Following "Inscryption," "Voice of Cards" is another card game where all is not as it seems. But whereas Daniel Mullins dealt jokers to enthusiastic cabin battlers and proved to be more than the sum of his parts, Square Enix barely shuffled the deck, despite the creative input of Yokoo Tarou, of "Nier" and papier-mâché head fame Despite. His Galaxy (Mon.). I came to this game expecting cerebral genre-busting, but the biggest tweak is how plain and basic it all is.

Truth be told, this is not so much a card game as a game made of cards. An insubstantial game master narrates the campaign and builds a kingdom out of cardboard. Characters, items, and buildings slide across the table, and hundreds of cards depicting roads, meadows, and oceans spread out to form an overworld that you navigate tile by tile. if you've played "Inscryption" or "Hand of Fate. Voice of Cards, in which a fantasy world is abstractly suggested by a few crude tokens, there will be a certain surprise in terms of more comprehensive worldbuilding.

But the excitement fades. Like the 8-bit tileset of Dragon Quest on the NES, it's just sparse, basic grass and mountains repeated. It is paper-thin. There are flashes of potential ideas, such as a sickly hero becoming even more dog-eared, or death expressed as violent tears, but they are rare. Compared to the "Gwent RPG," which magically creates avalanches, castle attacks, and multi-limbed beasts from similarly static parts, "Voice of Card" seems particularly flat.

Beneath the novel art lies a traditional JRPG. There is a hero and a dragon, with many villages and dungeons in between. The former has little soap operas, the latter has endless random encounters. A muscle-obsessed nutritionist makes an appearance, but that's about the only thing that makes you realize that a weirdo is behind the wheel. The writing, however, is only mildly interesting, but is aided by the narrator's storytelling. Todd Haberkorn, voiced in English, is delightfully disdainful of the nonsense that unfolds.

The adventure doesn't drag on either. Even if you spend some time exploring every nook and cranny of the world map and discovering rare equipment, the whole thing is over in ten hours. If anything, it could be made shorter by cutting out the padding from the two dungeons in the second half of the game. Being forced through floor after floor of monster surprise after monster surprise is lame at best, and even more so when everything is drawn on the same dingy card tiles. Again, why choose an art style that so aggressively amplifies repetition?

It doesn't help that "Voice of Cards" does not find its, well, voice in combat. It's not a card game or deck-building riff as one might expect, but a cute reskin of conservative JRPG thinking. Every hero has a deck of four moves, but is that really any different from choosing actions from a menu in Final Fantasy 1, for example? One might say that building a "deck" of attacks is a nod to modern favorites, but the mere replacement of three moves throughout the campaign speaks to its redundancy.

Like many things here, the combat suggests more engaging ideas. Like how to decorate the battlefield with the ephemeral nature of tabletop action. There are physical dice to be rolled for status effects, or counters that serve as mana. But because you are essentially playing the same hand each turn, there is none of the spontaneity or improvisation that defines even the simplest collectible card game. The art of these things is how your brain gets lucky (or not) on the draw. The system demands practically nothing.

The list of half-realized ideas is endless. There is also an elemental weakness system to keep you on your toes, but the enemy types are few and far between, so you could easily figure out a winning strategy and spend an hour happily winning the game. Or how about a gem system that allows them to accumulate mana stones to launch powerful attacks?" Well, the attacks are so inexpensive and the gems so easily obtained that they can basically drop one nuke after another until the final stretch. The difficulty evaporates as quickly as the goblins. Also, Happenstance cards, which apply random buffs and debuffs at the start of the turn, are as good as non-existent due to the lightness of their punishment. This was more of an opportunity to add some creative thinking that was missing to adapt to the weakness of surprise, but it is completely toothless.

Even without that oddly balanced combat quirk, "Voice of Card" would have been a complete pushover. Just the natural act of uncovering the world map (which is not as epic as it sounds, but again, this is a 10-hour game) allows you to level up far beyond the difficulty of the region you are in. For example, I didn't need to use a single recovery item until the final dungeon, at which point my inventory was maxed out and I was forced to manually dump items every time a monster randomly dropped an item during battle. This is 1) a lousy thing to ask of a player and 2) especially laughable given that the story is about a medicine drought. It's like throwing healing balm into a volcano. Just don't let the villagers find it.

It's a shame there are so few of these pieces, from the oniony layers of "Inscryption" to the tarot-like brilliance of "Hand of Fate" (much better to discover this game instead), that lean toward the table-top roots of video games The current trend is proving to be very fertile ground. A true busted flush.