Card-en-Ciel

 

Review by · October 21, 2024

As RPG players, we traverse myriad different worlds, yet we can recognize there’s a sameness to it all. Sometimes, we are surprised by something that’s new and amazing, but we’re also creatures of comfort and appreciate settling in with something familiar. Card-en-Ciel takes you on a journey through many worlds that might stir good memories of worlds you’ve visited before in your life. As a roguelike and card-collecting game, it offers both something familiar and something unfamiliar. But is this new world another one that’s worth visiting?

The partitions between games have been breaking down because of the proliferation of Mad Obstructive Data (MODs), but thankfully, Neon Nanashiki, who fashions himself as the Gaming Chair Detective (don’t we all?), is on the case to solve the mystery of why and put a stop to it. To do so, he and his extremely friendly assistant Ancie enter all of these game worlds virtually to collect partition data to make those worlds safer. Truth be told, if an entire story could be word salad, this one might be that, but what might be of more interest are the stories to be discovered in each game within the game.

From their description and name, many of those games might sound like something you’ve played before, though a couple are from Inti Creates’ other franchises. There’s the Yggdrasil Records series, which is so popular that even non-gamers are aware of it. It somehow always revolves around a sacred tree, which is the only tie between them all. Gamers widely consider Yggdrasil Records IX to be the best of them. There may be dragons in this quest. So, you dive into the code of these games in search of partition data, which is typically held by the game’s protagonist. Much of the entertainment in Card-en-Ciel comes from the descriptions of these parodies of real-world games, most of which is divulged through conversations between Neon and Ancie as you explore the code of each world.

Characters battle on a grid in Card-en-Ciel.
Battles are best and silliest when the grid gets crowded.

Card-en-Ciel is a roguelike, so you’re constantly pushing your luck to improve your deck of cards, which you battle with, trying to improve enough to eventually beat the boss. If you lose, however, you have to start a mission over, retaining basically nothing. As you’re hacking into the code of each of these games, there’s a grid with three floors, which you’re free to traverse how you want in a more open fashion than most roguelikes, getting into fights along the way. You’re rarely explicitly forced to fight, but fighting is the only way to improve your deck, and the basic cards you start each game with aren’t going to cut it. Unfortunately, though sometimes the descriptions of these game worlds are colorful and thought-provoking, remember that you’re only exploring the code of each, each time manifested as the same gray grid, which is what you get to look at for most of the game.

Battles are turn-based and tactical, taking place on a 3×6 horizontal grid. You start with three action points, which determine which and how many cards you can play in a turn before the enemy goes. Cards have both an action and a movement ability, though you only get to choose one of those options. Basic cards allow you to attack, damaging enemies or reducing their break. Break is Card-en-Ciel’s stagger system. If you can reduce it to zero, your enemies will be stunned, and your attacks will do double damage until the end of the turn. Meanwhile, each enemy has a counter meter, which ticks down by one with each card you play, attacking you when it hits zero. Thankfully, you can see which squares will be hit by the attacks before they occur. Thus, as you’re blasting your opponent with powerful cards, you need to keep an eye on the counter meters and make sure you’re able to move out of the way to avoid the damage. Of course, the cards get progressively more advanced, doing much more than simply attacking, allowing you to set up combos to put together devastatingly powerful attacks.

One of the cooler parts of exploration and combat is collecting muses. These are powerful characters in their respective worlds, whose songs override the standard background music when you’re in their vicinity. If you defeat them, you gain their abilities, which manifest when you meet certain battle conditions. Beyond the practical effects they bestow, they bring their performances into battle, their songs bombastically taking control of the sonic landscape in a moral victory. And those songs are all bops.

A character shouts in a cutscene in Card-en-Ciel
The characters on the cards are where Card-en-Ciel stores its character.

As you gain more cards with each battle, the amount of strategy you can utilize is limited. You can’t easily edit your deck, and every card you gain goes into it. If you want to remove cards to make it more efficient, you have to get lucky or take some clever steps. With every battle you win, another card is tossed onto an ever-growing pile that can easily balloon to massive and unwieldy proportions. Each turn of a battle is tactical, in that you must put your hand of typically five cards to use in the most optimal way. But with how much junk winds up in your deck, there’s no way to manage it and no human way to mentally keep track of every card that’s going in there. Incidentally, the descriptions on a few cards are so convoluted, it’s hard to understand what their actual effect is. There are ways to boost your advantages in battles, but it’s difficult to play the long game through working on your deck.

