Card Hero: Gameboy Game Review & Description of Play

Trade & Battle "Card Hero" is a trading card battle video game released on 21 Feb 2000 by Nintendo of Japan. The game is compatible with both the Color Gameboy and the old monochrome Gameboy.

The game puts the player in a world where "Card Hero" the card game is becoming the latest hit in town. The player character is a little primary school boy who is just picking up the card game. He gets some money to buy cards, and then plays in matches to win "medals" which can be used as money for buying more cards. Eventually some bad guys show up, and the player needs to defeat them in the card game in order to return peace to the town. After that, the player can keep playing against a collection of computer opponents, and continue winning medals for buying more cards. One can also trade and battle with another player who has the game using the Gameboy link cable. Evidently, the story is infantile, shallow and inadequate, but this is not too important for a card game: the core game play is.

One excellent feature of this game is the step-by-step approach. The player begins by playing a watered-down version of the game. As he progresses, more rules and elements are added gradually. This makes the game very easy to grasp, even by players new to trading-card games. It is pretty easy to pick up the game by playing (if one knows Japanese), but in order to give a picture of how the game plays like to inquisitive readers who don't have the game, please excuse the following rather long description.

The game system is reasonably innovative, and is quite interesting with a fair amount of strategy. Each player is represented in the game by the master, who has some number of hit points (5 HP, for the initial "junior" rules). Each player begins the game with 5 cards. The players take turns; on a player's turn, he draws one card and receives three stones (magical energy), and then he can play cards, and his monsters can attack.

There are four spaces around the master, on which the player can summon monsters, as per the following diagram:

    x   x
    x 2 x
    o 1 o
    o   o

A face-up monster can attack once per turn. (Alternatively, it can move instead of attacking.) There are front-row monsters and back-row monsters. The typical front-row monster has around 5 HP, and a 2-power attack which can be used against an adjacent (including diagonally adjacent, i.e. the enemy master) target. Many of them also have a secondary attack, with some special effect often at the expense of a few stones. The typical rear-row monster has around 3 HP, and a 0-power primary attack with a 2-power secondary attack (with a low stone cost of 0 or 1) which can be used to hit targets farther away.

Looking at the damage and HP figures, one can see that it is pretty easy to destroy a monster. For example, if you concentrate your fire on an enemy front-row monster from your adjacent front-row monster and both of your rear-row monsters, you can take it out in one turn. On the other hand, the master is far tougher because he is inherently protected by a shield which can absorb up to 2 power per attack. In other words, if you just summon a few power 2 monsters and bash at him, all your attacks will bounce harmlessly off his shield. In order to penetrate the shield, one needs to raise the power to 3 or more, and there are several ways to do this.

Most monsters can "level up" by defeating another monster. When your monster deals the killing blow to another monster, you can raise its level by lending it another stone. Many monsters have a power of 3 or more at level 2, and they can attack and damage the enemy master. Another important effect is that when a monster levels up, it recovers all its HP.

A monster which ends a turn without attacking (or moving) becomes charged. If attacked, the charge is expended to deflect 1 power. If it is not attacked until the player's next turn, the charge will add 1 power to its primary attack (once), and this enables a monster otherwise with a power of 2 to damage the master.

There are also monsters which can penetrate the shield right away, usually at the expense of a few stones. Besides monster cards, there are also spell cards, and some of them can deal direct damage to the enemy master. Spell cards cost stones to use.

At the start of a player's turn, if he has a monster on his back row without a monster in the space in front of him, the monster is automatically shifted forward. Thus by defeating the monster in front of a back row monster, one can hamper the latter's activity. Another tactic which makes use of this rule is to summon a front row monster on your back row and let it "charge" up. When the monster in front is removed, the charged up monster is shifted to the front, from where it can hit the enemy master for 1 damage. (In this game, it is often somewhat difficult to attack the opponent's back row.)

In order to try to maintain a close match, damage received by the master automatically becomes stones for the player's use. Also, all stones lent to a monster are retrieved when the monster is destroyed. Thus a player who is in a disadvantageous on-board position tends to have more stones at his disposal. This is a nice system, and it doesn't overdo it or make it totally pointless to gain a lead (which is a problem in the "reversal" rules of many games).

