Sound of Cards: Island of the Dragon Roar

A complete D&D-esque adventure in blackjack. Something innovative is no longer obvious these days. The world of this game was developed under the banner of Square Enix. The game landed with Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy on consoles. Can the game still put itself in the spotlight despite its busy release period?

Adventurers in white

At the beginning of the game, you play as a group of three adventurers dressed in white. The game explains how it all works. You will quickly notice that you leave monsters easily and that you are actually playing with a group that already has a lot of experience. After their adventure in the dungeon, they return to the mansion.

In the palace there is a summons to find and defeat a dragon. Lots of adventurers take on this task and are looking for a group. Control lies with your character: the man who, along with the monster, Mar, will receive the reward by killing the dragon. You are looking for a partner who can accompany you on your way, but due to your attitude and the fact that you are on the road with a monster, other characters prefer to stay away from you.

Coincidentally, you meet someone and begin your adventure to become a real dragon slayer.

Not everything is as it seems

There are some minor plot twists in the game. For example, the game starts with three defeated heroes while at the end you play with a novice adventurer. Later in the game, more and more of these plot twists appear. There is also a story to unlock for every NPC (or monster) you encounter. This story has two parts: If you meet a certain condition, you unlock the other side of the story. These stories are often dark and make you look at NPCs and monsters in a different way. Sometimes also with pity for those poor orcs.

Standard RPG with random factor

The battles are simple. Each enemy has a specific item as a weak point. There are a lot of elements in the game such as wind, bolt, fire, and light. We know this from other RPGs. The battles consist of turn-based combat in which you receive a mana stone in each turn to be able to achieve certain special attacks.

In addition, you have the offensive power of your character and the defensive power of your enemies. With another chance to score critical hits, another random item is thrown into the battles. Some attacks also require a dice and your attack can deal more damage or do something special.

So there isn’t much to say about the fight. What I mainly regret is that the damage is not always the same. I’m not talking about dice here, but if your character has an attack power of 10 and the enemy has a defense power of 8, you can sometimes do 1 damage, sometimes 2, sometimes 3, or sometimes simply 0. Know well.

I also found it surprising that you don’t find monsters’ weaknesses anywhere in the game. We see it more and more in modern RPGs like Pokémon and Octopath Traveler that when you know an enemy’s weakness, it becomes permanent. With Pokémon we can still argue because every Pokémon has a type (or several) and these have hypothetical weaknesses. Here you just have to know them by heart and continue to experiment. This gives me an old feeling. As if the game doesn’t really go with the times.

It’s in the cards

The game is made entirely in cards. And I really mean everything. Options you choose in Dialogs, Cities, NPCs, Conversations, and Items. Really everything. Since the game is a simple standard RPG, I think it’s a missed opportunity. Well, it is original to depict everything in maps. As a true fan of card games, I was instantly sold on this aspect, but they do nothing with it. You do not have to collect cards and use them in a deck or the like. You will find a sword and you must exchange it for the sword in your gear. So there is nothing special.

Storytelling

The entire story is told by the Game Master. This is the person who is actually sitting in front of you. The choices you make in random events or in conversations always have consequences. It is similar to a D&D adventure. You play on a board with characters and during a certain event, to make something work, you have to roll a certain number of eyes out of a dice or normal 20. The voice acting is good and the same person always talks to you, like a real D&D adventure.

You always have the option to go back to previous dialogues in the conversation. However, the narrator continues to speak until his dialogue ends, which is rather strange and not well developed.

The arcade game inside the arcade game?

To make things even more silly, there is also a card game that you can play in this game, which is made entirely of cards. In the game, you have to collect pairs of monster cards that have a numerical value from 1 to 10 and also a character for each of them, just like a normal card game. You can tweak the rules a bit so that you can play with or without monster powers and with a certain number of players.

From this mini game, there is also an option to play it online against other players. Other than that, the game is completely single player.

conclusion

The story is a standard fantasy adventure with humor built in, which is good for RPGs. However, the game made it look like something unique from the outside, using only cards, but inside the game it’s just a regular RPG like any other in terms of gameplay. There are a lot of these RPGs that do much better than sound cards. This RPG looks outdated due to the missing small – but important – elements, which modern RPGs have.

The fact that the game is also an RPG and has done nothing more than being entirely made up of cards is a disappointment. As a standard RPG, the game performs well, but the game lacks a number of things to set itself apart from other RPGs.