is a 2021 role-playing video game developed by Alim and published by Square Enix for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Windows. It was released for Android and iOS in 2023. Using the aesthetic of a tabletop role-playing game, the player controls a party of adventurers in the wake of a legendary dragon's reappearance. Gameplay involves travelling between towns, completing story quests and fighting in turn-based battles.
The game staff included several veterans of the Drakengard series and its spin-off Nier, including creative director Yoko Taro, executive producer Yosuke Saito, composer Keiichi Okabe, and artist Kimihiko Fujisaka. The game was initially pitched by Yoko as a social mobile game, but Saito insisted on it being developed as a small-scale console title. The game met with positive reviews from journalists, with praise focusing on its presentation and narrative. Two follow-up titles released the following year; Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden and Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden.
Gameplay
Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars is a role-playing video game which presents its world, characters and battles in the style of a tabletop role-playing game; everything is represented using cards, with the player navigating environments as a game piece. The player explores the game's setting of the Island of Bliss, with areas blocked off until certain story events are completed. The environments are split between towns, the overworld, and dungeons.
During navigation, the player uncovers the map through flipping adjacent cards, sometimes triggering random events and finding treasure chests, with some encounters requiring a dice role to determine the outcome. The player's piece can move one card at a time, or jump to revealed cards. Completing certain quests for characters earns the player a Mysterious Card, which plays into the ending of the story. In towns, players can engage in a card-based minigame, with the aim being to match card types and scores while working with or around random card effects, with the winner having the highest score. The card minigame supports four-person local multiplayer.
Battles play out through both scripted and random encounters with a party of four controlled by the player; protagonists Barren and Laty, and two other characters dictated by the storyline. During combat, the player can perform standard attacks, use items, and perform skills using gems generated once per turn and added to a pool. During some battles, happenstance cards are triggered, granting an effect to both the player and the enemy party. Damage from attacks is calculated using the attack and defense values on each card, while each character can only have one positive and one negative status effect at a time. Upon winning, the party is awarded with gold and experience points, with leveling up raising a character's health and attributes.
Synopsis
On the Isle of Bliss, a Dragon said to bring catastrophe in its wake arrives. Queen Nilla sends adventurer bands to slay the Dragon and the monsters that emerged in its wake. Adventurer Ash and his monster partner Mar takes on the job for coin, being joined by the witch Melanie as she also seeks the Dragon. They often cross paths and are impeded by Wynifred and Sherwyn of the Ivory Order, a group who control a panacea called Dragontears. During their travels, Ash's party grows with more members, and he runs across other villages with conflicts related to the main quest including a village which uses sentient monsters as a food source, and discover that the Dragon is being aided by a man called Vince, later revealed to be Melanie's brother.
Reaching the village nearest the Dragon's lair, it is revealed to be a testing ground for Dragontear treatments. Ash belonged to that village, with Mar having been his sister; an experiment on their family following an escape attempt killed their parents, transformed Mar into a monster, and caused Ash to suffer traumatic amnesia. Dragontears is further revealed to be the literal tears of the Dragon extracted through torture by the Ivory Order, its current rampage being collateral damage after being freed by Vince; it now seeks to die before the Ivory Order recapture it. Vince is killed defending the Dragon before it can explain its motives, then Sherwyn arrives and kills the Dragon; his family was a victim of Dragontear experiments, and he joined the Ivory Order to get revenge. The group pursue him, as he intends to destroy the last vials of Dragontear which can cure Mar of her condition.