Voice of Cards is a wonderful RPG card game made by most of the Nier developers and artists which really shows in the art style, music and even Replicant DLC.
Do you like Dungeons and Dragons? Do you like card games? Do you like RPG skill based combat?
I give you the wonderful gameplay that is Voice of Cards. Everything is represented via cards. The world, the enemies, the heroes, the items. It’s all cards.
So the combat itself is a turn based system like old school Final Fantasy games. Pick a skill, use it, enemy goes next ect.
I really found the combat system to be extremely fun. You get a sense of power as you figure out different combo moves that work with the 3 active party members you can have in combat at a time.
Critical hits, dice rolling to add damage. It’s classic D&D and FF all in one.
When you’re not fighting your way through slimes, goblins, ogres and various other standard RPG enemies. The story you and your party take on is such a fun classic tale like any first D&D campaigns.
The queen of the land is asking everyone if they can slay an evil dragon plaguing the lands
And oh wait. There’s another adventuring party who is better than you already on the chase!
It becomes a bit more plot heavy in its final chapters but for the most part, Voice of Cards is a really simple plot of “go slay dragon” and I love it. It knows exactly what it is and it runs with it so well.
Between combat and its story, you will encounter different RNG events and dialogue choices that though don’t effect TOO much. It’s still a blast when you have to roll to dodge lighting at random or a merchant is seen wandering the lands and they have exclusive gear or you spot a spyglass and see an enemy in the horizon.
All these little bits really add to the overall feeling of the game that though repeats a lot, you do find enjoyment in picking different options.
This all brings me to my final, absolutely favourite part of the entire game.
The game master. Every single character. NPC, hero and event cards are all read by one guy. It’s all the game master. Just like D&D
Sure it saves on budget but when you think of it as “holy fuck it’s like D&D” you just fall in love with it.
Todd Haberkorn does such a fantastic job at giving you a Dungeons and Dragons feel that I genuinely could listen to him talk for hours.
Overall, this game surprised the hell out of me. I knew I’d love it as soon as I saw it had Yoko Taro’s name printed on it
But it’s so much more than that. It’s just such a classic feeling game that really gives you that level 1 campaign feeling.
I haven’t seen anything much like this lately and I’m grateful for its existence.

gorgeous art style, and i enjoy the presentation of the areas on cardback, but there's no actual sign of card decks influencing the gameplay. doesn't seem to be any randomised card draws, doesn't seem to be any implementation of card-based rules in how the attacks/skills function... i don't know why the game is using cards at all, honestly.

it's just a standard RPG with standard RPG menus and standard RPG quests, but everything takes twice as long to do bc it has to animate a card draw instead of simply selecting your actions from a normal drop-down menu as you would usually.

the single voice actor also grates incredibly. he's fine, but he's not good enough to carry the weight of an entire game's worth of voice-acting on his own. i muted him almost immediately.

I'm a big fan of Yoko Taro-isms, so Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars hit the spot for me. Very fun writing and characters, and the overall plot is decent as well, though not on the level of the Nier series. Keichi Okabe's music is great as always. I really enjoyed presentation style with the audiobook-like narration and card-based visual setup.

The problem is that the combat is about as basic and boring as JRPGs get. Worse, there are random battles that occur with a mind-numbing frequency. As a result, it felt like a bit of a slog, despite the short runtime. Luckily, at some point between launch and my playthrough they added a turbo mode. Funnily enough, it seems to increase the overall game speed, so while my real-world finish time was 10 hours, my in-game time was 14 hours. I'm definitely glad to have saved those 4 hours, and I can imagine my score may have been a bit lower otherwise.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to the sequels. It sounds like they didn't do anything to improve the combat, though, so I'll play a few other games first.

