Donerksela -Sacred Area- Reviews

[h1]My Goddess's Deck Has No Pathetic Cards[/h1] [h2]Story[/h2] There isn't much of a story here. Basically, your protagonist, Fatima, is the guardian priestess of a nation, Donerksela, and she must help them manage their resources in order to expand their population and increase her power. Sadly, we don't really get much more dialogue than that. Some of the choices can let you be more lenient when it comes to your citizens' workload, but that's about it. We also never learn what's up with the enemies that show up, but the last guardian apparently failed to defeat them. All we know is that once the final boss is defeated on week 90, your protagonist is able to become a goddess or maybe something worse depending on your alignment. Your alignment stat determines what your character will look like, but I have no idea if going for negative alignment significantly changes the story. It probably doesn't change much, since there's no cutscene for winning the game. Personally, I'd like to see how ascending to goddesshood affects Fatima's relationship with her citizens. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] As implied by the above section, the game is all about the resource management and card gameplay. You get a randomized board to build facilities on, and each tile has a preset type of facility you are allowed to build, but some cards allow you to override that restriction. Each facility also has durability that you have to look out for, though at high levels, you might not have to worry about that durability outside of friendly fire with your offensive cards. You generate a certain amount of resources each week depending on your facilities, so try to strike a balance so that you have every resource you need. However, to ensure you can't do a ton of stuff in one week, you have a set amount of EP that gets refilled each week. But what exactly are you spending resources on? Food is spent to increase your population, wood is spent to increase your population cap, gold is spent on passives in the study menu, fuel is spent on repairs and manipulating your hand of cards, and ore is spent on facility upgrades. Passive skills in the study require almost all types of resources, and the nodes you can upgrade are randomized, though you can spend more resources to change a node to something else. Enemies can inflict debuffs on you to slow down your resource production and they will also take up tiles on the map. Worse yet, they can attack your population, causing a game over if your population is wiped out. Because of this, you may want to store up some offensive cards while lowering the enemy spawn rate in the study menu. However, you still need some enemies to show up if you want to farm money for the shop. As for the bosses, which appear every 30 weeks, they have a lot of HP, clear all your resources, and deal massive population damage, but if you win, you get to pick a powerful relic to add a strong passive for the rest of the run. You can gain EXP and manipulate your alignment score to evolve Fatima into her next form. I'm not sure how this affects gameplay outside of aesthetics though. I think some transformations increase the number of card slots, which can help with stockpiling offensive cards. Evolution also unlocks the game animation speed setting in the options menu, but it feels wrong to hide such a feature behind game progress. [h2]Verdict[/h2] 7/10 Once you get a hang of the mechanics, a casual run is fairly well-balanced, though the beginning of the game will be the hardest due to your lack of EP and card slots. Towards the end, you should have so many resources and passive buffs that you actually will feel like a goddess. Unfortunately, the game doesn't have much of a story and the translation is terrible, which makes it harder to learn from the tutorials and in-game manual. Maybe this would be better as a phone game considering how the gameplay loop works.