Xenocard, the Virtual CCG
JRPGs have a history of incorporating mini-games; FF7 had an assortment, FF8 had Triple Triad, FF9 had Tetra Master, FF10 had Blitzball. Though Xenosaga had a few interesting minigames, it blew away the competition with Xenocard, an in-game CCG that you could buy booster packs for with in-game money.
The game itself was a 2 player Magic: The Gathering style duel game, with 4 factions: Human, Mech, Realian and Gnosis. The humans were balanced, the mechs were powerful but expensive, the Realians were cheap and could be deployed en masse, and the Gnosis required humans to be sacrificed to be summoned, and had lots of weird effects (they were my favourite).
Your deck was both your hit points and source to pay unit costs; there were two discard piles, Junk and Lost. Gnosis had piles of interaction with the Lost pile. There were several Global enchantment-style Situation cards that had ongoing effects, some of them very subtle (such as making your killed units go to the Lost pile rather than the Junk pile, or drawing from your Lost pile instead of your deck), and you'd try to play them in an interlocking way that complemented the units you had on your battlefield. You could play characters from the game and level them up or attach weapons; I had a lot of fun turning the characters I didn't like into Gnosis.
There was massive amounts of depth in the game, and it addicted me for countless hours on end. I remember considering how as a virtual CCG, all unit stats were easy to check, and the battle procedure a breeze to run through; this would have been laborious in reality.
Xenocard had a tremendous amount of thematic-mechanical integration and was an outstanding game; it was a huge pity that neither of the sequel Xenosaga games had anything like it. To be frank, I'd buy a Xenosaga DS game.
Overview and card list.
The game itself was a 2 player Magic: The Gathering style duel game, with 4 factions: Human, Mech, Realian and Gnosis. The humans were balanced, the mechs were powerful but expensive, the Realians were cheap and could be deployed en masse, and the Gnosis required humans to be sacrificed to be summoned, and had lots of weird effects (they were my favourite).
Your deck was both your hit points and source to pay unit costs; there were two discard piles, Junk and Lost. Gnosis had piles of interaction with the Lost pile. There were several Global enchantment-style Situation cards that had ongoing effects, some of them very subtle (such as making your killed units go to the Lost pile rather than the Junk pile, or drawing from your Lost pile instead of your deck), and you'd try to play them in an interlocking way that complemented the units you had on your battlefield. You could play characters from the game and level them up or attach weapons; I had a lot of fun turning the characters I didn't like into Gnosis.
There was massive amounts of depth in the game, and it addicted me for countless hours on end. I remember considering how as a virtual CCG, all unit stats were easy to check, and the battle procedure a breeze to run through; this would have been laborious in reality.
Xenocard had a tremendous amount of thematic-mechanical integration and was an outstanding game; it was a huge pity that neither of the sequel Xenosaga games had anything like it. To be frank, I'd buy a Xenosaga DS game.
Overview and card list.