Culdcept Saga

Playing Culdcept Saga on the Xbox 360 might give you the strange sensation that you're actually on Wall Street, making investments in cold hard magic.  At times you're investing in things called "symbols" and other times you're doing battle with another player's creature.  Culdcept Saga is, at it's barest, a strange amalgamation of Magic the Gathering and Monopoly.  It's a card game with dice and a board. Or a board game with cards, rather. And it's actually one of the most engaging and strategic games to come along in quite a while.

In Culdcept Saga, players move around a board and claim lands for the purpose of claiming fees from other players who stop there.  Players claim territories by summoning creatures to defend the land; players also us items to protect your creatures.  Spells, although not always intended for creatures, can be defensive as well as offensive--can attack an opponent's creature or the opponent directly.  Creatures are summoned from customized "books" of fifty cards each and can be used to contest lands that are already occupied.  If you manage to destroy an opponent's creature on a land where you stopped, you'll take the land with that creature and forfeit the toll for that land.  Creatures can be upgraded for magic, and players proceed around the board, passing forts (which give a magic bonus), until one person reaches the designated amount of magic and returns to the castle (the game's start point).

I've never played the PlayStation 2 version (titled "Culdcept"), although I've heard it was unbalanced, glitchy, and popular in Japan.  Culdcept Saga isn't so much a sequel to the original, as it is a full-blown revision. It is Culdcept for PS2 with the cards retooled and rebalanced, bugs squashed, glitches ironed out, and a few more multiplayer levels for good measure. Culdcept Saga is what Culdcept should have been, and it's a little strange that Namco Bandai didn't deem it worth the release on PS2.

Culdcept Saga might be off-putting for many gamers; that said, it's not the kind of game that will (or wants to) get mass appeal.  Consistently, I see about twenty people online playing Culdcept Saga in the United States.  I'm told there are more in Japan (the 360 version is popular there, as well), but I have no way of confirming or disconfirming it's popularity.  There are, however, little over 200 people on the online leaderboards, so say something of it's niche appeal. If you like strategy games, board games, and/or card games, you're a likely candidate to get a lot of joy from Culdcept Saga.

Story

In Culdcept Saga, you play the nameless stranger who is able to harness the power of cards (which are said to be shards of the "Culdcept," a book of ultimate power). At first reluctant, you are forced against your will to defend yourself with a "starter book" or be killed.  Very quickly you understand that there are people who are trying to start war.  You do battle with many different characers such as a spunky cepter named Rilara, the traveling princess, Faustina, and the High Priest Sapphius, who is oddly reminiscent of Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII.  Essentially, the story is only a proponent to get you into battles.  Between each battle you watch a cutscene where you meet a character and launch into another conflict.  The story is extremely pedestrian and forgettable.  An evil king tries to invade another country and you have to go persuade the leader of that country to listen to your words of warning  before it's too late.  When you discover who's really pulling the strings, you'll probably be too lethargic to care.  The writing in the game suffers from stilted dialogue, poor voice acting, and contrived plot devices, such as "mind control." It's easy enough to skip the cutscenes; you'll be better of for it.

Graphics

Culdcept Saga looks like a board game. Graphically, it's unimpressive, but each card's art is rather well done and high resolution. If you take the time to look at each creature, you will notice some really nice texture work and modelling.  It's not flashy but not a complete eye sore.  Levels show of some nice background effects: all but the new Xbox 360 exclusive maps, which are sorely bare.  Also, some slowdown creeps up on certain maps when there are too many creatures on-screen.  Things never get too bad, but you'll be scratching your head, wondering where all that processing power went. 

Sound

Aurally, Culdcept Saga is a mixed bag. The standard bells-and-whistles here do their job, but don't get in the way.  The default setting is to have a lady's voice tell you when you landed on an opponent's land, or when you hit the castle, but thankfully this can be muted in the options. Overall, the music is pleasant if repetitive. It can even be enjoyable, if you're into sweeping fantasy soundtracks (and I am, of course).  You're given the choice of background music when you create an online game, although I rarely see anyone changing it from the board's default song. 

