Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars

A simple game that is plenty relaxing. No complex mechanics, just simple math and some cheeky lines.

Overall interesting story, but the amount of times you run into enemies is a bit much, causing it to drag on more than it would need to. Story is overall short but as I said before interesting.

Nice game, good artwork, ı like the devs but games combat is too tepetetive...

Probably one of the most fun games I've played in a long time. It's a really simple game. In-fact, it reminds me of old D&D computer games, and I mean from the DOS era. But instead of fog of war, it's cards. And instead of pixels, it's updated graphics and art.

The narration is superb. The combat is just okay. It's the very basic of RPG-style turn based fighting, just disguised as cards. Story is a blast and had some serious feels trips in it. Really glad I purchased this.

With that being said, it's a short game. Is it worth the money at full price? No. But if you can catch it on sale, definitely worth the money then. If you like old school RPG's, hell, even old school table top RPG's, you'd most likely like this.

The event spawn algorithm was a f**king disaster. I tried the suspicious doctor's brew for nearly about f**king 30+ times to get the secret skill for the achievement. It turns out that the game has a seed to determine which character can successfully get the secret skill. BUT, the seed doesn't seems to update during your gameplay, even after a new event spawned (I didn't try SL or restarting the game. Didn't get any chance. I suppose the seeding is bound to the setup phase of your gameplay, so it should be updated after restarting the game). Then the f**king hilarious thing is, during your NG+ gameplay, you haven't got all characters unlocked, but the algorithm can still assign the secret skill to any unlocked characters. So the f**king doctor will keep giving your f**king potions even you pass through the damage check! I just realized the whole sh*t after I got my backpack full of f**king potions.

not fun, i don't like the narrator's voice or pace, i've simply played better games with better story, mechanics, and cards, combat, and characters than this game

I just read that you can turn on fast animation on settings from a review after 7.1 hours of playing. Just fuck me. I didn’t sleep today. I had school and 5 hours of shift on part time job. Funny narrator tho

Really wanted to like this one. It does a good job of capturing what D&D is like, and the storytelling is fun.

Movement is super smooth

"Combat" is tedious with a lot of random encounters and the game makes you manually roll a bunch of dice

Made the mistake of trying the in-game card game. It's "we have rummy at home." Managed to escape its tutorial

The game really loves over-explaining the obvious stuff. Not a big deal, but even when it gives you the option to skip that still bogs things down

The deal breaker for me was a clunky UI. Several pages with identical tabs made it confusing to figure out relatively simple things like how to swap items between characters. Shops are very punishing with a misclick since you'll have to go through a wave of menu options to get back in, and their setup felt weirdly hard to parse despite having played a ton of rpgs

It has a unique presentation but doesn't do enough with it. Combat is way too easy except for the final boss. Didn't prepare well enough and now I can't even beat it.

This is a wonderfully charming game that, unfortunately, did not manage to completely win me over. Like most players of this game, at least that is my assumption, I have developed an interest in Voice of Cards purely based on the fact that Yoko Taro, the eccentric weirdo and lovable madman behind Drakengard and NieR, worked on this. Statements made by Taro himself as well as the videogame press had prepared me that this game was quite different from the previous titles in Mr. Taro’s catalogue.

Instead of a wide and deep discussion of very fundamental, very human themes, Voice of Cards would be a fairly straightforward fantasy tale in the form of a traditional JRPG. At first, I was saddened by this fact, me being a huge fan of NieR and its sequel and at least appreciative of Drakengard’s ambitions. Still, I watched a trailer, was intrigued by the music and the unique art style and decided to give it a shot.

The first thing I noticed which took me by surprise was the fact that Voice of Cards isn’t a card game at all. In fact, except for an optional card minigame, this game’s mechanics aren’t informed by playing cards at all. It merely is an aesthetic choice that the developers picked as a basis for the game’s presentation. Everything in this world is a card – characters, buildings, equipment, items, the entire world map consists of cards that are arranged in a tile-based fashion that form the layout of the world.

Now, you might think that this is probably an economic choice on the side of the publisher to save costs – after all, if all your game’s assets are made of static cards, you can radically cut costs in multiple departments, above all graphics and animation. That assumption may be correct. However, I have to point out how elegant Voice of Cards works with its limitations that arise from the card-based presentation. For instance, if a character in your party performs a “roll” attack, the card actually flips over and rolls over the enemy’s card. There is a scene where a character starts squatting frantically which is represented by an animation that lets his card move up and down erratically. A monster you help in the fields by curing its paralysis bows to you by subtly tilting its card. Stuff like that is just cute.