When you get to the Grand Dungeons, in which you have a deck containing every card you’ve ever collected throughout the entire game to that point, numbering in the hundreds, it’s evident that the game is more about the spectacle than a thinky experience. In Grand Dungeon battles, you routinely trigger multiple muses each turn, their entrance cutscenes playing one right after the other, each song almost instantly cutting off the previous one. In part, it’s that Disgaea mindset of trying to pull off the most ridiculously overpowered attack that you can. In Card-en-Ciel, that means using abilities to pull ten cards into your hand, each with three buffs on them, constantly refreshing your play limit so you continually keep playing more cards in a never-ending turn. That sort of game has its appeal, for sure, but overall, there’s less of a game here than at first glance.

Then, combined with the story and its metastories, Card-en-Ciel becomes challenging to rate. Don’t get me wrong, the send-ups of RPGs and RPG-adjacent games are fun, and some, like the adult visual novel about a man who only likes 100-foot-tall women (and it gets even weirder from there), are absolutely hilarious. Also, some of the stories are cleverly, though abstractly, told through the cards you collect, each representing a character from one of those game worlds. But the main story itself is a pastiche of a growing genre — cyberdetective games. Neon and Ancie are just two gamers hanging out and chatting about their favorites; their budding romance is almost sweet at times, but too often, it devolves into waifu tropes. The villainous plot is one you’ve seen plenty of times, but here it feels even less impactful. While the humor of spoofing on other games is fantastic, it’s often simply referencing traits that vaguely resemble those games without having anything meaningful to say about them. And Card-en-Ciel doesn’t have much to offer in its own main narrative.

A character explores the grid in Card-en-Ciel.
Unfortunately, this shot alone is the vast majority of what you see in Card-en-Ciel. (Better make sure it’s not burned into my monitor…)

Beyond the gray blandscapes of the innards of games, Card-en-Ciel doesn’t do much visually aside from being shiny. The characters aren’t ugly, but they are generic. To be fair, that fits in with the spoofs of games that they represent, but again, they’re just kind of empty. For controls, a controller works just fine, though I wouldn’t see much difference with a keyboard and mouse instead.

As you may guess by now, music plays a crucial role in Card-en-Ciel, and the many earworms that run the gamut of J-Pop archetypes in Card-en-Ciel have been competing for space in my head. For the main story, the voice acting is more energetic in Japanese, though for the hundreds of characters represented on cards, hearing their English voices are a must. Though they only get one-liners, the actors exaggeratedly and humorously drive home the mood of whatever story they’re from.

Card-en-Ciel spoofs so hard, it spoofs itself, and doesn’t have much left to give after that. There’s plenty of entertainment to be found in the game, but it comes at the cost of not having much to offer as a game experience. While hints of cleverness pop up here and there, they’re scant cover for the emptiness in Card-en-Ciel‘s soul. There’s something to be said about self-awareness of one’s limitations, but that doesn’t erase the limitations themselves.


Pros

Music and its implementation are cool, voice acting breathes life into characters on cards, parodies of games consistently humorous, feels good to pull off big combos.

Cons

Boring visuals especially during exploration, cardplay lacking definition, overall empty feeling while playing.

Bottom Line

As largely a spoof, Card-en-Ciel succeeds at being funny, even hilarious, but once you get past that, there's not much left to dig into.

Graphics
70
Sound
85
Gameplay
72
Control
75
Story
67
Overall Score 70
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Abraham Kobylanski

Abraham Kobylanski

Abe's love for RPGs began when picked up Earthbound for the SNES in 1995, and it hasn't gone out since. He grew up with the classic 16-bit RPGs, like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasies, though he's gravitated more toward Western and Strategy RPGs lately. His passion for the genre was especially reinvigorated in the past few years with amazing games like FFVII:R, Persona 5 and Yakuza: LAD. He's always on the hunt for cool, smaller obscure games as well.