Kohdok Talks about D-Spirits for a bit.

and we got a new box today yep here it is uh another box uh was sent to me by a game developer to good old po box 9046 as you can see here so i'm actually pretty excited about this one so let us see what we have today well we have uh dora the explorer character we got a kappa or according to this it's called moon kappa is that opposed to moon zappa uh look up frank zappa you'll get it we have uh monokuma if he was a gremlin i guess and huh i think i know who this is yep there he is the man of the hour himself and you know i assume there's some other stuff in here too and uh oh yeah yeah yeah there we go netfl that's his name okay so yeah this is uh d spirits although if you read the japanese written below the logo it actually says digital spirits although hilariously enough if you look at the website the icon there actually says dead spirits but anyway this is a new game that was funded on kickstarter and is going for an official release fairly soon and it definitely caught my attention it's definitely one of the first like similar to yu-gi-oh games like a sort of yu-gi-oh alike games that has caught my attention and i admit a lot of that has to do with this absolutely charming character design they have going on i i tell you it is a real treat after a whole big discussion about art and layout in my most recent video to be able to go over a game that clearly has its act together um these designs i think are great they definitely have that very like kids like anime look to it but it's sort of impossible to pin down like any one source of inspiration in its design i mean i see elements of like yokai watch and pokemon and heck with this guy here if i asked you what this character was without any context you'd probably say it was something out of the backyardigans or dora the explorer squiggly no squigging squiggly no squigging squiggly no squigging oh man i mean i expected them to maybe send me one or two plushes i didn't expect them to send me like the full suite of plushes here although i guess they've seen my couch um but anyway like i said d-spirits is a game that is very similar to yu-gi-oh it has like the similar limited monster zones in this case you're limited to four and it has things like how the attack and defense stats interact with attack and defense positions but there are a lot of things that i feel set it apart from yu-gi-oh um one of them is absolutely an emphasis on counter play a lot of what happens in this game i don't i don't think there's gonna be like solitaire games like there are in yu-gi-oh and yu-gi-oh just so much happens in a single turn with these spirits there's clearly an emphasis on being able to have a response to whatever kinds of shenanigans your players get up to so enduring is kind of a neat mechanic it's actually one that's reflexive so if a target gets attacked it can switch to enduring position in response to that attack so if the creature has had its attack reduced or if uh if it's it's experienced some kind of cut or if it's batsu then which has an effect that increases its power when it endures then that's actually not a bad move to take and oh man yeah like i said i'm looking at this art and it's just so so charming so nicely done it has a very a very clean look to it i mean there's a lot of uh there's definitely a lot of work going on into in the shading and all that but if you remember when i was talking about how the munchkin card game was like going for really simple designs but trying to do complex shading uh this has a lot more of a lot of what would have been would have worked better in that series is working here it has uh what is called cell shading which is where the shading rather than being some kind of like smooth effect transitioned on instead the shading is like solid blocks of color this is a common tactic for animation to make it easier to shade things make it uh allows it to be uh easier to go through cells and it's become a distinct look in and of itself anyway getting back into it another thing that's really interesting about this game is that it uses what i call a back-end resource system now most of your games they use a front-end resource system this is you pay a cost in order to get a card into play these are things like paying some kind of energy cost or needing to attach a certain number of energy cards a cost that you have to pay before you can use a card it's a pretty common one in fact you could also argue that things like like things you can only do once per turn are technically also a limited resource that you pay in the front end a back end resource system is one where you put a card into play but then when that card is removed from play you pay a sort of penalty the probably uh most well-known version of this back end payment system is pokemon with the prize cards where when you lose a pokemon to damage your opponent gets to take one of their prize cards and get a step closer to victory and if you use more powerful pokemon some of them give up two or even three prizes if they're considerably more powerful so that is probably the most obvious example of a back end resource system another one there was a game called dinosaur king which had each more powerful dinosaurs when they were defeated you lost more life points d-spirits has something kind of similar going on now if you're familiar with yu-gi-oh you are familiar with breakthrough damage that is where when a high attack monster attacks a monster that has a lower attack while that monster's in attack position the remaining damage continues on through to the opponent in the case of d spirits however each of these cards has a spirit cost a spirit point cost and what happens is you don't pay that cost when