SpoilerI know games are a medium and not a genre but whatever.

SpoilerSo, Card Hunters is a browser-based game where you play a tabletop game in your friend's basement.

The game plays like Final Fantasy-Tactics-y grid-based tactical RPGs, with Baten-Kaitos-ish card fighting a Paper-Mario-ous sense of your-characters-are-almost-entirely-defined-by-their-equipment-so-if-you're-stuck-on-a-battle-you-can-rebuild-them-from-scratch-between-battles-osity. All actions in the game, from moving to attacking to spells, are done by playing cards from your deck. Unlike other deck-based games, your cards come from your equipment, and each piece of equipment bound to a handful of specific cards. Some of these cards are better than others, but in general, if you try to switch to a different card of the same equipment level because one of its cards is really good, it'll also come with a couple of weak cards, or even a detrimental card you're forced to play.

The aesthetic of the game is all about the basement-tabletoppiness, the characters all looking like cardstock cutouts on cardboard board, with soda and dice hanging around the background of the screen. Because your friend is just learning how to DM, the main campaign is a series of prepackaged quick campaigns, each of which is just a few battles wrapped in generic fantasy flavor. Around these battles, there's a more interesting narrative of your friend learning how to run games and meeting the cute pizza-delivery girl. I'm hoping this is a running narrative with characters that actually develop, but it might be something like a limited set of randomly chosen scenes where you keep seeing the same ones over and over.

There's also multiplayer. I haven't really tried it much, but if you like turn-based strategy multiplayer you'll probably like this. There's, like, ranked multiplayer and a ladder and stuff, it's fleshed out, whatever.

The game is free-to-play, but don't let that bother you. The paid stuff is just cosmetic upgrades, a couple rare items, a few extra quests and the ability to farm ~30% faster. You can get either everything or mostly everything through normal gameplay, and if you do want to support the developers, there's a $25 package that gives you everything you'd even want to pay for. It's not really pay-to-win (although I imagine paying would help); during the beta, two of the top five players hadn't paid a cent.

The game is also browser-based, but that's not a huge issue either. The campaigns and shops restock once a day, but for at least the first dozen or so dungeons I've played, I've made it through without having to go back and grind, and I haven't needed to wait the 24 hours to access a previous dungeon again.

The difficulty is well-managed so far. I've died a few times already, but I've also only died a few times so far. Each dungeon gives you a few continues before you have to restart the whole adventure. It's probably not helpful that I've been trying to play a party of three dwarves. (Each of your party members can be a dwarf, human or elf, which come with a tradeoff between hp and movement speed, and later on come with special racial bonus equips. Dwarves are the slowest, so I'm kind of getting outpositioned a whole ton. On top of the classes, you choose between warrior, mage, and priest, which equip different items and therefore use different cards, and therefore can use different cards.

My biggest complaint is with the tone. Although the game gets the detritus around RPGs well (or at least the stereotypes about the detritus around RPGs), it kind of misses the point of the role-playing game. There's no chance to play a role. The game eschews all the talking and characterization parts of an RPG to just talk about the combat systems. In addition, having the characters' abilities just defined by the items you equip, and not by any choices I've made in the game, leaves me even less attached to my little paper dudes.

There also appear to be a few issues with the server, especially because this is the opening weekend. For now, expect a 10- to 20-minute wait before you can log on. (There's a timer to let you know.) In addition, the game sometimes stalls completely after your turn; this even happened once right after I won a difficult battle, forcing me to replay it. Fortunately, toggling between windowed and fullscreen seems to jog the game into moving to the next turn.

Anyway, you should probably try this game out. It's free, and at least the first few hours that I've played are pretty fun.

Spoilerhttps://i.imgur.com/LQ3Cqs1.jpg
This is the Melty Blood Act Cadenza Ultimate Strategy Bible (Ichijinsha, 2006). It’s the guide, but not the only guide; there’s a smaller, A5-ish-size book with more of a beginner emphasis, too (which is also a much more convenient thing to carry to the arcade). I suppose I should’ve included something for scale, but this book is about 240 pages thick and A4-ish-size. It’s hard to tell from this photo, but I have left the obi on; the actual cover doesn’t have that large text.

(dat metallic title )

https://i.imgur.com/7jGQIyU.jpg
Since this is a quality publication, they dedicate entire color pages just for section dividers. Don’t worry, space is not wasted in actual content pages. It’s packed, but divided off into nicely demarcated boxes and stuff, just like a magazine. That’s why they often call these things “mooks”; they’re books with magazine design, more or less.

https://i.imgur.com/swaoMmr.jpg
So after about 20 pages detailing the essential mechanics of the game from the very basics up to the extremely game-specific in gory detail, there’s a lot of pages dedicated to each character. On the first page for each, there’s a couple sentences for the character’s background, little pictures demonstrating the palette selection, and pictures showing what normals and stuff look like. On the rest of the pages, you have the special moves and such, along with detailed advice pertaining to them and the animations depicted as a series of images. And frame data, since after all, this is a fighting game with (at the time) a competitive scene.

Note the size of the text on the left. That is roughly the text density wherever there is text (most of the book is pictures), and if translated into English I estimate it would probably need about 125–175% the space overall (Japanese-to-English space requirements are more forgiving with prose, but prose this ain’t; it’s terse tip text).

https://i.imgur.com/xt5qDwp.jpg
What’s this after these anti-boss strategies? Art gallery!

https://i.imgur.com/I8nsxx9.jpg
On a single spread, we have the game portrait and thumbnail art for who are coincidentally (who were back then) my roommate’s for-fun main, my other roommate’s serious main, my for-fun main, and... the hilarious character.

After that, on non-glossy, greyscale print there is a collection of at-a-glance movelists (technically for transcriptions of speech!) in one section, and in the next, more general tips for fighting with a particular character, rather than the move-specific ones found in the glossy character-specific section. So it might seem a little inefficient and repetitive, but it’s actually more convenient because in the heat of the moment, you’re more likely to need the back section than the in-depth front section. Thoughtfully done.

Although such books will unavoidably contain inaccuracies or oversights here and there (for instance, if a nasty infinite combo arose before a game’s release, it’d have been fixed and never made its way into the guide, but it affects the game in an important way nonetheless; typos have also been known to make their way into guides), they tend to be reasonably authoritative and comprehensive on the whole.

Some English-language strategy guides do manage to cover their respective games in this level of depth (maybe I’ll get to do a side-by-side comparison one day?), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one achieve the level of elegance in graphical design found in a typical Japanese strategy guide. The ones I’ve seen are always have something up with them; too busy-looking or nasty font selection or whatever. Not to mention they almost never get to show off exclusive tidbits like developer trivia or concept art rather than the generic presskit materials every magazine already got mailed to them (in fact, this sort of thing is so lucrative that Squaresoft back in the day started a series devoted strictly to it instead of keeping it as a mere selling-point for guides). Really, I’d love to get in on translating this sort of stuff for a living, but in the back of my head I don’t think there’d be a strong market for it here at all.