I’m Obsessed with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s Card Game
Final Fantasy has a long history of mini games that – depending on how big of a fan you are – can range from charming to outright infuriating (I’m looking at you, lightning dodger). Aside from Cloud snowboarding in Final Fantasy VII, the most famous of these mini games might be the various iterations of card games throughout the franchise’s illustrious history. While the series is best known for its world and characters, only the most seasoned Final Fantasy fans have mastered Triple Triad. Since FFIX’s Tetra Master, the series hadn’t seen a proper card game in over 20 years. Then Final Fantasy VII Rebirth came along and created a card game so good, I wish I could play it in the real world.
When you initiate a match of Queen’s Blood, you’re blasted by the bombastic, jazzy match tune that launches your brain into either panic or determination, depending on how confident you are in your card game skills. For an entirely optional mini game, Queen’s Blood has several elements working in its favor. Initially, the game appears to be straight forward – almost to a fault – as the core mechanics revolve around placing cards onto tiles; each card has an assigned power value, and whichever player has the highest combined power value in a row wins points equal to that number. At first, Queen’s Blood felt reminiscent of Mancala in the sense that it’s a battle over territory and outsmarting your opponent (also you literally put stones into your bowl to count the score). But in true TCG fashion, the game introduces a plethora of mechanics that complicate every decision you make on the cardboard battleground.
It’s clear that Rebirth really wants you to indulge in Queen’s Blood. The card game is interwoven with each area of the game, and certain story events directly revolve around tournaments that Cloud and the gang get thrown into (though the matches themselves are still skippable). Rebirth’s development team even went to great lengths in designing unique characters with backstories that only appear for a match or two. In an interview with Kotaku, the game’s director Naoki Hamaguchi stated that the team ensured “each and every opponent who appears in the Shadowblood Queen storyline was presented as a uniquely individual character.” This attention to detail is consistent throughout the entire game and makes Queen’s Blood my favorite in-universe card battler that I’ve had the pleasure of engaging in.
As a brief disclaimer, this is all coming from a person who really likes competitive card games. Magic: The Gathering has had a hold on me (and every paycheck I receive) for a solid half of my life. Games like Slay the Spire, Inscryption, and now Balatro are in a constant rotation on my switch. There’s just something about that sweet smell of cardboard – or virtual cardboard – that has a hold on me. The feeling of sitting at a table with a friend and figuring out a strategy in the heat of the moment is a rare feeling that even video games can’t seem to replicate. Since the deckbuilder genre has seen an uptick in popularity, we are getting more experiences like this in video game form, so seeing this happen in one of my favorite AAA titles feels validating, if nothing else.
I’m not sure if the entire playerbase of Rebirth feels the same way though. While Queen’s Blood’s overall reception seems to be positive, a sizeable chunk of players will inevitably see side content like this as a distraction, especially when the game we’re talking about is a remake of one of the most aggressively revered games of all time. While I know that citing Youtube comments – or god forbid Reddit threads – as a source has about as much journalistic integrity as an Elon Musk tweet, my early searches for Queen’s Blood strategies revealed a fairly common sentiment repeating online: that integrating this card game into the main story is a misstep that detracts from the impact of the actual story being told. While I can see some validity in this argument, I also think that if any of these people are long time fans of the series, they’d know that in a Final Fantasy title, distracting from the main story with mini games is what they do best.
However, this does bring up an important discussion around developers that devote entire teams’ time and energy into side content and what role it plays in a story-based game. This is ultimately an unwinnable battle considering not every player will have the same taste or preference, but still this tightrope must be walked and risks are always going to be taken. In the case of Queen’s Blood, it expands upon the world of Gaia, providing deeper insight into the massive world you have the luxury to explore.
Either way, this TCG junky can’t stop thinking about Queen’s Blood. Now let’s just hope the buzz about expanding the game turns out to be true. Besides, who wouldn’t want a deck of collectible Tifa trading cards?
—4/16/24
