Welcome back to Save State where patience oftentimes pays off. Finding interesting RPGs to play can be expensive, especially if the developer or publisher is Square Enix. But every so often you can find some of their games bundled together with a nice discount. Voice of Cards recently put its entire trilogy on sale over on the Steam platform at a pretty deep discount, and I figured it was finally time to pull the trigger to experience these RPGs. I generally tend to love RPGs that adopt a tabletop aesthetic, like Crimson Shroud on the 3DS, so Voice of Cards seemed right up my alley.

Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars is the first entry in this little RPG series. In this title, everything is depicted for the player using cards and the voice of the Game Master. The GM begins weaving a tale of a dragon that threatens a kingdom, and you’ll navigate this world by moving a figurine across a map that’s made up of cards. While you explore the world, you can speak to NPCs, use vendors to shop for items, or encounter random events.

While in unexplored areas the cards that make up the topography will be turned face down, kind of like fog of war, and stepping adjacent to them reveals your surrounding squares. Exploring will let you discover treasure chests, events, or random battles while in the field. There is also a fast travel system of sorts since you can use the right analog stick to jump to any space you’ve previously revealed, which saves a ton of time once you’re on the world map.

Combat in Voice of Cards is a simple turn-based system where turns are decided in order of speed, and you can choose 1 attack per turn for each of your characters. Your party members learn new skills as they level, each having a basic attack that consumes no resources, and learning several new abilities that may consume 1 or more gems. Each of your turns, you’ll automatically acquire 1 gem, which is the resource your characters consume to use their more powerful skills. Your primary strategy in combat is going to revolve around determining when it’s most important to save up the gems you get each turn to perform a big attack, heal, or other defensive moves.

Each combatant’s attack, health, and defense stats are shown on the bottom of their card, which can help you figure out at a glance how much of your resources you’ll need to take out an enemy. You can also improve the stats of your characters by buying or finding weapons, armor, and accessories throughout your journey and can carry up to 30 items that you can use in battle as well. Of course, utilizing buffs, debuffs, status ailments, and striking any elemental weaknesses of your enemies is the quickest way to ensure victory in battle.

You’ll be engaging in combat a lot in Voice of Cards, but the real winner here is the presentation of the story. Many side characters get their own back stories you can uncover by reading their flip-card stories, and the main tale itself begins with a simple dragon-slaying quest that spirals into something far larger to defeat some enemies behind the scenes. A lot of the story developments are simple enough if you’re familiar with JRPGs as a whole, but there were some plot twists that I encountered in The Isle Dragon Roars that I genuinely wasn’t expecting. There are multiple endings as well, and if you want the best one you need to make sure that you’re interacting with everybody and everything.

The characters in the first Voice of Cards entry are greatly memorable too. Your protagonist character, whom you can name whatever you want (I named him Dingus), aspires to be a great hero who slays the dragon and saves the kingdom. He’s joined by Mar, a mascot character who is more than what he seems to be on the surface, and Melanie, a witch who hates dragons so much she’s willing to throw her lot in with the woefully unprepared Dingus. You also meet Bruno, by far the funniest character, and Ridis, who is riddled with debt and needs to slay the dragon to get wealthy quick. Each character gets their own little bits of story, and they even get their own flip-card stories to give you greater insight into them too.

Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars is by no means lengthy at around 12 to 15 hours, which is pretty short for a JRPG. For this title, however, that seemed to be about the perfect length, with the max level being 30. There wasn’t much of a need to grind out experience for additional levels either, though I never ran from any random encounters- you may need to level grind if you run away or use a ring to skip random battles, of course. Those who enjoy exploring can find additional skills for their characters from events, new weapons, armor, and all sorts of items.

The story for The Isle Dragon Roars is by no means as dark as the usual things creative director Yoko Taro has worked on in the past, but there are still some elements where you can see his influence. The gorgeous character artwork by Kimihiko Fujisaka (who you may better know from Drakengard, Nier, The Last Story, and Fire Emblem Heroes) compliments the card-based world design and really helps sell that this is a tabletop game you’re playing inside of a video game. The music is very similar to what you’d hear from in titles like Nier, with maybe slight Irish elements to several of the tunes. Just about everything audio-visual in The Isle Dragon Roars is pleasing, so there is a lot to enjoy if you like classic JRPGs.

Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars has a unique aesthetic and presentation but otherwise plays very similarly to classic SNES JRPGs. The story is well designed and wonderfully portrayed despite the simplistic presentation style, and the visuals and sound design complement the unique approach to classic JRPGs. The narrator (the GM) delivers lines with such a convincing cadence that you’ll see the actions described portrayed in your head. The lack of need to grind, along with a balanced difficulty curve, would make this a wonderful entry into JRPGs with a classic feel but wholly unique visual flair.

With all that said, I think this is a good time to bring this entry of Save State to a close. Remember, your Weebles may wobble, but they don’t have to fall down. Most will consider it rude if you force them to do so. See you in two weeks!