Neverland Card Battles for PSP Reviews by Gamers

I'll give Japanese developer Idea Factory some serious props for continuing to pump out games from their Neverland universe. There's been no shortage of these games released for the PS2 and PSP in Japan, and despite the titles enjoying only modest success over there (and even less here), there still seems to be a keen interest from publishers such as NIS America and now the North American publishing operations of Yuke's in bringing the titles over.



Problem is, Idea Factory's games, as a general rule of thumb, aren't the most technically advanced games on the PS2, much less the PSP, and at least in the case of its early PSP efforts, things were a horrid mess of unoptimized code and excess loading that made just interacting with menus a chore. It's gotten better (to a degree), but it's obvious the devs still don't really understand the hardware -- not enough to make Neverland Card Battles, their latest tromp through the Neverland universe, a smooth experience.



If nothing else, NCB at least tries to be a different kind of strategy role-playing game. It's card-based, which is a smart way to help guide a game by defining simple rules early on and then allow the range of cards and their abilities to provide the depth and strategy in things. Unfortunately, some rather bizarre choices in the overall design and, yes, technical issues hamper what may well have been something interesting but is instead mostly frustrating. Gluttons for punishment may enjoy the fact that the initial battle in the game essentially gives you hints about what you're supposed to do but doesn't actually explain them. It's not so much a tutorial level as a general "hey, uh, do this" set of dialogue lines and incredibly low-detail "instructions" on how to play things. Imagine playing baseball for the first time, someone handing you a bat and a glove and then going, "Eh, you figure it out."



So, a few failed attempts at mustering the enthusiasm to start and finish the tutorial battle (plus actually losing it the first time I played) made actually getting into Neverland Card Battles rather arduous. Once I did finally start plugging through the missions, however... well, things pretty much stuck with those first impressions. The AI, even early on, is rather merciless and makes what seems like perfect deck draws every turn.



This by itself isn't a bad thing. After all, there's really no better way to get better at strategy than to have an opponent that doesn't really pussyfoot around a clash, but the blasé attitude the game takes toward teaching you even the basics adds to the whole trial-and-error feel. The cards themselves can be fairly varied, offering everything from attack spells to monsters that can be summoned and used to fight either your opponent or, more likely, his own summoned creatures to restorative effects and skills that you or your units can use.



That's all well and good, and the core of any good card game is variety and a strict reliance on the base rules to keep it all even. Thing is, NCB is something of a mixture of three different styles of game. You've got your cards for determining what actions you can take per turn based on how they're drawn from your deck (of which multiple types can be built, named and saved to slots, and taken into battle), but there's something of an element of Go (or more accurately Othello) in that you're trying to capture parts of the movement grid, which helps build your currency for using cards. On top of all this, there's the basic turn-based bit of strategy that guides things like where you can move and your attack radii.



The card-based side of things is decent enough. Every card has a basic cost associated with it, so moving around and capturing parts of the map is absolutely crucial (as is managing captured spaces and trying to limit the opponent's stock), but there's also a cost paid for having the cards in hand at the end of things. Budgeting all this stuff at once is something of a headache -- mainly because the AI will constantly attempt to gain new ground, but it adds an extra wrinkle of strategy to each of the turns, and for that, I can hardly fault the game.



I can however, give it plenty of crap for the bizarro choice of allowing both units to act during a combat situation -- even if the first person to attack effectively strikes a killing blow. The damage tallies are only counted after both units thump on each other. This effectively removes the ability to make desperation attacks with your main character or one of your summoned units that would normally remove an enemy unit or main player (dubbed "Dominators" in NCB's parlance).



Though it gets somewhat better as more powerful units are added to a deck, there's a lot of pointless cancelling out of units that takes place. When coupled with the need to often re-capture spaces after a unit has moved around to scoop them up before it and the unit it's attacking off each other, and the fact that moving distance is usually limited to just a few squares (though there are ways to augment this) means there's quite a bit of busy work needed even early on.



All this detracts from what should have been the star of the game: the cards. When talking about your deck, Neverland Card Battles doesn't disappoint. Especially with the fairly basic nature of Idea Factory's other titles, the art for the cards is detailed, often quite imaginative and wholly enjoyable on the PSP's screen. The rest of the game? Eh, not so much. The battles in the game are quite honestly on the level of the stuff seen in the old Shining Force games (though the sprites are hardly as detailed), with two or three frames of animation for the whole attack. The sprites on the grid are minimally animated, and though the backgrounds sport some decent detail, none of it comes close to the time and attention spent on the cards themselves.



The voice acting and localization, not surprisingly, aren't exactly on par with some of the stuff seen from, say, NIS or Atlus, but it's passable. The music, likewise, is decent and at least doesn't grate too much, but it's not especially hummable once you've turned off your PSP either. The sound effects, on the other hand, are pretty universally basic, and for whatever reason, an insanely annoying buzzer sounds whenever you back out of menus -- which is necessary to do things like enter combat or end a turn.

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