Shadowverse: Champion's Battle, the tried
Shadowverse
Card video games are timeless and just get distracted for a moment to see the birth of two or three new ones. Roguebook, Inscryption and Black Book are the first and most recent to come to mind. But that type of card game linked to an anime was missing, a void that Shadowverse: Champion's Battle has decided to fill.It should be specified, however, that the animated counterpart, Shadowverse, was created following the homonymous free to play video game for PC. We tried it for a few hours, leaving it satisfied on the whole: the gameplay, when it comes to dueling, faithfully follows the original Shadowverse so if you've played it on PC you know what to expect. To this must be added the outline of school life, made up of a lot of chatter, objectives to be completed to continue in the adventure, cards to be obtained (by winning them or by buying the packets) and ranking to climb to prove to be the champion. In short, nothing new under the sun.
We will do it by impersonating an avatar, male or female, who has just moved to Tensei Academy and who will immediately meet Hiro Ryouzaki, the protagonist of the anime, and his friends. The target? Restore the Shadowverse club and give it back its luster by conquering none other than the national tournament.
Let's discover Shadowverse: Champion's Battle in our tried-and-true on Nintendo Switch.
Shadowverse Showdown!
We have already told you the story. As expected, we are the new students who moved to Tensei Academy, a school where the trend of the moment is Shadowverse: the protagonist (we chose the female avatar) knows absolutely nothing about the game, but she proves, without surprise, a star. nascent. After meeting the magical trio made up of Hiro Ryugasaki, Mimori Amamiya and Kazuki Shindo, characters present in the anime, she begins our adventure in the institute with the aim of reconstituting the Shadowverse club. In fact, it risks being closed and the only way to convince the stern president of the student committee to keep it active is to win the national tournament. A no brainer for a group of fans like us, or at least this is what we want to pass: behind the anime aesthetics and a story clearly aimed at an audience of very young people there is a game that, of course, makes of strategy and planning are his strong points. She has already taught us Yu-Gi-Oh! in its time, card games (or video games) are never for children, regardless of what the graphics or the story lead us to believe.Shadowverse: Champion's Battle doesn't spare and right from the start, even with the simplest battles, it's not enough to just take any deck, put it into play, and hope it does good or bad all by itself. Each type of has its strengths and weaknesses, it is more effective against some and not recommended against others, at least as long as you rely on the different pre-built decks that the game makes available to us: there is obviously the possibility to customize them to create something unique. really, but in the early stages of the adventure it is difficult to set up something that can really be worthwhile because there is no card to do it.
Especially considering that only neutrals can be used anywhere, the others are related to the type of membership: Neutral, Forestcraft, Swordcraft, Runecraft, Dragoncraft, Shadowcraft, Havencraft and Bloodcraft, these are eight classes with which you will have to juggle battles and decks to form. Each is characterized by a peculiarity, for example Forestcraft prefers a game based on the use of as many cards as possible during a turn to create devastating combos; Dragoncraft instead relies on Overflow, which activates after a specific number of turns and enhances certain cards with effects dependent on the card itself. Step by step we understand what the most suitable type of deck is, if we prefer an aggressive, balanced or reasoned strategy and there we go to build the ideal deck.
Shadowverse: Champion's Battle, some of the decks available
Playing Shadowverse is not too different from any other card game we may have tried before: from Magic to Hearthstone to Yu-Gi-Oh !, the basics are those. There is an activation cost for the cards we want to play and in the case of the Followers, who here define the cards with the most active role in battle, there are also the attack / defense parameters. It is possible to place a number of cards on the field equal to the amount of action points, which increase by one each turn to a maximum of ten - there are cards that facilitate this process. The followers attack both other followers and the leader, who can be hit at any time of the game regardless of how many followers he has deployed: only the presence of Ward forces the opponent to destroy that card, before moving on to the real player. Except for exceptions, followers cannot attack when they are played but this is where the Evolution mechanic, typical of Shadowverse, must be inserted.
Each player has a certain number of evolution points, which are activated passed a few turns: by consuming an evolution point it is possible, as the name suggests, to evolve the chosen follower, which will thus increase its statistics and could even gain additional effects. Furthermore, a card that has just been played and evolved is allowed to attack immediately but in this case it can only hit other followers: the leader, at least in the specific turn, is protected. A shrewd use of Evolution reverses without major problems a game that was believed to be lost and makes the clashes exciting, especially because the higher the opponent's rank, the more he will be inclined to exploit evolution and do it in an intelligent way. Evolution is activated once per game, so it is essential not to be rushed and to decide when to use it. Not only that, it must also be taken into account that the first player has only two evolution points, while the second gets three, as well as being able to draw two cards during his first turn.
Shadowverse: Champion's Battle, a card and its possible effects
Facing other players is necessary to acquire new cards (you can see which ones you will get before starting a match), to earn money to buy singles cards or packages and increase the level of the type you are using: the latter in particular is useful not only because at each increase it makes us get a card but above all because the rarity of the card depends on the overall level. The more we increase, therefore, the rarer the cards we will get.
For obvious reasons, it is not possible to challenge characters of a level too higher than ours and it can be understood from the fact that the name of the deck they use is not shown: in that case, before reading their rank, we know we can't compete yet. In addition, even more importantly, by defeating the players it is possible to obtain their Deck Code: we will need it to unlock the related deck in the creation menu. Building a specific deck requires having all the expected cards and, should we miss them, you can bookmark it so we can keep track as soon as we get one of the cards we were looking for.
The Tensei Academy is not the only one place where our adventure will take place, as well as the students will not be the only adversaries we will have to face: as the story continues, we will be able to move to places adjacent to the institute to explore and collect objects (generally bags of cards or rupees, depending on the case) but also to challenge anyone who is ready for a duel.
Shadowverse: Champion's Battle, the Evolution phase Also having very slight RPG connotations, Shadowverse: Champion's Battle includes missions to be solved ; on this, however, we will return in the review phase. Taking our first steps as future champions reminded us of the not-too-old Yu-Gi Oh! (Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution is from 2019, so to speak) and, to return instead to a past glory, it made us want to play Pokémon Trading Card Game: who knows that you can't have it in the future a return to origins.
This is to say that Shadowverse: Champion's Battle lets itself be played very willingly and yes, the story is undoubtedly aimed at a young audience but the substance, that moment in which we find ourselves having to battle, raises the bar pointing to another target. Anyone used to Shadowverse for PC will find the transition to this version very natural, for everyone else it is still an absolutely accessible experience whose basics are simple to understand: with practice the rest will come.
Shadowverse: Champion's Battle is the classic card game that's easy to understand, hard to master. Already from the opening bars, you notice the need to have to put together one or more decks to be exploited according to the occasion, constantly challenging the NPCs to get money and materials with which to improve ourselves: the feelings that he left us refer above all to the various chapters of Yu -Gi-Oh !, from which it detaches itself by presenting itself less elaborate but still efficient - especially with the mechanics of Evolution. While it is possible to challenge real players, right now it is not easy to find opponents and therefore this remains an aspect to be explored in the review phase. From an aesthetic point of view, the game does not differ from any other anime tie-in, with discrete graphics for the characters (a little more bevel would not hurt). Nothing to say instead regarding the illustrations of the cards, very well made and equipped with one or more lines of dialogue. In this regard, you can choose English or Japanese for speech but the localization is only available in English.