the creature enters play your spirit points are basically lear life points it's when this uh creature is defeated and sent to the discard pile defeated in battle specifically card effects that remove these um don't cost uh don't cost you any spirit points unless a card specifically says it does and there are several that do some with really strong effects or like with their own level of like protection or some kind of other cool thing tend to have an effect where no matter how they leave the battlefield you pay the sp cost um what this means is that here's the thing is in yugioh a weak monster is sort of like a hole in your fence that your opponent can just ram damage through in the case of d spirits the weaker monsters give up fewer um spirit points so a weak creature like this will only give up like 200 spirit points whereas something big and nasty like uh like atlas's gengar which i don't have out here gangurt it's this sort of this sort of goofy like this sort of goofy and terrifying um catfish dragon thing that has a very very powerful effect it's it's basically ultimate tyranno if you're familiar with the concept it basically has ultimate tyranno's ability but it gives up way more spirit points when it gets defeated um so what this does is it creates uh it creates a world that where the weaker monsters are um not only are they more useful they're also better at defense um like i said there is no breakthrough damage there is direct damage uh for instance gau has an effect that allows him to attack through all of your opponent's monsters and hit directly those uh lightning bolts aren't just for show he really is basically sort of this game's version of what giraffe the sp system actually reminds me of this game called gundam extreme verses and what it is is it's a video game where you could either play as like super powerful ultimate gundam robots or you could play as like one of the basic foot soldier robots but the trick is that each of those units has a score attached to them this is another example of a back-end resource system and when that unit is destroyed that many points gets deducted from the team's stock and the first team to run out of stock loses not only is that a great system that allows all players to participate in the game for the duration of the entire game but it means that the lower power units can actually be considered viable because they essentially get more chances to win like you could play as the devastating master gundam with all of the power that that name implies or you could play as a little transforming tank that's definitely not as powerful as the master gundam but the fact that the transforming tank is half the cost of the master gundam and thus is able to get essentially an extra life is what makes that competitive also you you're not just limited to the spirits you actually have a separate deck of spirits which can contain up to 15 to 20 spirits one copy of each you also have a a set of signs signals and signs deck you actually have two separate decks here so you announce which deck you draw from at your turn your starting hand can be any quantity from any number of those and what they do is they have the uh they work like your spell and trap cards although they work from the hand there is no setting cards instead cards that can be played on your opponent's turn have a the screw attack lightning bolt next to them indicating that they can be played on your opponent's turn and they all have various effects like they might change a monster's attack they might change a monster's attack position they might allow you to bring a monster into play um let me see if i can find it there is yeah here it is hopeful summon so hopeful summon um it's a quick effect card as uh as you can see by the lightning bolt there it's a quick effect card that allows you to super desummon which is this game's version of special summon a d spirit with 700 sp or less from your hand to the field so gau who has his direct effect uh his direct attack ability gau can only attack directly if he's already been in play for a turn but if you use hopeful summon to effectively flash him into play at the end of your opponent's turn then he's technically been in play a turn and can attack directly so there's a lot of those sorts of uh neat combo ideas like it reminds me of like the first episode of um i believe it was was it zexel yeah yu-gi-oh sexual where um where the hero he combines uh utopia's ability to uh to negate any attack to negate its own attack so that he could then activate the effect of a card that allows him to double his attack power and attack again in order to win so those sorts of combos definitely um exist in this deck there is an admittedly slightly out of date how to play video which uses older versions of our hero damien and our clear villain atlas i mean you don't i mean his name is atlas you know a character named atlas is in the character named atlas and this sort of thing is generally bad news but the the dark evil shade over the eyes and his his silly catfish eyes uh fish dragon um definitely definitely makes it clear that he's supposed to be the villain here although he's kind of traded hairstyles with damien and the old and the old one damien had a much more prominent hair and damien here is our main character for the uh for the the show surrounding it although it's it's kind of funny he has like that little man dark cut going on in his in his hair there what's up with that um but that is something that the people who made the game have uh did tell me about when we had a little chat on zoom a bit earlier they actually said that a lot of kids have been looking into this card game have been drawn in by the characters and think it's interesting