After the player has got some familiarity with the basic rules, more elements are added. A Super card allows the corresponding monster to level up beyond its normal maximum level. For example, Kowairu, a skeleton fighter, has a power of 2 at level 1 and power 3 at level 2. If it kills an enemy when it is already at level 2, and the player has the Super card Wairudaa in his hand, it may level up to level 3, which has 5 power and thus can do 3 damage to the enemy master per turn. A monster may also level up to level 3 directly from level 1 by defeating a level 2 monster. A Super card may be tricky to get into play, but once it shows up, it can often decide the game unless it is quickly dealt with.

After defeating the bad guys and clearing the story part, the player earns the option of playing with magic masters. A magic master has some inherent spells which he can use without a spell card, and he can also attack adjacent units (usually, the enemy front row monsters). Both of these cost stones. Using a magic master changes the game significantly, as you won't be left with a large excess of stones without a good way to use them, since you are given ways to spend them without the need of cards. The magic master match is called the "senior" game while the former game is called the "junior" game; both of these rules use a 20-card deck and a master with 5 HP. Eventually the player gains access to the "pro" game, which uses a 30-card deck and a magic master with 10 HP.

Overall, the game system is quite polished and playable. Thanks to the online tutorial, it is painless to grasp the rules. The twist with the master's inherent shield keeps the game from being too bloody a race of straight material, although it sometimes makes for a rather slow-paced game. Also, the master's shield combined with the rule that a "preparing" monster cannot be attacked creates some unintuitive situations where your monsters are deprived of useful things to do, although the "charge" rule compensates for that a little bit.

The player is limited to 3 of each type of card in a deck. Other than this restriction, there is (until a certain stage; read on) a fair amount of freedom in deck construction, as there are no indispensible mana or energy cards, and the player is not restricted to playing within a certain color or suit as in many other trading-card games. This also gives a good balance between luck and skill. (The requirement for mana cards tends to result in a high luck factor.) The only cards which have certain other cards as an absolute prerequisite are the Super cards; all other cards are (supposedly) accessible to the player regardless of the rest of his deck, so the player can freely choose any card of which effect is useful for his deck.

The interface is very nice and smooth, for both the card battle and deck construction. You can maintain up to 9 deck designs for each rules class. The game auto-saves frequently; this is very convenient for a portable game, when one can break the game in the middle of a card battle, for example. It also prevents cheating as well.

However, despite having an interesting backbone system, the game has one major problem. Some trading card game players think that in a card game, no card should be "better than another in every way", so that every decision in deck construction needs to be carefully calculated, and there are no trivial decisions. Some players think that while rare cards should be powerful, there should be some restraint on their use: either that they are costly (in terms of in-game resources) and difficult to get into play, or that they are useful only for certain decks built around them, or only in certain situations against certain decks. Some players think that the ideal deck composition should contain a proportion of rare cards close to the ratio of rare cards that one acquires in his collection: if each 10-card booster contains 1 rare card for example, then a good deck should also contain about 10% rare cards. If you belong to any or all of these schools of card-game philosophy (and I do ...), then unfortunately Card Hero would largely be a waste of time for you.

For in this game, the designers balance a powerful card not by raising its playing cost or imposing some restriction, drawback or weakness in its effect, but rather by merely assigning it a high rarity. In fact, most obviously useful cards in this game are rare; in general, the rarer, the more powerful and the easier to use (cheaper and/or more volatile) is the card. Within the 110-card set, a number of cards are virtually worse "in every way" than some rare card, and many others just seem to pale so badly in comparison to the rare cards, that they don't seem to be practical inclusions in one's deck in a serious match. I'd say that about 1/3 of the cards in the card list are useless wallpaper, and another 1/3 are common cards which are useful only in few situations: you basically have to build your deck around them, or you'd be better off using rare cards instead.

The rarity of each card is indicated by a number of stars. Common cards are 1 or 2 stars, 3 stars are rare, and 4 or 5 stars are ultra-rare cards. Players who belong to the above-mentioned school of thought would hope that, in a typical 'competitive' deck of 30 cards ("pro" rules), the total number of stars in the deck should be around 50. But here, in this game, a typical deck has got around 100 stars in it. Even a deck which tries really hard to make use of common cards cannot afford to contain less than 50% rares while remaining competitive, and the typical 'orthodox' deck (either the white/wonder deck which tries to level up assorted monsters, or the black deck which tries to damage the enemy master while preventing enemy monsters from level up) would contain 75% to 95% rares. Yes, this game is that rare intensive. It is all about rares. Good cards are rare, and lame cards are common.

