Genre: Role-Playing
Publisher: Yuke's Company of America
Developer: Idea Factory
Release Date: October 27, 2008

In the mind of J.M. Barrie, creator of the beloved "Peter Pan" stories, Neverland was a magical realm of boyish adventure where you never had to grow up. In the imagination of Neverland Card Battles creators Idea Factory, however, it seems that Neverland is just another generic anime fantasy realm, filled with dark elves and your typical, boring ancient evils.

I came into Neverland Card Battles with no ideas or impressions of the Neverland universe, and I left it with just about as much. The game does little to make you care about its dull cast of anime misfits. Even the arrogant gambler, Galahad, who serves as the plot's protagonist, does nothing but spout pithy moralistic sayings, get trapped in his gambling addiction, and kick some card-battling butt. The others trapped in the game's setting, the vast and deep ruins of Hellgaia's shrine, are just as cheap and one-dimensional, only they're much easier to hate after the first six or seven times a particularly vicious one shows you just how cheap he can be.

Neverland Card Battles is more than just an empty story rife with worn-out clichés, however. Beneath the thin veneer of a plot lies an interesting and eventually addictive mix of trading card game and strategy RPG. The game's crippling disabilities are only the uninteresting world, technical issues, some bad design and a crushing difficulty curve. Buried beneath the ruin, a glimmer of gold waits to ensnare the incredibly patient TCG strategy buff.

The title plays out in a unique set of more than a dozen tiled grids. Each map has its own layout, ranging from narrow canyons to sprawling islands and claustrophobic volcano tops. While the type of land doesn't matter a whole lot, the layout of the tiles on the grid does because the game is just as much about managing terrain as it is about playing with your cards. Each card in the game has a certain cost, which can only be paid out of your available supply of tiles. Every tile over which one of your characters walks is marked and gives you one cost point, and the same goes for the enemy. Therefore, in order to actually use anything, you have to carefully plan how you're going to conquer your available grid, or how you can stop the opponent from capturing his. It's a strategic depth pulled straight out of board games like chess, backgammon or Othello, and it's a lot more instrumental in battle than you'd think. If you can block your opponent's moves and take back all of his red squares, he can't do anything but sit there and absorb damage from all sides. If your opponent drastically knocks down your cost count in his turn, you may be forced to sacrifice units or bases whose upkeep cost is too high, and your Dominator may be left to fend for himself.

Every battle starts out pitting just one foe against the other. You and the enemy Dominator can summon monsters or cast spells with your cards in an attempt to take out the other one, but the most powerful unit on the field will almost always be the commanding generals, the Dominators. It takes a lot of strategy to bring down these behemoths, even with your army of card monsters and available spells, and it can start to feel every bit as daunting as felling a Colossus in Shadow of the Colossus, especially when they have abilities that have the potential to make them practically invincible. Even the second enemy, Shaia, can be almost impossible to damage with your normal cards thanks to her "first strike" ability, which tallies the damage she deals before her opponent gets to strike and allows her to kill anything with low health before it can touch her. While some of the early Dominators can be downed simply by engaging in a dogfight between the leader characters, most enemies have far superior attack power and health and require you to peck away at them for a long time.

A strategy is an important thing to have in Neverland Card Battles. You won't get far just rushing in alone, so you quickly have to learn to sit back and stretch out the battles to stop losing. Unfortunately, even when you do this, the odds of loss are still completely up in the air. Something apparently not given much thought in the early stages of the title game is the frustration of having strategy play second fiddle to the random draw of a card. Unlike a good game of chess, you can only plan so far ahead, since you never know which card you or your opponent will have next. In addition, even though the game briefly shows your opponent's hand as he makes his decisions, you can never take a detailed look through his cards to infer their next move. It's not clear whether game designers intended this, or just forgot to give you the chance to plot things out better. Either way, it makes things incredibly frustrating when you finally have things pinned down, and then a lucky draw gives the opponent an unbeatable monster that can proceed to tear down all of your carefully laid plans as you pray in frustration for a better card.

Trust me, that card never comes.

Although you could argue that bad luck can be combated by good deck design, you'd be flat-out wrong for the vast majority of the game. It's true that once you have a good selection of cards, you can make decks for almost any occasion that start to stack the odds of any draw in your favor, but for the first dozen battles or so (actually, for the entirety of the story mode), your card selection is, well, not so hot compared to your opponents'. While your enemies somehow have cards with attack and defense stats in the double digits, you're stuck with a few flimsy support cards and, if you're lucky, a handful of cards that can resist strong attacks or possibly deal out five attack points. Once you start getting lucky and racking up some comparable cards the game takes on a whole new dimension, but until then you have to lose, lose and lose, waiting for a lucky chance to corner your opponent and pummel the daylights out of him.

The mechanics of gameplay are just complicated enough, and the cards just varied enough, to make the endgame a supremely enjoyable experience. Rather than trying to cheaply exploit any cards, you can start forming actual strategies and put up an honest, if tactical and occasionally devious, fight. This is about where the addiction kicks in and you can see why Neverland Card Battles would stand a chance. The various card attributes, the simultaneous striking feature, the defense-building strategies and the battle to maintain a decent amount of cost all make for a stimulating, cerebral experience with only a bit of luck holding you down.

The multiplayer would probably be a shining beacon of rare joy in this mostly frustrating title, but its ad-hoc single-pak play is inaccessible to anyone who plays by the rules. It'd certainly be nice to go up against a flesh-and-blood human being, with his own strategies and foibles, but it's an experience that almost no one will ever know, and most people will have to settle for the confusing but complicated AI.

Unfortunately, the minefield of issues will probably keep away just about everyone who doesn't have to play the game so they'll never get to the mildly enjoyable core experience. The graphics won't be drawing anyone in, either; everything is squashy, blurry and underdeveloped. The plot is atrociously simple and only peripherally present, and the sound design is awful, especially when you hear the "cancel" buzzer for the umpteenth time. The music is as generic as the characters, the loading is constant and invasive, and worst of all is the aforementioned "learning curve," or more appropriately, "brick wall."

It's hard to recommend Neverland Card Battles when it mostly feels like work, but it's difficult to not love it a little after seeing it through to the end, despite its prickly exterior. The best thing to do here is to hold out hope for a sequel that will truss up this plain date and make it ready to take to the big ball. This title holds the potential, but it needs a makeover before its positive qualities can shine through.

Score: 6.8/10