With a title that unwieldy and long, you may quite rightfully have no idea whatsoever what this game actually is. But fear not! It's actually not so complicated (although it definitely still is, even for a Japanese game, a very weird and unwieldy title X3). Here in Japan, we call Dutch playing cards "trump", and the "Alice" in the title refers to Alice in Wonderland, as this is an Alice in Wonderland-themed collection of card games played with Dutch playing cards. This is a game I heard of a LONG time ago after just doing a simple google search for interesting Japan-exclusive N64 games. I managed to find a copy not too long after I moved here, and it was the first game I streamed on Twitch a little over a year ago. My particular copy is also one of the most immaculate N64 games I've ever seen, and ALWAYS boots up first time, so most of this thing's life for me has been to test the console to make sure it's booting properly X3. To celebrate my one year of streaming, I finally sat down and played through the whole story mode over the course of like 3-ish hours.
The story is, fairly predictably, a retelling of Alice in Wonderland but with basically every disagreement solved by Alice (whom you play as) beating her opponent in some card game. The game has a very tongue-in-cheek approach to how its written, and even pokes fun at the very premise, with Alice sarcastically predicting the upcoming card game only for her opponent to enthusiastically confirm her prediction XD. It takes place over 8 chapters in game, so 8 card games, and is fairly short. I had a lot of fun doing the voices for the characters on stream~. The game itself is really what it says on the tin, and it's really just a bunch of card games. There are like 16 of them in total, ranging from obvious ones like Old Maid, simple card matching, and Sevens, to variants of other games like "Page One" (the game Uno is based off of), and even oddballs like Seven Bridge (which is basically just Mahjong but played with playing cards). It was quite the work of luck to be able to pass most of the story trials for the games, particularly ones like Seven Bridge, and some of the rule sets were different enough from the how-to guides I'd looked up online that I was a bit confused on how to play, but you can look up how to play any of them whenever you want by just pressing the start button, so that's an awesome quality of life feature. Not every game is playable multiplayer, as the game has no ability to hide player information like that, but a fair amount of them still are. There are even a few games you can play that aren't present in the story mode like blackjack and video poker. It's all well put together, even if it is a bit confusing to get the grasp of the game's house rules sometimes. The game's presentation is really cute. The music is alright and is very "card game" in its presence but non-intrusiveness, but it's the graphics that are a bit more noteworthy. It has a very Paper Mario-like pop-up storybook aesthetic to it, as the story mode is presented literally as a story book on a big stage. And this is all in 1998, so actual Paper Mario was still two whole years away. It has a very charming and memorable aesthetic, and fits the "family fun" nature of a card game collection really well. Verdict: Recommended. It's hard to really judge a game like this on most levels. Though it's a pretty cheap, albeit uncommon, game, the amount of text makes it pretty difficult to recommend as an import. But if that isn't a problem for you and a somewhat multiplayer-light card game simulator with a cute aesthetic on N64 is something you think you need in your life, then this is will fit the bill about as well as anything could X3
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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