(this game)
RUNE is a "card action RPG" released on 25 April 2002 by From Software for the Nintendo Gamecube. A US version, in English, will be released on 29 May 2002 by Activision, and the European release date is 28 June. This article is a game review based on the Japanese version, written in English to encourage readers to buy whichever version they are comfortable with the laguage (which means primarily the English version, admittedly). For screen shots, please visit the official site.
The genre name, "card action RPG", being an unfamiliar combination of familiar words, describes the game rather accurately. (Personally, I appreciate such functional name much more than the recent outbreak of a thousand and one "new" genre names coined for orthodox old genre games.) The game is precisely the combination of a collectible card game (CCG) and an action-RPG. Just like in any ARPG, the heroine runs around the stages and battle enemy creatures under a real-time action-game combat engine. She can attack the enemy with sword, whip, and other weapons, she can cast powerful magic spells to inflict great damage, and she can even summon friendly creatures to fight alongside her. However, all of these attacks (including the weapon attacks) are enabled only through the deck of cards in her hand. In a fashion similar to a CCG, she constructs a deck of cards and takes it into a stage, and plays those cards in battle to fight the enemies. If she runs out of cards, she has no more means of attack and will have to give up and try the stage again. (As stated in the Japanese TV commercial, she may be the weakest heroine in RPG history if without her cards.)
The game has done an excellent job of combining the two aspects. In combat, the controls are quite simple: to play a card, you just press the corresponding button (ABXY). Target selection etc. is done in the action-game way: when you do a sword attack, you hit whichever enemy standing right in front of you! Thus the game offers both the feel and smoothness of an action game, and the appeal and depth of a CCG. Many recent RPGs require the player to struggle with complex combat menus, but doesn't provide much more real depth or playability. This game gives you fresh, innovative game play with some depth and excitement, while requiring less menu navigation than typical RPGs (and even ARPGs!)
The game has over 20 stages. You construct a deck of up to 30 cards in the outside world map, then you enter a stage. Once inside the stage, you have no access to other cards in your collection, so you have to choose your cards well. You try to clear the stage by fulfilling a certain objective, usually by reaching a certain place and often defeating the boss there. As you walk around, random battles occur (in most stages; some stages have primarily fixed battles). The random encounter rate is very reasonable: you fight around 10 battles per stage. You fight the battle, in real-time action-style, on a truncated version of the very same field you have been walking on. (If you destroy any field objects such as trees and barrels in battle, they remain destroyed after the battle.) When you enter a battle, the top four cards in your deck are drawn into your hand. You can discard a card if you don't like it (R button + card button), but it takes a second or two for you to draw new cards into your hand. (Discarded cards return to the top of your deck after the battle.) Once inside a stage, your deck is not shuffled between battles, so you should avoid piling up lots of 'unwieldy' cards at the top of your deck. When you play a card, it becomes partially or completely burnt. A card which is completely burnt is removed from your deck until the end of the stage, at which point it is returned to your deck. (It is not permanently lost.) You draw a replacement card from your deck to replace the consumed card. (The top card in the draw deck is displayed on the screen, and you can see the colored frames of the next three cards too, which indicate the elements they belong to.) A card which is partially burnt starts the next battle in the same partially-burnt state. You have to watch your card expenditure to avoid running out of cards in your deck. You can sometimes recover a consumed card by catching a blue fairy, and if needed you can put "card recovery" cards in your deck. You'll find lots of cards in treasure chests inside a stage. (You can also capture enemy creatures; more on this later.) You can add newly acquired cards (only; not other cards in your collection) to your deck at "deck points", which are usually found before boss fights and sometimes in other places too. You can "give up" and exit the stage at any time; when you give up or are knocked out, you retain any new cards you have acquired as well as any experience your cards have earned, but you have to redo any events and pick up any event items again when you retry the stage.
