Super Dragon Ball Heroes World Mission is a typically insanely long title for a brand new card game on Nintendo Switch featuring more stats, cards, references and sub-par graphics than you could wave a telescopic stick at. (You know, like Goku had as a child, remember?)
Super Dragon Ball Heroes, was a DS game that has been moved onto the Switch and is a pretty solid card game, which I find frustrating, addictive and I'm confused about whether or not I enjoy. I think I've spent about an hour or two in tutorials feeling like I was learning to play Numberwang… and yet I keep going.
The hero of the game is called Dave, in my version, but is essentially nameless and you can call him Jeff or Chimp Lasher for that matter. Dave is the protagonist of my story, and he has found himself in the middle of a card battle tournament, but all the characters in the card game, based on the 'real life' events of Dragon Ball, have started coming into the 'real world' attacking everyone they can see. This is a bit odd, considering the characters such as Radditz, Cooler, Frieza etc. are intergalactic terrorists, meaning this is the equivalent of us having a card game featuring Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, and that douche that stole the last table in Starbucks before ordering anything.
The game is packed full of lovely Dragon Ball nostalgia as you would imagine, and each card game resembles a contrived RPG mechanic more than a strict card game like Gwent or that awesome one from Final Fantasy IX. Unfortunately, the graphics look like I've drawn them on my lap in the street because there were no free tables left in Starbucks.
The story is compelling, and the exciting energy of Dragon Ball is here as much as it could be in a card game, which unfortunately goes hand in hand with an intensely steep learning curve at the start of the game, I have no idea why I'm winning, but I assume I should just keep doing what I'm doing. The music is great, and the cards are really awesomely designed. However, here is my main problem. This is a card game. This is, at the time of writing, the same price as a AAA title! You could fly to Spain with a pack of cards, get tipsy in a bar and play with some nerds for roughly the same amount of money. There just isn't enough in the game to warrant the price tag, especially with so many other high-quality games floating about at the moment.
If you get a free copy of it, or you see it on sale and you love Dragon Ball, it's certainly worth playing, but I'd hold off for a while. I'll tell you what, if you are a government employee that can pass a law that means you aren't allowed to sit down in a Starbucks without previously ordering something, I'll give you my copy.
★★★☆☆
David Roberts
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