and personally i think that's wonderful um i feel as though a lot of games have gotten i guess you could say gentrified a lot of games have been kind of taken over by adults who like make who want everything to be like all serious and all competitive and have kind of forgotten just kind of the joy and fun of collecting cards again so to see a game that goes out of its way to specifically appeal to kids i think is a great thing like it's the same with a lot of video games i've been playing lately i know i'm going off on a tangent here um but i've met a lot of video games that look like they're supposed to be fun for kids but then there's like swearing in it out of nowhere and i think a lot of people have forgotten kind of you know kind of that pure innocent time and i'm glad to see that there are games that still uh grasp on to that and here we have our two starter decks now these are the uh kickstarter starter deck first editions they have uh like i said i like the designs on these characters and they have a foiling effect not sure how well my camera is picking that up the whole thing is covered in a foil effect and it's actually like a nice it's not like a typical like like flat top box that you usually get it actually has like a nice uh like opening flap here is in fact is this magnetic let's see i think it is is it magnetic easy way to find out yep definitely is yep it's magnetic neat okay so this is actually a a pretty fancy little container here um i do like seeing boxes that can be reusable it is wrapped in the shrink wrap um it does mean that the shrink wrap is the only way to see if it's tamper evident but i don't think well i don't know this seems like the kind of thing that might occasionally be sold in a grocery store but uh let us have a look inside so of course we're gonna take a look at the the damien deck here and we have uh we have our deck of cards here we also have a set of sleeves this seems to be a new trend to uh include some sleeves in the starter deck i mean i i like it i get the idea that a lot to a lot of people these uh their cards are very precious to them so i can understand the desire to sleeve them immediately i am still personally of the belief that a booster pack is a better addition than sleeves but you know to each their own it's nice that they're being considerate and the fact that you have like the whole deck and the sleeves it tells me that the full thing will fit into the box once it's all sleeved up the real question is this is uh this is sort of a limited starter bot uh starter sets 15 d spirit cards and 10 support cards which if we consult the rules which are the the final thing in here the rules will uh tell us how much we actually have on the deck it can contain up to 20 d spirits and 10 to 20 cards so this is like the minimum size deck 25 cards that's uh that's a pretty small uh pretty small deck size all things considered now let's take a look at uh some of these cards here let me see if i can get you to see that here because it's actually a foiling effect on the car yeah there it is they actually all say damien's so and so so this is actually something in the game that i didn't bring up before i actually didn't know that they were going to do this in the starter deck if you look at the list on the back it actually just lists the basic characters here but these are actually something different they uh might have been worth featuring on the back so what happens is uh you can only include one copy of each d spirit in a deck but if it has a different name for instance uh a different name counts as a different name so i could include damien's gau along with regular gau in the deck so all of these um and there's uh there's squiggy from before that plush we got before and moon kappa as well so we got m bird um a lot of these have effects that are similar to their normal counterparts they're a bit incomparable compared to them so like like regular frampton can be played from your uh from your deck at basically anytime this frampton basically acts more like uh it's more like a kuribo where you can um send it from your discard pile and remove it to uh negate one attack um i'm not sure which version of kuriboh can do that but i don't know if that's rainbow kuribo or somebody will know which kuriboh it is um we have another foil in the case of a form of damien's knuckle slice and like i said they are you only get one of each d spirit in the deck but you technically only need one of hd spirit so you buy one starter deck and you're done i know that's a common criticism of like a criticism that i've leveled at a few games where you have to buy several copies of something to get everything but no you get everything in the deck um spirit buff limit three you get three rebirth limit two you get two strike again limit three you get three swaparoo limit four you get two [Music] select one d spirit on the field and swap its power and endurance stats so that's a so there are a lot of tricks and forms of interaction to deal with troublesome cards although this one i think might need uh the might need a bit of clarification uh damien's here damien's got has the effect that if your opponent's spirit uh spirit spaces are full at any time damien's ganu can be super d someone from your hand or squad and can attack your opponent's sp directly so um this is a an ability that i think is gonna need a little bit of clarification so it says that the effect allows it to be summoned and attack directly does that mean it is summoned already attacking can i do that on my opponent's turn summon it already attacking um or is its ability to attack directly an independent effect that i think is gonna need some clarification but otherwise you know it's a pretty uh