plays a bad pass while trying to put into practice strategies almost identical to those of others much longer, five or even ten times more extensive: by when it takes to feel the joys and sorrows of the characters, even those with those who are already ten or twelve hours, the truth is that you have dedicated more time to fight against the most routine enemies than to learn to empathize with your group, so the pretended power of the end stays on little, dissolved a bit of more, too, because of a last stretch that becomes longer than the account, artificially stretched, gives the sensation, more to reach a duration of two figures that to deepen the type of dilemmas that could contribute a plus of interest To your group of adventurers.

I imagine it is difficult to ignore Yoko Taro s name in a game like this, which seems to have everything to talk about the game itself, which exists in constant state of breakage of the fourth wall: after all the narrative runs to Charge of a game master Anonymous that is reciting what is happening on the screen. Beyond the purely aesthetic, however, there is no trap or cardboard in Voice of Cards: it is, as it seems, a normal and current RPG; Normal and Sorrento, in its worst moments. In combat, ultimately main protagonist of this story, is where easier is to do the cotton test. In shifts and following the order that determines the Stats of each combatant, attacks and spells are exchanged until all the enemies (or all your characters) are defeated. In each turn you get a gem, and these gems are the equivalent of the traditional MANA; Each spell or special attack has a cost in gems, and around saving them and consuming them is usually assembled all the strategy.

As in, put, Magic: The Gathering or Slay The Spire, each character has a couple of main attributes, attack and defense, visible on their front. One should think that the result of our attacks can be predicted by doing a simple mathematical operation (your 15 attack 55 harm to an enemy with 10 defense, for example), but there are other hidden attributes that escape your control and make it Voice of cards ultimately a game con cards, and not of cards, as it said at the beginning: there are weaknesses and elementary resistance, for example, but also critical attacks and other calculations that make an attack sometimes more or A little less strong, and you can even fail a blow; All this is difficult to fit into a game of card, or try to keep everything possible the feeling that it could exist outside the digital environment, but not in a RPG. In this sense, Voice of Cards ends up being much more conservative and limited than it perhaps it implies the centrality of the letter, and sometimes it stays with the worst of the two worlds; the omnipresence of the physical (the letters but also the gems, the dice, the tray that is placed on the map when a combat begins and on which it develops) is fascinating until it begins to be tedious, to make the game go Slowly and that ultimately the most stretched areas are still more stretched. I do not want to throw all the blame to gimmick aesthetic, although something has: Actually, the variables of each combat (enemies and their weaknesses, your characters, their team and their magic...) are somewhat scarce, something that in the long run just passing him invoice.

But it is also very nice to play a game from time to time as Voice of Cards, content and humble, something inflated but still tiny, definitely less imposing than the gigantic references of the genre in which it is inscribed; And, once left the idea of ​​the mindfuck that seems necessary in Yoko Taro games, it is also nice to see the main manager of Near in another lighter context, in which there is not so much at stake, simply having a project Less than that, with everything, some decisions and hobbies are usually welcomed by a gender, the RPG, of which he wants to be Pierre and at the same time honors. It is a complicated position and that it shows in the game, but that in the end it is also part of its charm and its way of being. In any case, if someone has the right to take out a minor game, or ten, that is Yoko Taro; To have something important to say it is important to know how to have fun, although sometimes it falls at the amusement solipsism of the private joke.

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