Few types of reviews are harder to write than ones in which a game was not what you expected. Not to pull back the curtain too much, but a lot of reviewing things is providing your genuine reactions to a piece of media. How did it make you feel? What was the context you experienced it in? But there’s going to be some grit in the gears if you went in expecting one thing and got something else. You were calibrated incorrectly. So it goes with Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars, a new JRPG from Square Enix.
See, Voice of Cards was made in part by Yoko Taro. Taro, an impish developer who enjoys playing with ideas of authority, violence, and cycles in his games, has a tendency to do the unexpected. Nowhere is this more manifest than in his masterpiece, 2017’s Nier: Automata. Automata was an expansive, looping story about a generations-old war, about prejudice and loss, about the cost of violence on the psyche. It climaxed in one of the most beautiful moments I’ve experienced in a lifetime of playing video games.
So when I hear that Yoko Taro is making a JRPG fantasy adventure with card game mechanics, my mind starts spinning. The card game has grown in leaps in bounds in recent years, but the JRPG has not. How will Taro bring his unique touch to what is a fairly staid genre?
What this review presupposes is… what if he doesn’t?
“Knowledge is power!”
Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars is… well, it’s a lot. You might be able to guess that from the title, which manages to use a lot of words to say very little. The game introduces you to its core conceit immediately: This is a game in which there is essentially one type of object (cards) and one voice actor (the game master). To explore, you move your token to a card, flipping over all surrounding cards. To fight, your character selects from a handful of skill cards, each of which has a cost. Free attacks are always available but weak; spend gems to use abilities with extra effects, from increased damage to healing to status modifiers.
First, I should say: Voice of Cards looks fantastic. The card-flipping to mimic a sort of ‘fog of war’ effect feels pretty great. It does slow down movement in some areas. When there’s only one path, taking a step and then waiting for the single card to flip can be frustrating. But in the open world map and in most dungeons, it manages to mimic the feeling of exploring a battle map in an old school D&D game. Along those lines, the game master — Todd Haberkorn — has a warm, soothing voice that never grates, though I wish he’d do more voices for the different characters. Biomutant tried something similar, with a narrator ‘translating’ every character into a single voice. Unlike Biomutant, though, which let the narrator speak his own mind, Voice of Cards’ game master is a more objective and omnipresent voice.
Unfortunately, Voice of Cards is a bit too conservative for my taste. Because it isn’t a deckbuilder, your abilities remain static. Each character starts and finishes battle with the same four options, though you can swap them out between fights. This would be fine if combat was rare. It isn’t. There are a lot of random battles in this, despite a comparatively small pool of foes. Because there’s very little chance in battle, it’s easy to set your abilities to the best elemental effects to handle monsters in any given area, and then it’s just a matter of putting in the time to push through hundreds of random encounters.
“Power is power!”
And yet, the game does contain glimmers of brilliance. At one point, a member of your party gets poisoned, and you seek out a famed nutritionist to help cure them. There, you find Shoreland, a village full of muscle-bound weirdos, all tied to the game’s best characters: Aureo, the nutritionist, and Bruno, his son. Much of Voice of Cards is pretty typical Western medieval-style fantasy. For this sequence, however, the game enters truly weird territory. Here you enter the land of the Himbo. The writing gets lighter, weirder, wittier. The game finds its voice.
Unexpectedly, Shoreland even offers the incredibly rare positive fat character. In one side quest, you meet a fisherman. Unlike the rest of the town, he isn’t shredded. He has a bit of a belly; his body is soft, practical. But the fisherman isn’t a joke, nor it his physique. Instead, Bruno acknowledges that his body is practical, a necessity for someone who must go out into the cold to fish and haul large catches into his boat. It is rare enough to see a positive depiction of fatness; to see it acknowledged as potentially healthy was remarkable.
The writing in Voice of Cards is solid, even good, for most of the game. I just wish there was more to it, and less grinding. But Shoreland is the only time the game is willing to get weird. Shoreland presents an interesting what-if, a picture of a more ambitious game that isn’t there.
“His eyes begin to sparkle the moment you utter the word ‘hero’.”
That’s not to say that the writing in Voice of Cards is bad. It’s just… a little undercooked. It’s serviceable, for the most part. You are a callow ‘hero’ looking to slay the dragon for profit. It’s a scenario you’ve played a dozen times before. And the characters’ voices, while distinct, are underutilized. This isn’t a game where you’re going to go on long, character-driven side quests to get to know your party members. Which is unfortunate! Late in the game, the story really comes alive, its more complex themes sticking out. But because the game’s writing is fairly minimalist, you don’t have time to really emotionally engage with that twist. You don’t feel the consequences of it.
In Nier: Automata, the game has the space to luxuriate in those themes. It has time to explore them, both within your main cast and also from the NPCs you meet along the way. Voice of Cards has no real NPCs, so beats that have enormous repercussions for the way people in this kingdom live their lives land with little fanfare. Yoko Taro’s voice, his thematic interests, are definitely present here, but they often felt buried beneath the slog of the random encounters. It’s a small budget game that feels profoundly hemmed in by its desire to be long, so it pads its length considerably. When the game is focused on its storytelling, its writing, there is a lot to respect here.
I’m still wrestling with Voice of Cards. There are flashes of brilliance, here, moments of unexpected levity and odd in-jokes. There are also long stretches of nothing but a too-simplistic combat system. As someone interested in Yoko Taro’s career and storytelling, I’m glad I checked it out. But as someone hoping that Taro can again hit the highs of Nier: Automata, I left disappointed.
Still, for Shoreland, himbo village, for the brief moments of body positivity and the flashes of genuine more quandry — there’s something here. Perhaps a future game in this style will have more innovative gameplay. Maybe it will give you more time with its characters. The game does enough right that I’m curious to see if Taro revisits the idea, builds upon it. It’s not much, but it’s what we’re left with.