a pretty straightforward deck and aside from swaparoo i don't know do you get swaparoo in this deck as well yeah you get two swaparoos in the in the atlas deck as well so between this and an atlas deck you get all the swaparoos you could ask for although um one type of card that is conspicuously absent from this deck is any realm cards i didn't talk about these before what a realm card does is it's basically like a stadium card in pokemon where you have one realm card in play and it acts as a field card it has an effect that benefits both players while it's in play and if you play a new one it gets rid of the old one but it has a trick where a bit like monopoly you have to offer to pay an amount of life points in order to get it into play so this sort of turns into an auction kind of like with monopoly where you volunteer to bid higher and higher amounts of uh spirit points until somebody blinks um at which so basically your opponent can pay a ton of life points to keep your uh to keep your card from coming into play something else i forgot to mention spirit points actually have a lot of uses as well you can also use uh you can spend 500 spirit points during the draw step to draw two cards instead of one that's uh an interesting trick another one is soul exchange if you already have a if you already have a spirit in play you can use uh you can return that card to your hand in order to um play a fresh one now i couldn't do that to for example uh have damien's gau attacked then spirit then spirit exchange to use his effect again because that would be outside the battle step but um the regular form of frampton if i ever if i get one in in the booster packs is a a prime candidate for soul exchange because soul exchange does not count against your one summon for the turn you get one uh regular spirit summon for the turn just like with yu-gi-oh um but if you super de-summon something then you can still exchange anything that's been in play for a turn so you could not so exchange damian's gow you could soul exchange him on a later turn to reuse his effect but not on the same turn it looks like there's uh they're trying to avoid uh any kind of infinite loop you can get although it's something to keep an eye on chef's kitchen is another one to keep an eye on too when i was uh speaking of realm cards this is one where normally you pay the sp when you lose with the battle in the case of chef's kitchen you gain the sp instead and this is a card that i think we need to look out for there are definitely ways to work around this card you could um you could attempt to play your own realm card although since this is a life game realm card that might be difficult to outbid your opponent on there are cards that destroy realm cards there are cards that destroy spirit cards there are cards that can attack directly so as long as there's enough ways to get around pretty much anything that can be built there's a a pretty good chance for balance here so yeah that's a a neat little bit of kit although i did notice that the current copy of the rulebook it is a bit blurry on the inside um i don't know if this is because the black got tied in with the color printing i detailed that before but the text is a bit uh it's a bit off i imagine this is something that they're going to be fixing in later releases they've already told me a few things that they're working on and then finally we have the cube this is the large thing that was uh sent uh sent along with everything else it's a nice big it's a nice pretty well proportioned box it's got a lot of the uh the artwork around the sides here we got gau we got methyl we got the gargoyle i'm not sure what this one is kind of reminds me of uh kind of reminds me of xj9 from from my life as a teenage robot um but the idea is that this is uh this is like a very like a very special first edition set and what it does is it contains it looks like in design like it's supposed to be like a half booster a half box i've described these before and that they tend to contain fewer boosters than an actual in that they contain fewer boosters than an actual um set and instead opt to have like fewer uh boosters but more stuff to do and yes it does contain a set of rules in it and of course a box topper let's take a look at the box topper ah there we go there's a little tab on the side there yeah not not very uh not very easy to open is it okay let's have a look there is this all-star guy let's see what we got here it is pi runt oh it's a little it's a little it's a little pirate man 650 1300 each time pyron successfully destroys a d spirit it gains half of their attack power this effect lasts until pyrunt leaves the field so this is going to be somebody you're going to have to rip out the extra pieces of paper to throw little pluses onto in order to get them to work but anyway that's kind of neat so it gains uh so each one has a type like pyronteer is a a uh sort of a dark type you can see like a little logo on there and um that is their basic type and there are creatures that have that has an advantage against for example this one i believe this is technology is this sort of uh this sort of vector cube here so it gets plus 2 000 either attack or defense in combat against one of these uh types of critters so there are some cards that mention different types like i said the the the one about the sky mentioned the food types it might not be a bad idea to include those icons next to the word as they are related not a bad thing to include now as for the rest of the cube's contents inside we have not 10 but 20 booster packs from the control the soul introductory set so this is uh way more than your typical half booster in fact it's it's more than some full booster boxes 20 is