Card-en-Ciel Reviews

Amazing game with plenty of content to explore even post story and the builds in decks can be quite fun!

It's a tactical deck-building game. Pretty fun, but I don't think the heavy otaku themes are going to be to everyone's taste. Lots of reference to various galge and visual novels mostly flying over my head. Still, 5 hours flew by quite easily. I think if you enjoyed Slay the Spire and dig the otaku stuff, especially if you have nostalgia for games of the '00s and '10s, you'll have a great time. If you don't like that stuff, it's still a mechanically good game, but it's gonna be a bit like immersion therapy, I think.

This review contains no story spoilers, or gameplay spoilers beyond the demo and an extended but tagged discussion of a mechanic in the first third of the game. TLDR: The opposite direction of adapting MMBN from OSFE, taking speed in terms of turn count rather than reactions. Try it out! Its demo lets you try out about 2-4 hours worth of the game for free, with save transfer. It's a top-notch game with plentiful difficulty options and lots to do, as well as great music and one of my favorite gimmicks in the genres! Completed all of the base-game content, as well as a decent portion of post-release stuff. Despite what many reviewers might tell you, this game does actually take its Battle Network inspiration somewhat seriously, adopting a much faster pace than most other roguelike deckbuilders, but still having a turn based system. Don't expect the frantic nature of One Step From Eden, since you have all the time in the world to plan out your moves, meaning strategy is 100% the name of the game. However, just like Battle Network, your goal isn't just survival, it's blitzing foes down quickly as well. To help you accomplish this goal, Card-en-Ciel has 4 systems in place that work together quite well. 1: Wild Cards. Ever pulled a dud hand in Battle Network or OSFE and wished you had that one extremely overpowered card just this once? Well, now you can! You can bring in a deck of Wild Cards and forge a single copy of one of your choice per turn in battle, letting you tip the scales of luck quite drastically, or even gain access to cards that you normally wouldn't be able to in that area! Keep in mind, though, Wild Cards are disposable per dungeon visit. Later on, you'll be able to carry enough Wild Cards to summon one every turn of combat, making them very reliable! I like this system a whole lot, and if you've played Wizard101, it might feel familiar to you, as it's very similar to Treasure Cards. Do keep in mind, however, that you can't forge a Wild Card if your hand's full, and that can be a recurring issue! 2: Card archetypes. Every roguelike deckbuilder's gotta have 'em. In Card-en-Ciel, they're built with interplay in mind. For an example, Banish does what you'd expect, removing a card from play for the rest of the fight. However, if the target card has Suspend, it'll ignore the Banish, allowing you to use Banish cards without risk. Alternatively, if the target card has Reboot and isn't a forged copy of a card, it'll both ignore the Banish and activate Reboot, which will create a duplicate of the Reboot card! You can hover over a card at any time to see very exact explanations of what each card's keywords do to other cards, and there were very few times where jank interactions really confused me. 3: Cheat Codes. Similarly to OSFE, CeC takes a modular approach to upgrading cards, where each card has a list of possible perks it can provide. These vary from boosting their damage or break, to reducing the cost, to reducing the cost while damaging you (this can be a benefit), to forging other cards, to boosting the damage or break of your next damage or break card, to adding entirely new keywords to the card! You need to keep the cheats on your cards in mind, as oftentimes they completely change how a card functions! Heck, there's even an archetype that lets you add cheats onto your cards in the middle of battle! All copies of a card in play will continue to have the same cheats for the whole fight, whether they're in the discard or draw piles, or even if you forge another copy! You can get more permanent cheats on cards by either winning fights, or getting additional copies of the card that have cheats. 4: Muses. Ever since Mega Man Zero and Azure Striker Gunvolt released, Inti Creates has locked in on their specialty being "mecha and girls". And given this game's timely release on Lumen singer Megu Sakuragawa's 36th birthday, it's quite clear from the onset that they were aiming for a LOT of the latter. When you touch down in a dungeon, you're greeted with a Muse, labelled with an activation condition and an effect. These replace your Artifacts from OSFE or Relics from StS, your primary source of passive effects. Unlike those, [b]ALL[/b] Muses have an activation condition. Whether that be as simple as "Use 4 0-cost cards." or as specific as "Use 2 different sets of identical cards in one turn.", they all have varying degrees of reward for their difficulty of activation. With over 40 to collect, as well as cheats for them, you'll be hearing new tunes for a long time, and several of them will get stuck in your head. In addition to their built-in perks, they also give you a Skill Point to temporarily ramp up the power a single card. Speaking of, turns work in a subturn system, where each action ticks a counter down on all enemies before they take their next action, whether it be attacking, assisting other enemies, placing down hazardous terrain, messing with your hand, or otherwise hindering you. Enemies can run out of actions, just like you can. However, as mentioned earlier, you're scored at the end of each dungeon based on how many full turns you took to complete the dungeon, as well how many high-erosion panels you cleared out, and whether you fought the optional superboss in each one. This incentivizes you to take on more difficult foes and rush into more complicated fights to get a higher rank, and you want higher ranks, as getting higher ranks means access to higher difficulties in the same dungeon which means you can go for higher ranks in those difficulties to eventually go for the 3 Medal score in Hard +9 Difficulty. As you scale up in difficulty, however, each dungeon introduces more and more mechanics, meaning you won't get too bored of the same place too quickly. And if you're good enough, you can clear out each dungeon in 4 trips: One for Normal, one for Hard +3, one for +6, and one for +9. Good luck with that, as some of these dungeons really require that you step outside your comfort zone and strategize to come out on top (or get really lucky). Minor gameplay-only spoilers: [spoiler]Grand Battle Dungeons are one of the highlights of the game for me, though. They take most of the above and kick it all up to 11 by introducing 3 important rules. Rule 1: You bring in a deck consisting of every single card in your stock, meaning every card you've encountered on your journey, ever. This makes it dangerously inconsistent, but also considering the archetypes are all built around each other, this is also dangerously powerful. Rule 2: You bring in every muse you've ever encountered as well, and can activate all of them. This also means you have a steady stream of Skill Points to wreak havok with. Rule 3: Your cards are your HP. Every time you take damage, you drop cards. Every time you restore HP, you regain them. Your HP cap is your total card count. There's a limit to how many of each card you can bring in, so you don't end up with a deck of 600 Blade cards. This all culminates in a chaotic storm of strategizing around what each and every tool you've encountered is capable of at all times, which gets more and more satisfying as you gain more and more muses and cool cards and learn new card interactions. Overall, a massive highlight of the game, and a gimmick I wouldn't mind seeing parroted in other games.[/spoiler] As a wrap-up, quickfire notes: PvP: Cool idea, seems like a fun thing to do with friends who know the game about as much as you do, I don't exactly have that. Also dominated by 0 Cost. Daily Dungeons: Handled quite well, incorporating the difficulty options to encourages you to weigh your options on whether you want to go all in on a +9 gambit and risk getting blown away, or lower the challenge for a surefire path to victory? Update content: From what I've done, the update content is REALLY good. That's all from me. Character limit...

Underneath a lot of anime trope heavy, often cringe inducing dialogue, there's a surprisingly good card battler with a good amount of replayability. The muse system is interesting, and stacking buffs is incredibly satisfying when you draw the right cards.