Gameplay

Culdcept Saga, luckily, isn't the sum of it's many parts.  Closer to Magic the Gathering than Monopoly, this is the kind of game that you come for the strategy and stay for the strategy; you either know what you're getting into or you won't play it.  The single-player mode against quirky AI characters comprises half ot he game's bulk, and will take about fifteen hours or more to complete, depending on your familiarity with the game.  A great deal of the joy of Culdcept Saga is the collecting of cards, which are awarded at the end of battle whether you win or lose (although amounts are scaled up to your place).  There are 500 cards in the game, and so getting four of each (the max number you can use in a book) will take a very long time. 

A single game of for 8000 magic can take over two hours in real life, so it's not the type of game you just pick-up-and-play. And the online multiplayer has limitless replayability, thanks to some ingenious card combinations.  

There are several types of cards in Culdcept Saga, each with their own perks. Creatures, as I mentioned earlier, are land-holders, although each has a unique ability.  Certain ones have triggered abilities if the opponent's creature meets the requirements, or are triggered at different points in battle.  Other creatures, like Fay, have Territory Abilities which can be used after the "move" phase of the game. Figuring out when to use abilities and where to use them is part of the fun of Culdcept Saga.  Making the right move (the best possible move) is difficult, but not impossible, to work out.

One of the major problems a card-based game might have is the balancing act of powerful cards and versitile cards.  You'll find that, online, there are some cards that are considered "top tier" that many players seem to overuse.  Those: Trespass, Reflect Amulet, Fistfight, Suppression, Find, Fame, Refuge and a few others do rank above some other cards for versatility, cost-effectiveness, and power, but even there are plenty of counter strategies for these top-tier cards as well, so that nothing feels cheap.  Essentially, if a player manages to set up a killer strategy, it's not the fault of the cards, but the fault of the opponent who should have been working to disrupt that combo.  In Culdcept Saga, no one card dominates the game, and that's the most important aspect to the strategy.  Some of the most difficult games I've played have been against gamers experimenting with some infrequently used cards.

Achieving the set magic number can be easier with the help of something called "symbols." As I mentioned earlier, Culdcept Saga is a game about investment, and "symbols" are the game's stock market.  Symbols are the representation of the amount of investment in a given color on a given board.  At designated locations throughout a board you can purchase symbols for one of the four colors.  Symbols of a given color begin the game with a set value, but increase when people place creatures on the corresponding color.  Larger chains of creatures beget higher values of symbols.  A player can then sell back the symbols at the new, inflated price.  Symbols also affect the lap-bonus a player gets when he or she returns to the castle, so it can be worth the wait to invest in them, and watch your bonuses get bigger and bigger.  Without making this too overpowered, Namco Bandai has included several cards that attack symbol users directly, whether draining a percentage of one's magic according to how many symbols are owned, reverting symbols to their magic entirely, and others.  Playing a "symbol book" is very powerful online, although many players are weary of said strategies, and often carry one or two ways of dealing with symbol books.  The computer, however, is not so good at dealing with that type of strategy.

The AI in Culdcept Saga cheats.  I'm not sure how else to say it.  You'll see it time and again: you just need to roll a three or higher to get to the castle and win, but first you have to get through the computer's level 5 land.  More often than not, in nail-biting situations, the computer will force you to roll onto it's territory.  There's no way I can prove this happens, of course, but I have my suspicions.

What Namco Bandai has in Culdcept Saga is a rare thing: a unique intellectual product that is about as balanced as it can be.  Incredibly playable, insanely addicting, and wonderfully deep, Culdcept Saga will not appeal to everyone, but those who decide to try it out will find an amazing game that is only marred by last-generation graphics and a positively laughable story.  For the budget price, you'll find no game that offers as much replayability.