For anyone growing up with story-driven, single-player videogame adaptations of TCGs (or original card games) - such as Digimon Digital Card Battle, Pokemon TCG for the Gameboy, or dozens of Yugioh titles - this is a really well put-together inclusion to a (fairly niche/dead) genre for a bargain price.

The story is simple, but serviceable, with the occasionally surprisingly insightful or entertaining internet or joke. The music is, surprisingly, quite good (the first boss music is particularly good, and I appreciate the added instrumentation layer when it moves from the conversation into the battle itself). The card pool allows for some diversity of strategies, and the pacing of giving new cards that slowly unfold new synergies and options is well-implemented and enjoyable.

For certain, this game deserves a bit more attention than what it's gotten, if only for how rare it is to see a card game in this style nowadays.

The weaknesses of the game are almost entirely down to the length and mechanical complexity. I finished the game in as little as 4 hours, including collecting one copy of every card (except for the few 'secret rare' cards that you have to grind for). Shockingly, there's no post-game content whatsoever (yet), even though it seems to be hinted at. And the opponents of the game are so easy (in part due to relatively poor AI) that there really is no point in grinding or finding these secret rares - there's nothing like the Digimon Digital Card Battle post-game with the opponents playing special hyper-powered cards against you.

There's only 118 or so reasonably acquirable cards, which feels a fairly small amount, with maybe only about 6 or so real archetypes viable: I'd categorise them (using Magic the Gathering terminology) as something like "Go-Wide," "Voltron," "Aggro," "Burn," "Control" and a special named/tribal archetype. Further, there's no ability to save and load decks, which somewhat discourages you from switching away from whichever deck you've tended towards when it's already beating all of the opponents anyway. Finally, the animations/gameplay feel fairly slow in-battle; I feel spoiled by animation/battle speed settings in most roguelite deckbuilders (or speed-up buttons on emulated older card games).

And yet, despite two paragraphs of me pointing out the weakest elements of the game... I still need to leave with stating unequivocably that this was a wonderful trip down memory lane for me, a satisfying four hours, a rare type of video game, and it's a game I deeply hope receives more content or a much larger and more ambitious sequel.

One of the most charming games I've ever come across, would be cool to see it blow up and the dev make a bunch of money and hire people and release a similar game with a larger scale and hire more people until ultimately there are so many employees that they lose sight what the core of the game was and what made it so special and then they crash and burn