Most actions in the game aren’t visually translated though. This isn’t an inherently bad thing for me as this sparks my imagination, much like older titles with simpler graphics do. On top of that, everything you do and everything that happens to you is delineated by a narrator. That guy’s voice is soothing to an extent that borders on tiresome. I’m pretty sure this is by design as to give the narrator a sort-of…bored tone? but it didn’t really work for me. You have to listen to this guy’s voice for the entire runtime of about 12 hours and the joke of “haha, an old tired narrator ironically comments everything in the game” got old pretty quickly. I would have loved to have at least the main characters voiced by professional actors.

Besides the visual style, another aspect that really stands out is the music. The OST has no business being that brilliant in a “small” game like this. Keiichi Okabe is a god in this business and I’m so glad they got him to work on this project. I implore you, even if you are not interested in this game at all, check out the OST, it is beyond beautiful. The choral sounds of NieR and the melancholic undertones that Okabe is known for, it’s all here and it’s honestly some of his best work. As a sample, just listen to this.

Given its smaller scale, I presumed the game would not reach the narrative heights of NieR or Drakengard. And it doesn’t. For the most part, this is a standard JRPG fantasy story the likes of which you have seen a million times before. However, the typical Yoko Taro weirdness is absolutely here, if somewhat hidden and not as extreme as in his other works. By exploring the world, talking to people and fighting monsters, you unlock cards for each kind of NPC or enemy. These cards contain some bits of lore about the world and these texts can get…juicy. Not spoiling anything here but Voice of Cards definitely deals with some of Taro’s favorite topics like what distinguishes humans and monsters and even contains some tragic as well as questionably humorous elements. The writing is still not quite there though. There are twists that you can see coming a mile away, background stories for villains that aren’t all that interesting to begin with and a conclusion that leaves a lot to be desired. It was good enough to make me want to see things through till the end and get a chuckle out of me every now and again, so there’s that.

All that sounds well and good and still, my time with this game can only be described as a pretty mediocre experience. Why is that? Well, for one, the dungeon design in this game is among the most boring I have seen in a JRPG. At first, that isn’t that much of an issue as the first set of dungeons are fairly limited in scope but the more you progress, the worse it gets. Some of the late game dungeons are so dull as they consist of a multitude of levels that offer little to no variation. Every level looks the same and the high enemy encounter rate (yes, this game has random encounters) doesn’t help either. It just goes on and on and sometimes, you spend the better half of an hour in there. The lighthouse, volcano and mausoleum are especially terrible in this regard. Mind you that the game usually allows you to jump to previously explored tiles on the map. In some dungeons, movement is heavily restricted though and the game forces you to trod through these boring-a$$ levels one step at a time; it’s not fun.

Then there’s the battles and they are simply way too easy. Except for some battles at the end, out of which the best ones are optional, you can turn off your brain and breeze through this entire game. There’s no real challenge here and most of the combat decisions you make end up not making any significant difference at all. Combined with the uninspired dungeon design, things can get very tiresome very soon. This is the type of game you enjoy on a lazy evening with nothing to do and maybe some “Devil’s Lettuce” if that’s your thing; believe me, you’re in for a chill time :D

Another thing that bugged me was that some game design decisions feel like Yoko Taro is taking the pi$$ out of the JRPG genre, and not in the usual subversive way but more in a direct and heavy-handed manner. To give some spoiler-free examples, in this game you travel from the town of “Advent” to “Nexton” and then “Thriceton”… medicine is conjured on a mountain called “Mt. Medica”…see where I’m going with this? Then there are a number of treasure maps you can find and they point to the most random places. One map hints at “a place where you can see the ocean” which is … interesting, given the fact that you can see the d@mn ocean from literally everywhere :D Another points to a place “south across the mountains” which is as vague as can be. Remember, for every step you take, a random encounter may ensue, so this seemingly fun treasure hunt can turn into quite the chore. There was also an event where the game required me to have a “Mercenary’s Sword” in my possession, one of the weakest early-game swords I had naturally sold at this point. This was a one-time chance and to this day, I do not know what I missed by not having the required item. Stuff like that is just annoying.

This is a fine game with amazing music and a cool art style. It’s no narrative masterpiece and its dungeon and enemy design could use some heavy polishing. It didn’t fully grasp me in a way NieR did but I surely enjoyed my time with it. If you’re looking for a chill JRPG with mostly lighthearted storytelling and a relatively short runtime of approx. 12 hours, give it a shot. If you’re expecting Yoko Taro’s next big thing, this ain’t it.

