The Card Battle: Eternal Destiny

Genre: Turn-Based Collectable Card Game

Players: 1

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Review:

The Card Battle: Eternal Destiny is a Turn-Based Collectable Card Game released on Steam in 2016 as Eternal Destiny: Animation Card Battle, and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021. It has players taking the role of an agent working for an organization researching ruins and trying to keep the peace between warring factions of humans, demons, and angels all competing to control Earth. Or at least, that seems like what’s going on here…

Yeah, The Card Battle has one of the worst localizations I’ve seen in a while. Stilted sentences, poor spelling, missing spaces that make for run-on words… this game’s text is almost painful to read. Yet the game wants you to be reading its horrible text a lot – this game has a lot of story it wants to push the players into, and even if it wasn’t for the atrocious localization, this would be pretty bad. It’s just a whirlwind of formulaic anime-inspired sci-fi terminology and various factions, races, and poorly-structured world-building that becomes tiresome pretty much immediately after the game starts, when you’re given a mind-reading aptitude test that you immediately pass despite doing nothing, saying nothing, and not even having any sort of introduction to your character.

The rest of the presentation doesn’t make things much better here, either. The anime-style artwork is decent but nothing special, and in a few places it even has cringe-worthy elements like crudely-animated boob bounce. As the very least, the electric guitar-heavy soundtrack is decently energetic, though it feels out of place here when it seems like little effort has been put into other elements of the presentation.

As for the gameplay, I can say that there seem to be some interesting ideas at play here. The battlefield has five slots available for your troops and five for the opponent’s, and slots have different properties that can enhance or reduce the strength of cards with different affinities. Players can also “evolve” their troops by stacking another card of the same type on it. Clearly some thought was put into the gameplay here.

Unfortunately, it’s all for naught, because any nuance this game has is thrown right into the garbage due to the terrible tutorial and lack of information conveyed to the player. Cards show the troops’ attack strength and health, but not their affinity nor any special bonuses they have – you have to individually pick each one up to inspect it for these, and when you do so you’ll be so overloaded with text that it’ll be difficult to make heads or tails of it.

There are also numerous mechanics here that are either poorly explained to the player, or not at all. If you’re fortunate enough to get a basic understanding of how the game works, odds are good your strategy will likely just devolve into one of brute strength, because any nuanced look at the cards is tedious and usually not worth the trouble anyway.

I suppose I should also mention the game’s nonexistent multiplayer, its good touchscreen integration, and how it is unclear which, if any, of the PC version’s 6 DLC expansions are included here… but honestly, does it even matter?

At $19, The Card Battle is a terrible mess of a game that has a few good ideas, but those ideas are buried under an atrocious localization, a sorely lacking tutorial, and a terrible presentation that makes it difficult to even tell what all of the cards actually do. Nintendo Switch players looking for a Collectable Card Game already have multiple better options, including the similarly-named free-to-play game Eternal: The Card Game. Or if you’re looking for something with a good anime-style story, there’s also Shadowverse: Champion’s Battle, which is better in virtually every way. As such, there is simply no good reason to get this game.

tl;dr – The Card Battle is a Collectable Card Game with an anime-style story and characters, and while it has a few interesting mechanics, those are completely outweighed by a horrible localization, terrible tutorial, and poor presentation that makes it a chore just to figure out what each card actually does. There are multiple better card games on Nintendo Switch. Don’t waste your time or money on this one.

Grade: D

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