There are three basic types of cards: weapons, (FF-style) summons, and support cards. Every card always represents a creature, although some creatures do not appear as enemies in the game. (Some of the support cards funtion similarly to the corresponding enemy creature, but many cards work differently.) Weapon cards allow you to directly attack enemies. When you play a weapon card, the creature represented by the card is superimposed on your character and makes the attack. For example, when you have a "Lizardman" card in your hand, pressing the corresponding card button will do a sword attack which strikes at enemies (and things) directly in front of you. Each weapon card typically has several charges. For example, the Lizardman card has three charges; when you use it once, the card is 1/3 burnt (and stays in your hand), and it becomes 2/3 burnt when you use it again, and when you use it a third time, the card will be completely burnt and removed from your deck until the end of the stage. The "summon" cards work like attack spells. When you play one, the heroine disappears for a moment, and the summoned creature appears in her place to make a single powerful attack. Summon cards typically have great attack areas, but they are slow and can still miss sometimes. There are some summon cards with healing effects (HP or card recovery) too. A support card causes the corresponding creature to appear and fight alongside you. (That's what I call 'true' summoning, but anyway.) The card burns slowly when the creature is in play (different cards have very different durations), and when the creature is hit, a whole chunk is burnt. There is a very good variety of support cards: in addition to the standard type which walks around and attack enemies, there are "trap" creatures which sit there until an enemy approaches and blow themselves up for a single powerful attack, there are "orbit" creatures which orbit your character and ram and damage enemies, and there are creatures which themselves don't attack but provides some benefit (such as enhanced attack strength, defense strength or speed) to its allies. Among the last type are the "elemental modifier" cards. For example, the giant bee doubles the damage of all (friendly and enemy) tree element attacks, and halves the damage of all earth element attacks. Thus when used in the right situation, they can make your side four times as strong relative to the enemy. All the cards have different attack areas and attack speeds (since they have different attack animations), so the 100 or so cards provide a very good variety indeed.
Each creature (and card) belongs to one of the four elements: fire, water, earth, and tree. Fire is strong against tree, tree is strong against earth, earth is strong against water, and water is strong against fire. Plus, some creatures belong to the neutral "alien" element. Before you enter a stage, you can read a summary which states the elements of the common creatures in the stage, so you can adjust your deck accordingly.
You expend MPs (officially, "magic stones") when you use cards. When you damage enemies (or blow up field objects), they release magic stones, and when you kill them, they release bunches of stones. Thus you normally should not have any problem recovering MPs, if your attacks hit and you do pick up the released stones. (Card recovery cards are very effective, but they are a bit unwieldy because they are not attacks and cost lots of MPs.) The MP stones also add experience points to your cards, so you should try to pick up most of them. You can use cards even when you do not have enough MPs, but you have to pay for the deficit with your HPs, which can be a lot! The HP penalty is directly proportional to your current HP. So even when you're in a crisis, being low in both HP and MP, you can still play powerful cards and try to survive the battle, as the HP penalty would be small in that case. (You will never die of the HP penalty unless you play a card with an MP cost equal to or higher than your maximum MP.)
When you clear a stage, you will be rated with 1 to 5 stars according to your performance. The rating depends on the number of enemies you have defeated, the amount of damage you have received, and the number of cards you have used. I feel that the rating is a rather good evaluation of your playing skill. Depending on your rating, you can pick 1 to 3 bonus cards. There is often 1 boss card among the 6 cards to pick from, so a good rating helps but you need some luck too. Healing and card recovery cards are very helpful towards clearing the stage, but they do not reduce the damage count or card consumption count, and they themselves count as a card used without contributing to defeating enemies, so you should not be overly dependent on them if you want a good rating. You can flee a battle (except a boss battle) by running into the edge of the battlefield for a few seconds. That costs you a random card, but this does not count as a card consumed, so sometimes it is better towards your rating to flee an especially tough enemy than to fight it and take lots of damage and use up lots of cards.
Your main character gains levels only by getting the "key" item in story events. (Just like in Zelda.) She gets more HP and MP as well as better defense. Your cards gain experience, but they do not gain levels. Experience is earned by each type of card, not each individual card. They can be spent in the card shop either to convert a card into another card, or to make another copy of the card. For example, if you have 4 Lizardman cards and they have earned 3000 EXP, you can either spend 1000 EXP to convert one of your 4 Lizardman cards into a Kamaitachi card (which admittedly is not very useful, a common characteristic among many but not all 1000 EXP conversions), or spend 3000 EXP to convert one into a Poison Lizard (which is quite good), or you can spend 700 EXP to make a 5th Lizardman. (Copying a card costs anything from 700 to 5000 EXP, depending on card type.) A final option is to spend nothing and keep saving EXP for the Lizardman, until you have 6000 EXP with which you can convert a Lizardman into a very powerful card (which I would not spoil here). When you win a battle, all cards in your deck get EXP for the magic stones you picked up in the battle. If you use up a card in a battle, it will gain EXP for this battle but not for future ones. If you have multiple copies of one card in your deck, you still gain only one time EXP, so you should diversify if you want more EXP in total. Also, when a card deals the killing blow to an enemy, it gets special EXP. Thus if you want to concentrate on gaining EXP with one card, you should put multiple copies into your deck, so that it has more opportunities of getting special EXP, and also all copies won't be used up so soon. I think this is an excellent system: you get the enjoyment of earning EXP for your cards and getting more, better cards to build your deck with, without suffering from the drawbacks of an orthodox level up system for each card (as in Arcana Strikes [SS] and Endsector [PS]). Having to level up the cards tends to make a card useless until you level it up (please refer to my discussion article concerning this point), and it encourages the player to use the same cards throughout the game. That is inappropriate in a deck construction card game, in which the fun should be in constructing a variety of decks using different cards.