Finished chapter 1 and so far the game is too simple and repetitive. It feels like an old rpg maker game or old rpg game but with higher budget for music and graphics.

The game is great, I love Yoko Taro's writing (even if it's predictable. The companion characters are all pretty fun if a bit odd. The card designs are nice and I love the art style. Its not hard but difficulty in video games is overrated. Play on High speed at all times because the movement can be slow.

Don't play the second game 'Forsaken Maiden' and we'll see about the third game when I get there.
Don't buy any of the DLC stuff either

I bought this because I'm a huge fan of Nier and Yoko Taro. the art is great and they use the same music composer and vocalist from the Nier games. The influence of Yoko taro's fun weirdness on the story and world is noticeable, mainly in the flip-side stories for the character cards, so it's full of charm. That being said, though, this game is really boring. While the entire game world being presented as cards is unique, it also limits what you can do to make the visuals interesting. The combat has the potential to be fun and complicated, but the fights are so easy they just become tedious. It's so easy to get strong that there's no challenge, yet every fight takes a full minute to win. I cannot say the music is bad, it actually fits the idea of this being a game played in a tavern, but the vibe is TOO chill. When combined with the narrator's monotone voice, I was practically dosing off. Part of me wishes the narrator put more effort into doing voices for the different characters. Speaking of characters, the story isn't particularly interesting, at least at the point where I stopped. I didn't even finish it. It has fun moments and dark comedic moments and genuine emotional moments, but man, it just doesn't come together.

I understand that not every game made by Yoko Taro or Square-enix is going to be an award winning success, maybe the sequels to this one do a good job improving on what they set up here.

Short and sweet. Linear turn based card themed rpg with a decent story. Mostly a barebones game but if you can get it on sale... I highly recommend it for rpg lovers. WARNING: Do NOT buy the cosmetic dlc. Doesn't do much.

Pretty decent, appreciably concise JRPG. Not very difficult or complex, but it was a fun time; it's got that signature Taro-led charm, whimsy, and pure Weird Factor, so if you're a fan of anything he's a part of like I am, this game's worth checking out.

Wow. This game is so boring.
If you like not needing to use your items because it’s so easy then this game is for you. If you like slow game play and lack of content this game is for you. I found myself having to discard items because I didn’t use them in battle.
You can freeze enemies and he’ll go full every battle.
This game is so dry and boring.

I even played at work one day and it was so boring at work. Couldn’t image how people can play it on their free time. I regret buying the three titles. I bought all three as a bundle, but after playing the first completely. I will not start the others. It’s a shame. Don’t listen to the video reviews out there. They were likely paid.

Blahhh this game…

Good game but definitely not for everyone. The gameplay gets rather tiring with time, and combat isn't the most interesting for sure. Loved the final boss though, it was actually challenging and fun to fight.
Amazing music and art. The story is pretty good too, but it takes its sweet time to actually start getting interesting.
anyways in any situation just use ridis shes insane

It's good RPG!

So easy that the game actually feels pointless. Sound design and art are amazing

Great art and soundtrack but the positives stop there. Menus are incredibly slow by design, "choices" lead to the same outcome and the combat is ridiculously easy to the point where you click the same moves for the quickest outcome.

played 20 min, i don't like that i can't click faster thru dialog, i don't like how long the tutorial takes; it didn't hook me and i didn't feel motivated to play; the story neither sufficiently captivated me

What an interesting experiment this game is. I will separate this review in three parts to better explain it: reviewing the game as an RPG, reviewing it as a Yoko Taro directed game, and reviewing the experience as a whole.

The RPG part.

This game is a pure classic RPG, it has almost no card game element and the cards are only visuals.
The party setup is the usual JRPG 3 characters (with more in reserve). But the base 3 characters are so good I ended up never swapping them.
It is an extremely simple RPG recommended for beginners, with a level cap of 30 which you will reach by the end. The one superboss in the game also isn't that hard to beat. If you are looking for a challenge this will not be the game for you.
Here is a list of interesting mechanics that this game tries to work with:

-limited party wide heals. You don't get a ton of party wide heals, making attacks that hit your entire party extremely effective, and putting you in situations where you have to choose who gets the heal and who can stay at low health, making for some tense late game encounters.

-no healing out of combat except items. If you are not using items the only for you to heal is to find someone to fight, this is interesting because you will have moments where you want to delay the end of a fight or the phase of a boss in order to heal before proceeding.

