At its core, this game Is really fun!

As a new player whose only played the original shadow verse a little bit I've learned the game feels more about tempos. Board states are not permanent. They change rapidly. A carefully planned board can be easily broken by you opponent with the right combination of cards. So its really mostly about being able to respond in a timely manner than anything.

This could be a skill issue, but I've had issues with time. I play Forest-Craft fairies and many times I have to plan out the best combination of cards to play in a certain sequence in order to come up the best strategy. I feel severally punished for playing my own deck and I do just lose games because I feel rushed by the time or the time simply just stops. I've played Yugioh Master Duel, Duel Links, Pokemon Pocket TCG, Hearthstone, any popular game I've played it and got to considerably high/max ranks in all of those games and I've never lost because of time as I have in this game. I think adding another 10-20 seconds of time would do wonders. I do understand the need to punish slow play, but when you're trying to pilot a deck you're not familiar with especially at lower ranks having that little extra time is necessary.

As for controls, drag and dropping anything is wonky, and its the main way I play most of my games up to this point. Recently I have been opting to use right click to activate and play cards because thats more responsive, but if you are used to drag and dropping things with your mouse the game will fight you when you're trying to play cards at times.

Lastly I think which is the Largest elephant in the room is the grind for a viable deck. So, its clear most people hate the business model. I will be the first to say I'm not a fan of it either. After playing for about half a week, I have done every event to completion I have bought the battle pass, and I have also bought the little 1.59 pack to get you hooked on spending money on the game. I have exhausted every possible resource to build the perfect deck that is free. I'm still missing 2 legendary cards and a gold card. Since the game can no longer front load me with packs I have to wait weeks maybe even a month to get the ideal deck. I have no more event rewards, The story rewards are few I have only dailies left. at most I maybe only open 1 pack a day. Pokemon Pocket TCG at least lets me open 2 packs a day. That is insane.

F2P players are necessary for these TCGs to survive. I larger playerbase means more matches more matches will make the whales stay longer and spend more money. If F2P players cant even make a deck to contend against a whale or even a dolphin then whats the point? Why Play? You see real world examples of it in physical card games. No one wants to play with the guy who has the 1000 dollar deck when everyone is playing a 50 dollar budget deck. It's just not fun losing over and over and over again just because I guy spent more money than you. In card games sometimes you just can't out play a deck that simply out classes yours and thats a fact.

Ill say this Cygames can't have their cake and eat it too. If they wish their game to thrive they're going to have to make this game more accessible for new players. If they don't want people to own every card in the game day one? thats fine! I don't think any company does, but at least make it so that its easier to build at least 1 deck and make the slow grind for the rest of the set.

Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars is a particularly ambitious JRPG that takes on a card based format while taking an innovative departure from the classic JRPG format to better fit the genre of a tabletop RPG with engine building mechanics.

Voice of Cards as a whole is fairly enjoyable game, with amazing presentation and story telling, but unfortunately runs into some pitfalls in the form of imbalanced team building mechanics, lackluster item progression and lack of replayability.

Voice of Cards for me excelled in its playful way of story telling. The narrator always kept me engaged with the story, as the way the cards danced on the screen allowed me to fully visualize each individual scene. Pair that with the game's amazing sound track I wouldn't be hesitant to call this one of my favorite games of this year, but only from a visual stand point.

Personally Voice of Cards ends up lacking of the game play department. I find many people call this a spin on the classic JRPG genre. Which I guess that's true to some extent, but this game has the soul of a tabletop engine builder when it comes to setting up your skills and resource management with your gems. Finding the most optimal rotations to defeat your opponent. Instead of going too deep onto each and every issue with the game play I would rather make short bullet points.

1. Gear is lacking. Gear in the game are basically stat sticks and don't have any unique or interesting effects.
The only important stats being ATK, DEF, and SPD. Speed only being used to manipulate turn order between your characters for rotations. The only really important rings in the game are the frost ring and the seal ring, and these status effects only really come up often on the final boss.

2. Melanie is too good, and Mar is too weak. Without going terribly deep into this Melanie as a whole isn't strong, but their ability charge is too good not to implement into any party. I found it hard to play without it once I started to use and abuse it. Mar on the other hand doesn't offer anything significant to the party. Their damage isn't amazing and their tanking skills are pretty bad too.

3. Navigating shops suck. Even though beyond buying equipment I didn't need to buy items often for my playthroughs of the game. Navigating the item shop is a chore, buying more than one item at a time is insufferable at best.

4. Too many random encounters.

5. Repetitive and Badly Design Random Events. The first time you get random events through the game they feel pretty cool and organic through the first play through of the game, but in the second area of the game, The Bewildering Wood, you get to really see how repetitive these events can be. The Bewildering Wood alone only 2 events that can be cycled repetitively as you venture through the game on your first play through. The second event I think is terrible, is the drop the armor in the hole event. I never completed this event since I never had just random armor sitting in my inventory, and even if i had the armor on one of my characters the event wouldn't give me the option to drop the armor i was wearing into the hole.

6. Buffs and debuffs don't overlap..? This was a weird one for me. This made making skill sets harder since not just debuffs, but buffs weren't stackable. Not even if you tried an attack buff and a defense buff together.
This really made me had to try to see what was more attack or defense. (I think defense is better)

7, AoEs are useless. The game is designed to have a max of 3 on 3 fights. Unfortunately this makes all the AoEs in this game borderline useless. It tends to be more efficient to take out one enemy, to mitigate one attack rather than AoE all of your enemies just to not kill any of them and take 3 attacks to the face. Since AoEs in this game tend to either cost 4+ resources or if they're less than that only do slightly more than your character's base damage.

Lastly I'd like to address the game's replayability, or it's new game plus. Honestly, It's unnecessary. New game plus is so devoid of new content, you might as well just stop playing after the first play through. Choices you make in the game are rather linear, and only make a difference after the last boss fight. The only thing you get out of new game plus is a new set of dialogue from the white order trio after defeating them. Access to the Secret Boss, and one more hidden boss to get finish your equipment collection. Beyond that, there isn't much else besides the four different endings you can choose at the end.

Despite my critiques of the game I found Voice of Cards as a pretty enjoyable experience as a tabletop fan and a JRPG fan. I more critical in this post mostly because I wish the game can improve and for these kinks to be ironed out if Yoko Taro wishes to venture into this style of game once again, because I think stylized take on the JRPG genre should not be slept on.


I give this game a 7/10 and i'd reccomend it at it's current price point. I'd reccomend it even further once the price drops.