Card-en-Ciel

Genre: Turn-Based Card RPG / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

Card-en-Ciel, released in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, is a Turn-Based Card RPG Roguelike that is clearly strongly inspired by the Mega Man Battle Network series. However, there are multiple key differences that set this game apart and make it play drastically differently than Capcom’s franchise.

The core premise of the game is that players take the role of Neon, a self-styled “gaming chair detective” who finds himself using VR to go inside an unreleased game working alongside the game’s developer named Ancie, who is struggling with a problem from an invasion of malware called MODs (Mad Obstructive Data) that… you know what? I’m going to stop. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with game development or even just videogames in general will see this entire setup as complete nonsense, as if someone handed a bunch of videogame and hacker terms and tropes to someone who maybe watched a few episodes of Reboot decades ago and then made them hash together some semblance of a story.

This isn’t to say that videogame stories must be realistic – certainly Mega Man Battle Network’s story wasn’t. However, those stories should at least be in service to decent characters and plot lines, and I just don’t see that here – Neon and Ancie spend more time talking about plots of the fictional videogames whose data has invaded Ancie’s game than they do actually revealing who they are and what their own deal is.

There’s a general feeling of “just toss it in” here, making for an inconsistent jumble of elements that doesn’t always work well together. To give you an idea, each of the cards you play has a little character voice clip that plays when you select it in a menu, or when that card first goes into your hand, and some of the female characters’ voice clips are… kinda’ suggestive. “Struggling to keep your eyes off me?”, “Is this the sort of stuff you’re into?” “Whatever he wants, I want”, “there is nothing wrong with having your own desires”… I’d expect this kind of stuff from an ecchi game, but this isn’t that, even if the character art for female characters is pretty over-the-top pandering.

And yet, at the same time, you have cutesy animal characters, guys in business suits, monsters… I get that the premise is that multiple games’ characters have somehow invaded this game, but everything uses the same art style, and there’s no indication of any particular world any of these characters comes from.

Don’t get me wrong, the character art here is really nice, making use of a colorful anime art style. However, I should note that I think that other areas of the presentation really suffer here – dungeons are little more than a plain-looking grid against a static background image, and while this reflects to some extent what we saw in the Mega Man Battle Network series, those games at least added variety by having such spaces contrasted with real-life locales to walk through and explore. Not so here. At the very least, the soundtrack here is good, with a decent selection of anime-style J-Pop themes, like Breaking the World, Thirsty, Lamb’s Requiem, and Embrace the Sky.

Okay, but after all that talk about story and presentation, let’s get to the meat of the game, the actual gameplay.

Battles in Card-en-Ciel look pretty similar to those in the Mega Man Battle Network series – you fight on a three-by-three grid on the left side of the screen against one or more enemies on their own three-by-three grid. You’ll be moving around on this grid to evade attacks while trying to line up your own attacks so they hit enemies.

What’s different here is that everything is turn-based, so you actually have time to stop and think about which of the cards you’ve been dealt to use. These cards represent your attacks, as well as support moves, summon moves to bring a helper character onto your grid with you, and “break” moves that reduce enemy attack power and eventually put the enemy in a weakened state where they take greater damage from attacks. Each card has a separate cost, and players will need to discard their hand and draw a new one to replenish the points used to play these cards.

Movement in Card-en-Ciel doesn’t come freely. Each card has a corresponding direction tied to it, and players can generally only move when discarding a card to use this movement instead of playing the card for its ability. This means that you’ll have to carefully consider whether to use a really good card for its ability when it’s the only one that can move you out of the way of an incoming attack.

Enemies have countdowns that tick down every time you use or discard a card, and their forecasted attacks activate whenever those countdowns reach zero, and also when you draw a new hand of cards. So players will need to be aware of not only what cards to hold on to in order to discard them for movement, but also how many actions away the enemy attack is so they can dodge away in time to avoid it.

In addition to all of this, players can fight and then acquire muse cards that are not played but remain in the background adding a passive bonus once you meet the conditions in a battle required to activate them. Plus there are action cards that can be used when you’re about to be attacked to time a button press to avoid said attack. There are specific card abilities that refer to other abilities, and enemy moves that place hazards on the board or junk cards in your hand… suffice it to say, there’s a lot to take in here.

This ends up being one of the game’s biggest issues – this game does a poor job conveying information to the player, and it’s not always clear how cards will interact. While you can enable pop-ups that explain the meaning of specific terms, overall this game does a poor job conveying information to the player, meaning that when you try something and it doesn’t work, or works in a way you didn’t expect, it’s difficult to figure out exactly why things happened that way. This might be partly the fault of an overly-lengthy and information-heavy tutorial early on in the game, and Card-en-Ciel may have been better-served parceling out that information in shorter spurts throughout the game.

Overall, I think Card-en-Ciel is kinda’ a mess. It absolutely has good elements, and when you get a run that lets you piece together a killer deck it can make for an amazing feeling. But you’ll also find yourself in runs where your deck isn’t quite working and it’s not clear why. Add to this a ton of exposition about fake videogame stories that have nothing to do with the game or its characters, an erratic mix of presentation elements that don’t always make sense and include some suggestive content that may make the game seem a bit awkward, and it results in a chaotic mix of good and bad stuff that definitely feels like it could have been refined a great deal more. Fans of Roguelike Card Games with a lot of patience may enjoy this, but most are better off sticking to other entries in the genre.

tl;dr – Card-en-Ciel is a Turn-Based Card RPG and Roguelike loosely inspired by Mega Man Battle Network. There is some fun and creative gameplay here, but there are also a lot of confusing gameplay mechanics, pacing problems, and a mishmash of presentation elements that don’t always work well together. The result is a game that fans of this style of game may still want to try out, but that most players are better off skipping in favor of better-designed entries in the genre.

Grade: C+

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best RPG, Best Card/Board/Dice Game

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