Es muy buen juego, y lo recomiendo, especialmente con alguna rebaja aunque sea pequeña. Mis problemas han sido la duración (no tiene por qué ser algo malo), que ha hecho que la historia y el miedo a no aburrirte con mucha lectura se comprima de más, y la dificultad, que se mantiene muy bajita todo el juego pero en el boss final se dispara un poco (tampoco mucho, pero lo justo como para notar cierta dificultad si te pilla por sorpresa de mala manera). Por lo demás, la propia historia está bien, los personajes son muy carismáticos, el arte fantástico... Muy entretenido para pasar un buen rato. Viene bien jugar la demo, para conocer qué te vas a encontrar y recibir un poco de contexto

Ohne jemandem zu nahe treten zu wollen, aber das Spiel scheint nicht für Menschen mit dem geringsten Anspruch entwickelt worden zu sein.

Eine Antiwerbung für jegliche D&D Erzählweisen und eine Antiwerbung für storygetriebene RPGs.

Und hier kommen wir zu dem Problem.
Laut den guten Bewertungen sind das schon die positiven Punkte. Abgesehen vom Soundtrack, der zum Glück wirklich ganz nett ist.

Die Erzählweise mag sich für besonders halten, aber es wirklich nur ein alter Typ, der exakt das vorliest, was auf den Karten steht.

Die erste Dialogentscheidung des halbstummen Protagonisten war:
"Wer bist du?"
"Wie ist dein Name?"

Und ähnlich fordernd ging es dann weiter..
Das Kampfsystem ist klassisches wähle eine Fertigkeit aus.
Es hat NICHTS mit einem Kartenspiel zu tun.
Nach jedem Zug kommt ein Fertigkeitspunkt dazu, aber das ist für Spiele nach 1995 einfach zu wenig für ein RPG in dem ständig gekämpft wird.

Die Karten nehmen jegliche Immersion, auch das Rumgewackel mit den Karten ändert da nichts dran.

Das Spiel ist ENDLOS LANGSAM. Nach jedem Schritt wird gefragt, ob du dir sicher bist.
Willst du die Stadt verlassen? ..ja, deshalb bin ich hier und wenn ich mich irren würde... könnte ich sie einfach wieder betreten.
Das dauert 2 Sekunden.
Die Frage zu beantworten dauert aber auch 2 Sekunden.
JEDES MAL!

Man kann das Spiel auf schnell stellen und selbst dann dauern Kämpfe und das laufen noch sooo lang.
Und das alles während das Spiel nicht gerade gut aussieht.

Ich kann die Lobpreisungen nicht verstehen..
Wenn das das letzte JRPG ist, das ihr noch nicht gespielt habt, versucht es.
Ansonsten spielt wirklich alle anderen vor diesem..

Un JRPG demasiado clásico en sus mecánicas que solo se salva por su estética.

Pros:
- El diseño de las cartas es precioso.
- Las animaciones están genial diseñadas, aunque pueden acabar volviéndose repetitivas.
- Es cortito, por lo que su simplicidad acaba pesando menos.

Contras:
- La frecuencia de encuentros aleatorios es abrumadora.
- Hay poco, muy poco de Yoko Taro aquí.
- No tiene ninguna mecánica mínimamente innovadora.

My fifth game in the trek through the Yoko Taro gameography. The music was excellent, as one would expect of Keiichi Okabe, and I loved the presentation of it. The characters where fleshed out enough to be entertaining and their interactions where fun, although slightly generically in line with Yoko's other works, and it worked surprisingly well for a game with only a single narrator - I thought it would grate on me, yet it felt far more relaxing than I had expected.
It was definitely the worst Yoko game I've played so far - or maybe the one with the least impact - but it was certainly enjoyable. I do not think that this style of game is for me particularly, having never been one for D&D styles.

So glad that I discovered this series of games, which are pretty obscure titles that no one else I know has even heard of. As a huge fan of turn-based combat and card games and RPGs, this just hit the spot in a unique way. The characters were charming, the story was interesting, the combat is a blast, and I appreciate the relative ease of the game as well, honestly. It's got a fantastic, calming, breezy score and I just got a lot of joy out of spending time playing through it without having to stress at all. I'm excited to play through the other two games and experience their different worlds.