-random events. some fights will have random events happen and they usually affect both the enemies and your own party. These are truly random so restarting a boss fight will put you in a different situation depending on the event card drawn.

-visible stats. The game shows you precisely the attack/defense/hp of everyone, enemy included. Due to some weird maths the numbers aren't 100% correct but you can still use them for quick calculations.

-tile jumping. You can move to any tile you have encountered with some very specific exceptions in like 5 rooms in the entire game. Meaning you can skip every encounter from Overworld to Dungeon by jumping to the exit tile, this weirdly invalidates an item in the game that allows you to escape dungeons.

-gem system. This RPG completely removes mana points and replaces everything with a gem system, at the end of a character's turn, you get a gem, some skills require multiple gems to activate. This gives you some simple strategies where you save gems for a big heal or a strong AOE.

-completely free inns. Not only are the inns free they also all have different reasons for being free in every town, be sure to check them out!

-elemental weaknesses. The most used trope in RPG games, they are here to stay. Sadly even though you have a monster compendium you can't see enemy weaknesses anywhere in the game, you have to remember yourself which element they are weak to, hard for players with a poor memory like me.

tl;dr Short RPG (12 hours to beat, even faster if you turn on fast animations), extremely simple mechanics but enough to keep you engaged.

The Yoko Taro part

How does this compare to Yoko Taro's other works?
Well in the first 30 minutes of the game, you encounter an old lady on the road and help her. Not even 2 minutes go by and you discover she was actually abused by her husband and she cut him up and ate him.
This might seem shocking to most players but honestly after what he wrote in his other stories this seems a bit too predictable at this point. I can't say the game really surprised me in big ways. It's missing a lot of 4th wall breaking moments (there is only one that happens in a conversation with an NPC).
I accidentally got the true ending on my first playthrough and damn this is the happiest ending Yoko Taro has ever shown us I have to say it's a wild departure from his other games.
There is no NG+ that dramatically changes the game, the only way to get the endings is to redo the final boss. NG+ should have been used to either add on top of the story or remix encounters.

tl;dr if you want more of small scale yoko taro (the one you get in the weapon stories), you'll get exactly this. But don't expect some mind bending 4th wall break.

The Experience

Overall it's a solid experience, the art on the card is absolutely stunning, and the pixel art DLC changes the cards of every NPC, every main character and every monster in the game including bosses (only things unchanged are the items and skills).
The mood is there, the narrator is great, the soundtrack isn't oppressive and lends itself to a small tabletop adventure like this one. You sadly don't get a lot of unique mechanics tied to the entire game being a board, with the exception of the final boss visual, looks really cool.

In conclusion, the experience of the game is really good, not perfect, not the level of NieR. But it's a cozy game with great visuals, great mood. It is very short however, 12 hours to finish (with normal animations), and got the full achievements at 17 hours (with fast animations on this time). So you might want to get it on a sale.

There are different approaches you (as the developer) can take when it comes to letting the player decisions have an impact on the story.
You could give them:
1. no choice, which makes writing a story easier, but lowers the engagement
2. meaningful options (harder to develop, but more engaging)
3. the illusion of choice, which serves no purpose and just feels bad when your choices just lead to the same conclusion

Guess which option the developers took.
Also the gameplay feels slow, even with the fast option enabled.

TL;DR
Generally a good game, good narration and fun for a single playthrough.
Absolutely not worth the full price so get it on a sale.

Completion time 15-20 hours, 40-50 hours for full completion because of the EXTREMELY low chance of receiving the fifth skills (at most 5% chance per character from a low chance event, I did it 200+ times and got 2 skills out of 5) and the achievements that are locked in the minigame which is so slow, rigged, bad and annoying that it's a literal crime against humanity.

Plus:
Narration.
For the most part the art is nice.
The music is nice.

Minus:
The minigame is abysmal and should never have been a thing.
Who decided to hide the Quit Game option behind a whole series of button presses and menus?
Short.
The game has 3 songs total, double that if you buy the DLC.
The art is kinda silly at times.

Fantastic Game

yeah so basically this is that one duo from reincarnation

Fun and cozy jrpg that any fans of Yoko Taro would enjoy. Only critique is that the combat never really gets too difficult so don't go in thinking it will be a hardcore experience. overall really good.