You can also capture enemy creatures (except for bosses) to get more cards. Instead of playing a card for its normal effect, you can throw the card physically at an enemy. To do this, hold the L button when pressing the corresponding card button. You do this with normal cards (any cards); there are no special "capture" cards designated for this purpose. The card has to hit the enemy directly, and even then it does very small damage. If that kills the enemy, you capture it. (You can later add it to your deck at a deck point, or in the outside world map after finishing the stage.) Regardless of whether you hit and regardless of whether the damage is enough, the card you throw is consumed (out of your deck until end of stage) without its normal effect. (The card is not permanetly lost and is always returned to your deck when you exit the stage.) Thus, doing capture throws and missing would be a sure way to run youself out of cards quickly. The damage is affected by elemental relationships, and also depends on the strength (MP cost?) of the thrown card. Doing a capture throw costs 1 MP, which cannot be substituted by the HP penalty. As a captured enemy does not count as a defeated enemy towards the stage rating (and it is easy to waste many cards if the capturing does not go smoothly), you should avoid capturing cards excessively if you want a good rating. I much prefer this capture system to those which depend on random chance and/or require specific items: this one is less hassle, and as the capture throw does damage even when the capture fails, you will eventually succeed in capturing a wanted creature. This capture system is the best among the games I have played.
In the stages, you will find red and blue fairies. You collect the red fairies and give them to the fairy researcher and get some cards in return. Catching a blue fairy instantly restores your full MP, or your HP by 10%, or a consumed card. While it is pleasant to collect the stronger cards, you will find enough cards in treasure chests etc., so you will always have a reasonable chance. Powerful, rare cards are desirable, but in the end it comes to your playing skill.
Time to talk about the game story. Our heroine is the princess of a country. A mysterious black mist is invading various places in the land, and her father is out to investigate. When the mist is beginning to engulf her home castle, she fetches the "key" from the castle treasure room (in accordance with her father's instructions before he left) and embarks on a journey to find her father. Eventually, she will unveil the secret of the black mist and defend the kingdoms from the invaders. The story is not very long or detailed, but it serves as a functional background for the game. Also, a few scenes manage to be quite touching, being well presented with nice movie sequences and appropriate music.
The graphics in the game are very good overall. There is a good variety of stages, which are all quite detailed. There is also a good variety of BGM, which contributes to the atmosphere of each stage very well. And let us not forget that this is an action game, so the over 100 cards are all animated in 3D and have different attack forms.
While the combat interface is excellent, the interface for deck construction is pretty good too. It is easy to add and remove cards from your deck. You can keep up to 8 decks in a save file, and as they are just tentative decks until taken into a stage, different decks can share the same cards. Each save file takes up 2 blocks on the Gamecube memory card, and you can have up to 8 save files on a card.
The game takes 10 to 20 hours to play, depending on the player's style. After clearing the game, you can keep on playing with the same save file in order to collect any things you have missed. But while the game is well-balanced when you progress along the story, when you replay the stages after the ending with high character level and powerful cards, it can become too easy and unchallenging. Thus, I would recommend that one stops playing with the same save file when the fun begins to wear thin, and instead start over with a fresh save file. IMO the game has enough substance to endure several playings, and I would rate the game with a longevity of 50 hours.
There is also a 2-player vs. mode. I haven't really played it against another player, but from the looks of it, it seems fine. There are 5 battlefields to choose from, and there is an "official rules" mode which bans some unfairly powerful cards.
RUNE (or Lost Kingdoms) is an excellent merge of an action-RPG and a collectible card game. The game play is innovative, well-polished, and well-balanced. It would be a very satisfactory game for players who seek innovation, for players who seek intellectual playability, and for fans of ARPGs and CCGs who won't mind trying something new. The game is not without its flaws, but they are either cosmetic (the game does not have good 'girl-game appeal' because our princess, while having nice curves around her waist, has got a face which makes it too apparent that she is a 3D-CG figure; the game has got no voice acting beyond a single word or two) or minor. (When you play a card, you are momentarily invulnerable. This works fine for most of the game, except when it is used against you by another card-user character, and there you see really how cheap this is. And then there are players who complain that playing on with the same save file after clearing the game gets boring, but as mentioned above one doesn't have to do that.) Overall, this is an excellent game and is recommended.
It helps to understand the card descriptions and the stage instructions as well as the story, so get the game in a language you know.
Copyright 28 May 2002 Alan Shiu Ho Kwan
Alan Kwan / tarot@netvigator.com / created 28 May 02