Listen, I love Yoko Taro's work and many Taro-isms are in this game as you'd expect. It has multiple endings that are gut-punches, really random humor at times, banger character designs, and beautiful music. But even Yoko Taro's usual charm can't hold up this game. The game is based off of tabletop games, and the entire world space is quite literally made of cards, true to the game's name. There's no voice acting in this game besides a narrator, true to the tabletop vibe. Unfortunately the game is painfully easy as well. I assumed since it was a JRPG, I'd grind a bit before the first dungeon, reaching Level 11 when the recommended Level was 3. And although the levels normalized, I went through the game deathless until the final boss, which I beat on my second try. Really disappointing game, which hurts me to say as a fan of Yoko Taro. And Emi Evans too, she's great in the music of this as well. But unfortunately, it's just a middling RPG that's held up by some lovable charm.

Full review: https://medium.com/super-jump/a-look-at-voice-of-cards-the-isle-dragon-roars-30141c7a386c

Score: 73

I tried the demo for this game when it was new, and I liked it but didn't want to pay full price. I bought it recently for the Switch when it was on sale, and in general I enjoyed the game. It's fun and simple but still a little bit of a challenge. I liked being able to take my time to collect everything and uncover every card.

At times the game can feel a little bit sluggish, opening menus and moving back and forth. It's also a bit strange that you cannot return to the title screen without exiting to the Switch menu and closing the game and restarting it. I still recommend it; the story is fun and can surprise you.

A turn based RPG built around having a card and tabletop roleplaying aesthetic for visuals and narrative, neither of which it takes advantage of. Leaving it a short, overpriced, mostly mediocre RPG.

The visuals of the game are based around cards, this includes the menus, the characters and enemies, the map and dungeons you move around on are cards that flip over to reveal terrain as you move, during battles your equipped skills show up as cards with art and their description on them. As a game styled around a tabletop RPG, the story, events, character dialogue, and sometimes just descriptions or hints as you explore are narrated by an out of sight game master.

At a glance I would have assumed I would have enjoyed the game quite a bit because of how much I like those two things but it ended up being a fairly dull playthrough that takes advantage of neither of the elements the game is built around. With the fairly ridiculously high price of the game (as well as needless cosmetic DLC), especially with all the indies that have done much more interesting GM and/or card focused RPG games, they could certainly have gone further at making the card aesthetic a lot more visually interesting with less generic tiles you move on, the monsters you fight and your character skills could have had cool looking detailed artwork like you would get out of something like Magic/Lord of the Rings LCG/Netrunner/etc instead of just a generic small variety of monsters just drawn in a rectangle or weapon and element symbol with text of what skills do, the characters could have been drawn onto cards in different ways or on not just generic blank backgrounds to show emotion and be more visually interesting. What could have been a much more interesting world to explore ends up being fairly generic. The style actually lead them to having some other issues. Everything is a bit slower than it should be and the odd card style of the menus make them slow and more of a chore to navigate than they should be, even lacking basic functions like cycling through characters with the shoulder or trigger buttons when you are swapping out equipment (it all functions even worse with a mouse and keyboard). I used no combat items in the game until the final battle but for some odd reason instead of limiting the max number of certain kinds of items you can hold they give you an inventory limit of 30 total items. This lead to a lot moments in the last 1/3 of the game where I would find a chest and be given a useless item or finish a battle and be rewarded with a useless item that would then slowly bring up a text about having too many items before slowly taking me to a screen where I can slowly choose one item to throw away before being allowed to move on.

The GM narration focus is also a thing that really doesn't go anywhere. He's just kind of there to only need to pay one voice actor and for some reason to give away any hints when a dungeon does anything different (dungeon has walls that turn into doors when you move onto them, "Why don't you try moving there"). The entire Game Master thing is never really used to add anything to the world and ends up just taking away from it, even more so because the added assumption of having a GM would be that the characters would have their own players but it's just the GM narrating what few inner thoughts or actions they take.