a lot so i'm not going to be opening it for this video i might be opening it for a later video so we're going to see what sorts of uh fun things we can get in here although there is one little bit of criticism i have to make about this box it is nice to have a box with like lots of art and lots of contents and stuff like that but the problem is if you're going to go out of your way to make like a nice like box like this why not make it large enough to act as very effective card storage for example if we were to for instance take a look at the old legend of the five rings booster boxes now these are also made out of a nice cardboard however you'll see if we compare that this uh legend of the five rings box is a bit wider even after i remove the top it is considerably wider which means it is wide enough to store a bunch of the cards inside so that might be the one thing i try to advocate more on the cube if they do a re-release is to see if they can figure out how to tweak the dimensions just so slightly so that it can stash more stuff otherwise always fun to see like a big push for like better art and things like that have a nice a nice thing that looks good on a shelf or good on a good behind-the-display case always fun to see that sort of thing and so that is a look at d spirits i highly doubt that uh this is the last we are going to see of it i mean there are some obvious questions regarding balance for example since the signs and signals cards and the spirit cards go into separate decks for example am i allowed to put each one in different colored sleeves so that i can keep them organized i actually discussed this with some of the people working on their game their stance currently is no and their explanation was that it's important for players to remember how many cards get drawn from eg deck and to calculate that accordingly in case specific cards are there and my counter argument is not only does allowing different types of sleeves help you keep things organized such as with yugioh's extra deck which i believe is also um allowed to do separate sleeves for extra deck cards but it also prevents a ruined game state because what would happen if one of my one of my signs and singles cards accidentally gets shuffled into my spirit deck and i draw that from my spirit deck during my turn that's a destroyed game state although at the time i draw the card only i would know that so it would kind of run a bit on the honor system or my opponent will only figure out that the mistake has happened long afterwards so honestly i feel that allowing players to do two different types of sleeves would be would stop and prevent more arguments than it would settle but that said that's a look at d spirits um i'm definitely going to do a separate video where i open the contents of the cube um but i honestly think it is a game with tremendous potential like i said i love the appealing character designs i'm glad they sent me all the plushies um i'm uh gawu is definitely gonna gonna gonna join the the club on the back of the couch for a while um in fact i have another one from the couch running support over here keeping uh keeping this guy up nephil up um but yeah uh it'll be interesting to see how the card game gets maintained like i said a lot of what's going on is a heavy use of counter play a lot of um cards that specifically interact with the cards that your opponent has played moves your opponent might make um a lot of cool unexpected stuff like i said there's uh there's a card that is basically like effect veiler that's like a shoe in for any deck so even though it says the minimum is 15 i imagine a lot of people are gonna run more than 15 just to make sure that they can include that um there's a lot of cool stuff in there there's a few pancreatops i've seen there's a few floodgates i've seen so it looks like there's going to be a lot of interesting stuff there's actually is a side deck in this game the game has a sideboard and a funny thing about the sideboard in this game it's something i also i forgot to mention there's a lot of things i forgot to mention i'm just kind of just kind of excited um you do have a sideboard um in this game however the sideboard also doubles as an extra deck in certain cases there are cards that can summon themselves from the uh from the sideboard or have effects from the sideboard during the game so that is definitely going to be an interesting thing to play around with because you do have that always reliable sideboard pull but that comes at the cost of you being able to put in some more flexible cards like some more reliable floodgates or arena destruction or things like that so it's it's a game that's designed to be constantly uh to have you constantly you know weaving around your opponent to try to get the upper hand and i honestly think that's going to be a very good very stimulating game experience and like i said it's been drawing a lot of kids i hope the kids who have been playing it have been having fun there's there's already a very clear um span between there are you know the the the go all-in strategies like with the ganger who has a really high cost and can do a lot of cool stuff versus um winning with the smaller spirits and both of those strategies definitely have their viable points and their highs and lows so it it's already showing a pretty diverse form of play styles even in the time it's been out so it's definitely a game worth keeping your eyes on so yeah that is a look at d spirits and until next time this is kodak signing off [Music] do [Music]

Channel: Kohdok

Views: 11,547

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Id: bYeqBFoheF0

Length: 28min 56sec (1736 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 03 2022