Let's look at some examples. Shortly after the start of the game, you get a few Biyondo, back-row monsters with 2 HP, a 0-power primary attack and a 2-power secondary attack at level 1 which can hit targets at range 2 (only; i.e. it cannot hit the adjacent enemy front row monster or the enemy master when it is shifted to the front, and it cannot reach enemy back row monsters when it is in the back row). At level 2, it gains another power point for its secondary attack. Soon enough, you get some Yanbaru, which has the same capabilities as the Biyondo, except that it has one more HP (3). But eventually you will get the 5-star ultra-rare Mougan, which has the same power value as the two 1-star monsters, but its attack can hit anywhere, and it has 5 HP too, wow. In fact, the Mougan is absolutely or largely superior to many other back-row monsters, and even a few front-row ones! As another example, the magic card Power Up, which costs 3 stones to cast, adds 1 power to a monster for one attack, thus allowing any 2-power monster to damage the enemy master. Why is such a staple card a 3-star rare? And then there is Kiaidame, which instantly "charges up" a monster; one can see that it has a comparable effect to Power Up. Why is this card a 4-star ultra-rare? Because it costs only 1 stone to cast, and is thus much cheaper to use than the 3-star card. In other words, the card is made ultra-rare because its casting cost is too low, because it is an unbalancing spoiler card.

(The Yanbaru is not completely wallpaper, because in a 30-card "pro" deck the player may need more than the 3 Mougan for back-row orthodox firepower. However, it remains true that in a match between two human players, the player who has 3 Mougan in his collection has an absolute material advantage over the player who doesn't and has to use Yanbaru in their stead. Some trading-card game players would consider this an undesirable design. And there is little doubt that the Biyondo is wallpaper.)

In short, just about every card which is powerful, useful, handy or versatile is rare. This makes the primary deciding factor of the game card collection rather than card playing or deck construction skill. It is exactly the kind of game which, if made as physical cards which need to be bought, I would recommend everyone to avoid. It's not really so bad since it is actually a video game software, but it is still not a good thing. In the story, it is sometimes emphasised how much stronger the opponent's cards are than the ones the player has. While such probably sounds exciting to small kids, it may be discomforting to hard-core trading-card game players, who understand where the true value of trading-card games is.

For yet more ridicule, among the 3 available magic masters, it is generally agreed upon that the white master is virtually inferior to the wonder master "in almost every way". Once one has got the wonder master, there is little reason to use the white master any more, because the wonder master can do most of what the white master can do, and he does it better, and he can do other things too.

Players of physical trading-card games know that starters and boosters come with a fixed ratio of rare cards. However, this game does not follow this rule. When you buy a booster pack of 3 cards, there may or may not be a rare card in the pack, depending on your luck. While some players consider this a good system which amplifies the joy of finding rare cards, I personally hate this, for when one is out of luck and opens pack after pack without getting anything remotely useful, it is nothing but frustrating, annoying and even irritating. Maybe it's just that I have below-average luck, but I've found the chance of getting rares to be unreasonably low. Don't forget that in this game, rare cards, lots of them, are necessary if you want to build a good deck. Some players may call this a feature which increases the "replay value" of the game, but I just see it as a cheap way of forcing the player to put up with the game for longer (which is a very different thing from making the game to be enjoyable for longer). After all, the point of playing a game is enjoyment, and making something hard to get so as to motivate the player to play a game (which he doesn't really enjoy and would otherwise not want to play) isn't the right way to go. True, the good game system contributes to making playing matches enjoyable, but playing round after round against the AI players, who are often stupid and are not very worthy opponents, gets boring quickly. It feels similar to RPGs which force the player to fight repetitive battles in order to level up. Also, there seems to be some deliberate bias in the card distribution: on any particular game cartidge (or rather, save game file, only one of which can be saved on one cartidge), certain cards are more likely to appear in boosters than others on the same rarity level. I feel that there is little reason for this arrangement: it just serves to make the game more annoying.

Another unreasonable arrangement is that when the player acquires the wonder master, he can choose one of his inherent spells from a list of 6, but that choice is irreversible: once chosen, the spell cannot be changed unless the player throws away his entire card collection and starts the game all over. Since one of the major appeal of a trading-card game is in the construction of various types of decks, restricting the player this way reduces the variety of deck types he can work on, and shortens the enjoyment of the game.