What you end up being left with is a short, overpriced, and mostly mediocre RPG. What little story there is can have a few moments of humor but doesn't offer much for world or character building. Every town will have the same shops and a couple people to talk to, you can explore three larger landmasses near towns to find the dungeons or other towns you need to go to or to run into often repeating random events. There is never really anything interesting to the design of dungeons, the biggest thing they do is put some spikes in some tiles right before you reach the end boss that you just don't want to step on to avoid taking any damage (these spikes are clearly visible, though one of the character's best weapons does require you to just walk through a couple spikes to reveal a chest a few spaces in). There are no route deviations or big side quests as it is a primarily linear game, you can get four choices for your ending that will amount to a few lines before the credits roll.

Most of your time playing will be taking a few steps, getting into a random battle, and completely destroying those enemies (over and over and over again because the low enemy variety doesn't help things). If you remember to upgrade your equipment at new shops, 80% of battles will be over before enemies can even get an attack off. With an ice attack spell that can freeze enemies permanently and causes you to break them out of the ice but do double damage when you hit them, even the first couple bosses didn't get to attack me. You start off with a party of three characters and get two more characters to join you over time, one coming fairly late but you have a limitation I've never been a fan of of only being able to use three characters at once but then two of the characters seem more focused on buffing or having some defensive skills and this is a game where healing and buffing has no use 99% of the time. At least this is one of the games that doesn't make the mistake of older titles and the characters in reserve still gain full XP from battles. As characters level up and change their equipment they can add to their health, attack (which influences all skills be they melee, ranged, or magic), defense, and speed and gain access to a few passive skills they always have (mostly element or status effect resistance), and active skills of which they can equip four of. In battle your skills are powered by crystals, you start a battle with one and gain another at the start of every character's turn. A basic attack costs nothing but using more powerful or status effecting skills can cost between 1-4, so you will want use your heavier hitting skills or skills that enemies are weak to while focusing on basic attacks or turn passive to help prepare stronger attacks.

While the battle system works and can be simple and enjoyable at times, the AI is terrible. In addition to all those times where enemies just couldn't do anything there will be so many times where when they do get to act they will try to do something like buff itself as it is near death and all of your characters move next. You will frequently see an enemy use a turn to slightly debuff one characters defense or elemental defense, often to a degree less than what their hit damage would have done only to then have their other allies attack other non debuffed characters. One positive here is that even with the battles taking place with the card visual style the attack animations do have varied effects for every type of skill and additional critical hit they can do while moving the cards around, making it a bit more visually interesting than the what you would get with the old first person kind of Dragon Quest/Wizardry battles that the animations would resemble otherwise.

It's a simple and fairly quick play (taking me about 9 hours) with a few funny moments but with all the good ideas aesthetically and mechanically or ideas that can be used in a much more interesting way it doesn't take advantage of anything and when it is selling for $30-$40+ there are a lot of other games with some similar themes that are worth more, cost less, and support an indie studio.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1686640421357985792

I loved this game. The entire story is told through cards, even the map is made out of cards that reveal themselves as the player moves across it. The world is filled with treasure and interesting lore tidbits. I liked the characters, the story and the writing - at times hilarious moments ensued. The only voice acting in the game is the narrator, but I felt like they did a great job so the game did not suffer by that choice.

The first play through took about 13 hours, I reached one of the endings. I only returned to game + to get the best ending which added extra 2 hours. The game + does make the play through quicker, but apart from different ending, it did not add that much more. I left the other two endings unfinished as it would require me to fight the same boss third and fourth time and ain't nobody got time for that.

There are things I am hoping are improved in the next two games, like the animation to and from combat being way too long. The number of pop up combats was also very high. There is a way to run away but that requires rolling that is only available once it is character's turn so again takes too long.

That said I loved the game, but for sure will wait on sales for the next ones, the price tag is too steep for how short the game is.