For experienced jrpg players, this game edges toward being an idle game in its simplicity (though I'm still at the start of the game. I may update my review after a while). I've muted the narrator's voice, as I found it too slow for my reading pace, and I enjoy voice acting to myself anyway. Lovely illustrations, though I felt they could do with much more variety. It seems like the team was trying to squeeze into every and any budget restraint possible by removing animations, mob and card variations, and multiple voice actors from the mix, which almost makes the title feel like a misnomer. I expected...I don't know, multiple voices of cards? While the soundtrack is gorgeous, I was disappointed to find that right away, two dungeon areas with different landscapes (cave and woods) had the same songs. The same npc character cards appear everywhere with no look variation. The things they say feel similar to an amateurish RPGMaker game. HOWEVER, I am enjoying the relaxed atmosphere, with simple clicking and WASD movement around a gameboard, some fantasy D&D reading and light humor (sometimes juvenile). I hope to have an update after progressing that shows a lot of expansion in the card playing aspect.

I picked up this game for about $10-$15 on a sale, and I will say that is about how much it is worth to play.

Please note that this is NOT a card-based game. Think of your standard turn-based RPG, but if the same mechanics were portrayed as cards and dice. That is what this game is--it is a turn-based RPG just with the flair of a TTRPG with cards.

The story is on the basic side, but the characters are fairly interesting. The queen of a country has issued a decree stating that she will handsomely reward adventurers who successfully take care of a dragon that has been terrorizing them recently. You are Ash, an gold-digging adventurer who jumps onto this opportunity for the sole purpose of getting rich. You, your beloved partner and mascot Mar, and a strange magician girl who agrees to join you set off to find this dragon. You visit various villages, deal with the incidents in each of these villages, pick up some new party members on the way, and search for this dragon while accidentally falling into a mystery that surrounds this same dragon.

The story is a bit bare-bones and after like 3hrs, you can see the same story formulas over and over again. The combat is fun, but can get very repetitive and frankly very very easy (until the final boss, then the difficulty level randomly spikes up out of no way). The main party has some fun banter and makes them memorable (especially Bruno--Bruno Best Boy).

What makes this game charming for me and frankly is what keeps the game engaging is the Game Master. Imagine you are a sole player in a TTRPG, with the GM handling everything down to the storytelling. The GM is the only voice actor in this whole game, reading everything from flavor text to dialogue. It really drills into you that in this game, you are a TTRPG player who is playing this story and world that the GM has created for you. He even has some funny quips every now and then that has made me chuckle. The fact that this game is designed this way makes it stand out, and really added to my experience

I beat this game in about 10hrs and felt like I did maybe like 80% of the whole game. I say this game is worth like $10, not really $20, and definitely not full-priced. Overall I enjoyed the game and am glad that I did it. However, I will not be playing the other three games in the series (btw the second game is not included in the Trilogy bundle, no idea why). It does make me a bit sad because I've read that the story in The Forgotten Maiden is the most interesting but its the very same mechanics as Isle Dragon Roars and thus really boring and tedious to play through since they do nothing to change it up. But still, I am glad I checked out Isle Dragon Roars.

The fact that you have to click the next button to do anything makes the game slow and boring. Heard a line of dialogue, click for the next one. Attacked by a monster, click to go to the battle. Won a battle, click to find out what you got for winning and through all the new skills. Want to play a mini-game, click to chose the rules, click to hear the rules, click to draw cards, click to listen to more rules, click to make a set, click to listen to even more rules, click to discard cards, click to end your turn; then watch the AI opponents be told all the rules every turn.

The developer needs to cut out all the pointless clicking and let the player play the game, instead of having to alternate between playing and clicking go to the next thing.

Other problems with this game are that it's clear the volcano wasn't balanced in any way, which is why they had to include a rest area in it but not the final area.

The plot doesn't make any sense. All the dragon was doing was scaring away fish; yet for some reason the queen asks everyone to kill it, even though she has an entire order dedicated to fixing problems. After you beat the dragon it flies to the one island it should have no reason to ever go to. Then you have to stop a guy using a magic spell on an alter, even though you have no reason to save this alter and could easily grab the item you need while he's casting his spell. Finally if you drop a dragon's tear into a volcano near where a dragons corpse fell in and melted to nothing it will cause that dragon to come back to life and jump out of the lava with it's body fully restored. However if you don't have 10 special cards he won't help you.

Overall the game is too slow and the plot doesn't make sense.

Both the wonderful artwork and the beautiful music create a nice atmosphere. The regular fights tend to be a bit too easy, but the boss fights are challenging. There a many characters with hilarious backstories and the overall main story is also quite good. I would wish that your choices would matter a bit more at times, but all in all I really enjoyed the game and would recommend it to anyone, who likes fantasy stories and tabletop games.

Yes