Welcome to our review of Super Dragon Ball Heroes World Mission, the newest entry of the Dragon Ball franchise, a tactical card game which is out now on Nintendo Switch!
Super Dragon Ball Heroes World Mission is a Tactical-Card game packed with exhilarating confrontation, deep card game strategy and a thrilling storyline taking place in the wide Dragon Ball Heroes universe!
Welcome to Hero Town, an alternate reality where Dragon Ball Heroes card game is the most popular form of entertainment. Create your own avatar and follow his journey to become the world champion of Super Dragon Ball Heroes. However, when the antagonists from the virtual game world appear in Hero Town and start wreaking havoc, you have to jump into the game world and team up with famous Dragon Ball characters to restore peace in the real world.
Super Dragon Ball Heroes World Mission (SDBHWM from now on) is quite a serious game when you think about it, bringing the entire franchise all the way to the Super series to the game, but that is about where it ends, SDBHWM does things its own way and the entire game is based upon the fact that there are now anomalies causing mayhem in the game world.
Forget everything you know about the franchise and sit back and enjoy a very good card game! As soon as the actual game begins right after a very big tutorial, you are immediately hit by a battle with none others than Vegeta and Nappa. Much like in the anime, but there is more, they are joined by two other Saiyans, namely Raditz and Turles. Vegeta also already knows how to power up all the way to level 3 super Saiyan!
So many things are wrong and the entire storyline is about collecting cards, all the way up to 1161 of them and finishing the storyline. As usual, I avoid storyline spoilers, so do play this game for yourself if you want to find out how it goes!
About the actual card battles, there is so much to be said. There are tons of tactics and you got 30 seconds to figure it out every time. Do you go all out in offense or keep most in support of your attacking squad? Well, this is the one time you can not under any circumstance skip the tutorial because there is a whole lot to take in.
Support cards, attackers, defense, attack patterns, … There really is a lot to take in. I was careless in one of my first missions and decided to go all out defense, I was punished severely because, during the turn-based action, I was unable to attack. Obviously, with everyone in defense, I should have figured this out, but I do think it is cool you are being punished in a way for being overly careful.
The reason this is so important is because you have credits, when you attack, they are used and when you go into support mode, they are being replenished. This is a PER card system. So you really need to pay close attention to everything. It is also not just enough to form 2 fixed teams, one attacking and the next turn the other. No sir, it is not enough at all. You need to learn the ropes and basically just overpower the enemy too in order to get that all important first attack in.
Once you get lucky, you got a chance to strike first with the charge impact system, basically time your attack to be more powerful than your opponent and you successfully launch a powerful attack, especially when you hit that perfect impact!
Aside from story mode, there are online modes, gachapon modes to get more cards, tons of items to collect and so much more, SDBHWM is very big in many ways. You can make Porunga appear, collect Dragon Balls, … I know I have barely scratched the tip of the iceberg so far, but also the tip of possibilities. I honestly think SDBHWM gives great bang for the bucks!
In the end, like any tactical card game, you need to bring down the opponents’ energy before they take you down and win the fight. Story mode will take you through a real rush of fun, weird, awkward but also very unexpectedly cool battles!
Most important of all, once you do the card “stuff”, you get to see your favorite Dragon ball heroes battle it out for you. Nothing beats seeing Beerus attack a guy like Raditz even if some of the animations are not the very best work out there. Graphically, this game is both a hit and a miss really, some really awesome bits and at times, you’d think we were back in the Wii era. But the graphics are just not the most important part. Those are the storyline which is really fun and entertaining and the strategic parts of the card game, also very finely tuned.
In conclusion, as a big Dragon Ball fan of the original hour, I used to get up in the weekends at 9 am just to watch the episodes in French which I barely understood at the time, but Dragon Ball just looked so cool. SDBHWM brings back nostalgia in a way but the game really shines where it matters, it’s a really strong strategic card game!
