Chocobo Tales (DS)

I didn’t see a thread for it, so I thought I’d mention that Chocobo Tales is actually a really good game. The premise sounds kind of silly, but I’ve been playing this game way too much for the past three days. The idea is that you compete in different kind of stylus-minigames. There’s a wide variety of games from racing to coin collecting to climbing to logic puzzles, and the trick is that scoring well enough in these minigames not only carries the plot forward, but nets you cards.

The cards are used in boss and mini-boss battles, which are unfortunately quite rare. However, the cards earned in the single player game can be used to play the card battle game against other people over Nintendo Wi-Fi.

So, if anyone wants to try the card game some time, my friend code is 034462-804887.

My GF has it and likes it a lot. The card battle looked decent, but some of the minigames just gave me huge ‘I never want to play that’ vibes.

Oh, that’s true. There are a few minigames that are horrible. Most of them are decent, though.

Played it. Beat it. Loved it.
This one is quite a bit of fun. It’s fairly rare for me to finish a game. I couldn’t complete some of the minigame objectives, but they do a good job of not making it too hard to advance the game.

I’ve collected 91% of all cards so far and played a few games over the wi-fi and, seriously, if you like card battle games, you should buy this game just for that. The minigames don’t really grab me all that much, but the card game is very cleverly designed and well balanced.

The idea is that there are four colors that work in a somewhat rock-scissors way so that Red is strong against Green, Green is strong against Yellow, Yellow is strong against Blue and Blue is strong against Red. The game is mostly based on bluffing. Both player have three hand cards, and the twist is that you can see the color of your opponent’s cards, so you can try to guess what he is going to do. Ending up with three cards of the same color is bad, since your opponent can safely play a card strong against that color (cards are chosen simultaneously).

Each color has four circles (one for each color) that can contain a sword or a shield. If a card has e.g. a red sword, then it attacks using the red element. Some cards are purely defensive and do not have swords at all, and all cards can contain several shields. On almost all cases, the cards attack is the same color as the card itself, and most cards have a shield for the color they are strong against. Some cards go against the the rock-paper-scissor rules, but are otherwise weaker.

Playing a card always nets you a crystal of the card’s color. All the more powerful abilities require you to have one or more crystals in one or more colors, so you have to build up using lesser cards, before you can unleash the stronger abilities. The clever balance here is that piling up lots of cards in a single color ensures that you have lots of crystals of that color (e.g. the Bomb creatures Explode+ ability requires 5 or 6 red crystals), but increases the probability that you will end up with the dreaded single-color hand. There are also lots of abilities that manipulate the crystals in various ways like stealing, destroying or changing crystal colors.

Finally, there are colorless cards, that are great since your opponent has no way of guessing what color of swords or shields that colorless card has, but they don’t give you any crystals.

The largest complaint about the card game I have so far is that it seems disconnecting doesn’t affect your win/loss stats. That basically means that every asshat online disconnects as soon as things don’t go their way. That’s why everyone should go out and get this game. I need some decent people to play against. :)