Card games are indeed serious business that even your history teacher teaches it!
Another series that involves children’s card games less the holographic monsters! What makes this show to the big kahuna in terms of children’s card games, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters? Just read the review to find out!
The story is about Aichi Sendou who doesn’t play Cardfight!! Vanguard (Gasp! You never played a children’s card game?!), the latest card game craze in their place but he carries with him the rare Blast Blader that was given to him by someone. Because of his classmate getting the said card for the sake of beating Toshiki Kai, this show’s Kaiba less the douche-ness, he ends up playing Vanguard just to get his card back, and so, Aichi will end up like the other known anime characters who were involved into card games.
The plot of this anime is pretty standard for shonen, a weak hero in which as the series progress, he will become the strongest around. What makes this interesting is that unlike most anime protagonist that I know that plays card games, Aichi here doesn’t have a background knowledge regarding the game… which is interesting to begin with that is why I want to see how he will win in his first match in the next episode! As for his possible rival, Kai, he is standard type of rival character, period.
Now you understand why Seto Kaiba spends a lot of money to enhance the excitement of a children's card game!
As for the mechanics of the game, it reminded me between Duel Masters in terms of blocking thing and majority of the rules and Pokemon TCG in terms of evolution-esque style in terms of the primary card and placing damage counters. What makes the card game interesting is that, we don’t have holographic monsters but we have our characters imagining what are their monster doing in the mystical world called, Cray. This is enjoyable to see because you have this feeling that they are now in a different dimension and the players are just moving some cards for the scenery in the other world to move.
Overall, if you watched a lot of anime titles that is based on card games, you might consider this show following the same formula like the shows that has card games with it. I guess I might drop this title in the 5th episode if I haven’t seen any interesting development in the show.