Yggdra Union: We’ll Never Fight Alone

Many, many things about Yggdra Union: We’ll Never Fight Alone, puzzle me. I did not, cannot, and will not attempt to unravel its weirdnesses, but, conveniently, I do have a forum for expressing my befuddlement about them.

Review of Yggdra Union: We’ll Never Fight Alone
by X-34 minus 5R1-6X36

Many, many things about Yggdra Union: We’ll Never Fight Alone, puzzle me. I did not, cannot, and will not attempt to unravel its weirdnesses, but, conveniently, I do have a forum for expressing my befuddlement about them.

Let us begin with the game’s title. Yggdra Union. It is a strange combination of words. This is why: “Yggdra,” presumably, refers, for some entirely arcane reason, to Yggdrasil, which in Norse mythology is the name for the “world tree,” the legendary earth-and-heavens-spanning arboreal behemoth under whose branches the gods would convene to discuss matters deific. I do not know what Yggdra Union has to do with Norse mythology, or with Yggdrasil, or, really, with anything. It is apparent that the game’s designers do not know anything about these relationships, either. I understand, in fact, that it is common practice in Japan to employ English (and Norse?) words simply for their euphoniousness, or for their appearance on the printed page. I am torn between whether this is a reasonable thing to do or a highly puzzling thing to do. I’m leaning toward the latter.

Next, we have “Union.” In the game, this word could not be more thoroughly misused. In gameworld, “union” means “battle,” so far as I can tell. I would like to suggest that battles, in which armed forces slay one another, are hardly unifying events. When you move your little cursor thingy over a character and the screen-text asks if you’d like to “form a union,” such wrongheaded antonymery is downright puzzling. I kept thinking that I was being asked if my blue-tinted, big-headed characters would like to make friends with the red-tinted, big-headed character. But no – I was being asked if I’d like to kick some red-tinted ass. Took me a while, that.

You probably think I am nitpicking. Maybe I am nitpicking. But let me tell you, these little oddnesses accrete rapidly.

My major source of puzzlement has to do with the fact that gameplay revolves around the playing of cards – not like poker, but like Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon. I don’t know anything about Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon (except that one of the creatures is called Bulbasaur, a word I like to utter for its euphoniousness), and no amount of manual-reading nor gameplay could relieve the big brick wall of puzzlement engendered by this central concept. If you understand such card games as Magic, you may have little trouble parsing the card-playing aspects of Yggdra Union. Then again, maybe you’ll have a lot of trouble.

You have to choose a card to play before embarking on any sort of strategic move, so there’s a highly puzzling card-selecting screen. It’s highly puzzling because it makes you go through the motions of selecting certain cards, but won’t let you advance past the screen without selecting each and every one of them.

More puzzling than this, though, is the fact that all this cardplay does not appear to be – what is the word? – fun. To me, this is like playing a game based on actuarial tables. To succeed at Yggdra Union, one must balance a card’s power value with the time of day during which it can be played with its puzzling gender-, location-, and size-based restrictions with about six other factors. On the one hand, this creates complex gameplay, I suppose, but, on the other, it means that you need a spreadsheet to play the game. Any life experience that requires one to open Microsoft Excel is an experience which is, by definition, devoid of fun. But if you are an actuary, you might set a high score or something.

Here’s something else puzzling: during the battle scenes, you, the gamer, don’t actually do anything. You just sit there and watch as your big-headed characters – who are separated from the other big-headed characters by a big jagged line – swing their battle axes at each other. Yes, OK, you can hold down one or another button to make them fight more “passively” or “aggressively,” but, so far as I can tell, all this does is slow down or speed up the fights. Since I had nothing else to do, I usually sped them up.

The story itself is pretty standard: you and your band of heroic bigheads have to defeat the forces of the Imperial army; to do this, you use weaponry and potions and cunning and horses and all that stuff. You also use the cards themselves. Interestingly, the cards exist in both the story-world and in the gamer-world. That is, the characters themselves refer to the playing of certain cards against other characters. This has no particular effect one way or t’other on gameplay, but I found the story-world’s imperfect barriers to be unusual.

Yggdra Union’s designers must have known that gameplay is puzzling, so they included little in-game tutorials. These are useful – to an extent. They do give you some pointers on how to move your little cursor thingy, and on which weapons are likely to defeat other weapons, and so forth. (Incidentally, the weapon power ratings are entirely nonsensical. Swords are more powerful than axes, which are more powerful than spears … which are more powerful than swords. This illogic never ceased to bother me.) But, by and large, the tutorials don’t explain enough. And, frankly, I take it as the mark of subpar design if you have to include something like this at all. Why not just make the game, you know, comprehensible?

Gameplay in Yggdra Union rarely held my interest. Playing cards is uninteresting and baffling to me, and the action scenes are devoid of action. There ain’t much left, I’m afraid. Or maybe there is – I didn’t play this one for very long. The combination of “boring” and “meaninglessly complex” does not, for me, make for exciting gaming. Yggdra Union is a solid “Meh.”

One last puzzling detail: All of the characters have “heroic”- or “fantastic”- or “medieval”-sounding names, like Milanor and Zilva and Aegina and ol’ Yggdra herself. Except for one guy. His name is Russell.

Approximate hours played: 3-4

Will I play it more?: No.