Apparently, the player who goes second in a match can counter some of the first-move player's advantage, since the first-move player's monsters have no targets on their first turn (the second game-turn, when the monsters summoned on the first turn are turned face up), so the second-move player's monsters get to strike first. But the truth is that a player gains an absolute advantage just by getting to go first, because he gets to receive a card draw and 3 stones first, and he is not required to summon any monsters on his first turn. If he is determined to wait for his opponent to summon monsters first, then the second-move player loses any of the supposed advantage that going second may have, but the first-move player is always ahead in terms of stones and cards. In my experience, the first-move advantage is significant. I question whether the designers are aware of it; if not, that would be significant incompetence on their part, in my humble opinion. And if they are, I cannot understand why they do not try to balance it in some way, such as by depriving the first-mover of his first card draw, and/or adjusting the number of stones the players receive on the first turn.

The programming is not very seamless: there are a number of bugs and cheats. Reportedly, the AI player can sometimes hang the game (possibly due to some infinite loop bug), though I have yet to run into that problem. What I have encountered include: the "victory points" in the ranking list within a class does not sum up to zero; a victory reaped with the Thunder spell has been tallied as a "Super finish" (a Super monster dealing the final blow to the enemy master); in the weekly "white" and "black" tournaments which require the use of the corresponding master, it is possible to use any master after hitting the "select" button (which is used to verify the contents of a deck). Fortunately, these bugs (the ones I have encountered) are not critical, and doesn't affect the game play in large. Speaking of the AI, I cannot understand why, when the computer player is making his moves, the game simulates his navigation of the control menus, as if he is actually using the controller to input his moves, by making a sound on every step of cursor movement or button press. In my opinion, this is a pure waste of time.

The graphics are quite nice for a Color Gameboy game, and the sound is okay. You can see some screen shots on the Nintendo official homepage, but if you can't find any screen shots for the all-too-important battle screen and the deck construction screen, that's Nintendo's fault, not mine. (Don't worry, those screens are both functional and pleasant.) There is a clock chip in the cartidge; it keeps track of the date and time (in real life), which triggers some minor events. For example, you can get some pocket money (a tiny amount) each day by talking to your mother, and the list of "singles" (rare cards sold expensively) for sale in the card shop is renewed daily.

Okay, now we know that this game has got a good game system but downright poor card balance. So what are my recommendations? First of all, the game is in the Japanese language, and much of the text is important or helpful, and I can imagine that the game would be a pain to play if one doesn't have some comprehension of the language. But there is very few kanji in the game, so Westerners who are learners of the language would be okay. Back to the point: to a small kid or a novice of trading-card games, or to the player who naively buys the idea that rare cards should be more powerful and all, this game is probably fun. In particular, fans of the Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Monsters card game (unquestionably the single worst trading-card game I have ever seen; compared to the 'poor' card balance in Card Hero, that game has absolutely zero card balance, and no creditable game system, no decent interface, no nothing to boot; or rather, the game system is non-existent, the interface is intolerable, and the game stinks like cow excrement in truly every aspect; I digress) really should look at this game to see what a good card game is (in part) supposed to be like. However, this recommendation is not without reservations, for while this game has some good aspects (namely, good basic system), it does not illuminate the true ideal of a trading-card game, and would probably obscure it on the contrary. For hard-core trading-card game players who share the aforementioned school of thought, while this game may be fun for a little while, once one sees the ultra-rare cards and acknowledges them as mandatory inclusions in just about every deck, the strategic variety (which the no-color, no-mana-card aspects seem to offer initially) diminishes drastically, and the game gets old quickly. Supposedly, in a trading-card game, as one gets more cards, a larger variety of strategy options should become available; but unfortunately, in this game, on the contrary, the range of strategy options narrows, because the ultra-powerful rare cards displace many weak common cards and make them wallpaper. Because of the poor card balance, the game is no more than a fun little distraction; it falls short of being a truly memorable game experience, the kind which lovers of Quinty or Umihara Kawase, for example, have enjoyed and are ever on the quest for. To such players, as I have mentioned above, the game may even feel like a waste of time.

Copyright 20 March 2000 Alan Shiu Ho Kwan

Nintendo homepage (this game)

NOAH's ark (Japanese fan page)

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