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Super Dragon Ball Heroes World Mission takes Goku card-battling

Top Trumps, but the numbers go up to six digits

The next game bringing far too many Gokus to PC is Super Dragon Ball Heroes World Mission on April 5th. Unwieldy title aside, this one's a bit different from the usual fighting game fare - it's a collectable card game, though it doesn't bear much resemblance to Hearthstone and its ilk either. It's the latest in a series of arcade and 3DS CCGs by Dimps, featuring a mixture of strategic positioning, button-mashing and timing challenges to boost attacks. World Mission, fittingly enough, is the first in the series to see an English release. Take a peek at the reveal trailer and a look at the game from its debut live-stream below.

In the original arcade version of Super Dragon Ball Heroes, you'd collect real physical cards. You assemble your team of seven characters, and lay them out on the high-tech tabletop, and physically move them around the board to change their position between 3D animated combat rounds. While the PC version isn't as tactile, you're still moving your team of interdimensional heroes and villains around to decide who is committing to attacks, who's going all-in and who's defending to recover some health. I've never played a card game like this before, and I'm quite interested in trying.

Cover image for YouTube video

And here's a little of the game in action from its debut stream last night. Give it a watch, as it's a very different breed of CCG.


Skip to 27:11 if it doesn't automatically.

This being Dragon Ball Z, it's a game of Very Large Numbers. Forget having attack ratings in the single digits - damage numbers here go into the tens of thousands for a single round of combat, which (if my math is correct) is significantly over nine thousand. Rather than the 3D combat animations being entirely for show, players are frequently prompted to mash or time button presses, or wiggle controls to activate powers. This focus on building a team to deploy up front instead of a deck to draw from gives it more of a Top Trumps feel than Magic: The Gathering - 'my feline god of destruction can beat up your shiny gold space tyrant', and so on.

Super Dragon Ball Heroes World Mission launches on April 5th, developed and published by Bandai Namco. No word on pricing or business model yet, but the 3DS games in the series were retail releases.

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Dominic Tarason

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