A Hugely Inaccessible but Confident Card Game Port
Yomi 2 is my nightmare as a game reviewer. It’s a game that I can see is objectively well put together, is created by a respected designer (David Sirlin), and has a significant fanbase, at least as a board game. It should be, and likely is, a slam-dunk: a loving port of an established board game. But I bounced off Yomi 2, and continued to bounce off it, match after match, tournament after tournament. In Yomi 2 terms, I try to step in close, but it attacks every time. How do I review a game like that?
I have to be dispassionate, because I am confident that most of the fault is my own. I am a massive deckbuilder, TCG and roguelike card game player, to the point that I would consider them to be my favourite genres, bar none. I was weaned on a diet of Magic: The Gathering as a teen and my favourite game is probably Slay the Spire. My ears prick up whenever someone uses words like mana, draft and top-deck.
Dead or Alive? Mostly dead, as it Turned Out
My least favourite genre, however, is the one-vs-one fighting genre. Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Blazblue and the others leave me cold. I get the feeling that you have to devote yourself to one character at a time, mastering through repetition, and pulling on a desire to outposition an opponent. I’m the opposite: I like to explore everything, I’m fascinated with new stuff rather than mastering the same thing, and I have no competitive impulse.
Yomi 2 may be a card game in form, but it’s a fighting game in spirit. David Sirlin has done a spectacular job of crafting something that conveys the feeling of a Street Fighter, right down to the way a player thinks. You have to play your opponent just as much as your own deck; you have to learn and master individual characters; and you have to lose and pick yourself up over and over again. A good player of Yomi 2 will wipe the floor with a bad player, and there’s no button-bashing to get the bad player the odd win.
From the start, it was clear that I was in over my head. The tutorial is the only part of Yomi 2 that I would describe as actively bad: it tried to introduce concepts at such speed and frequency that I had to play it multiple times. Eventually, I turned to Youtube videos for the board game: they were infinitely better at not only describing mechanics, but telling you how to play them well. Yomi’s tutorial has a frustrating habit of telling you what something is, not how to use it to your advantage or when to use it. The sheer number of unreadable icons on cards doesn’t help matters either.
Search Out a Yomi 2 Fan to Guide You
What I really needed was someone to sit me down and explain that Yomi 2 is rock, paper, scissors. Attacks beat throws, throws beat dodges, and dodges beat attacks. Block cards muddy this a little bit, but they effectively beat attacks (depending on whether you corresponded a low block with a low attack, for example), and act as the card-draw. If you block successfully, you will refill a hand.
Rock, paper, scissors is a large proportion of Yomi 2, but it’s not enough to win matches. I found that two other factors tend to be integral to a win. The first is card-cycling. When I started out, I mostly ignored the size of my hand, and the diversity of cards in it. But as I played more, I realised that was a mistake: I needed to make more use of the Exchange system, allowing me to swap a card per turn with my discard, and to anticipate a depleted hand rather than react to it. Block cards, which generate card-draw, moved from being a late-game card to an all-game card.
With more card options I could play ‘faster’ cards more often (speed acts as a decider when two cards of the same type are played). I could Power Up more frequently, by swapping duplicate cards for additional Power Up tokens or Super Move cards which often acted as a damage-spiking winner. Most importantly, I became less predictable, which leads into the second factor: the psychological element.
React to your Opponent, Not Your Own Cards
I would have loved a personal trainer to tell me to look at the opponent’s character – which is a strong indicator of the card types they lean into – and the face-up cards that they Exchange. It’s entirely possible to anticipate the player’s move and prepare its counter. Well, anticipate it a little: Yomi 2 is still a game of luck. You won’t guess correctly every time.
Successfully land a blow on your opponent, and you are given an opportunity to enact a Combo. Cards can be sequenced – there are Filler cards that can go anywhere in a combo, while others are Finishers – to nudge a small attack into a killer one. But this is yet another clever design quirk: if you pump cards into a combo, you have fewer cards to choose from on the subsequent spar. This is what I mean when I say that Yomi 2 is objectively exquisite from a design perspective. It’s so damn clever, and it conveys the feeling of a fighting game perfectly.
So, why did I bounce off it? The tutorial didn’t help, and the subsequent 0-10 win/loss rate made matters worse (both are connected). I just wasn’t set up to succeed by the noisy card icons and the poor onboarding.
But there’s something else: if you want to compete in the game’s excellent tournaments and online game mode, you need to pick a character, a synergising gem (Yomi 2 doesn’t have deckbuilding, but it does let you splice a character’s deck with a gem that adds cards of a certain orientation) and then master them. Characters have different specialisations, from Lum’s gambling on RNG to the brilliantly named Argagarg’s hit-and-run technique. You not only have to learn your own path to success, but your opponent’s too.
Painting the Skill-Ceiling With My Own Blood
Which is a long way of saying that the skill-ceiling in Yomi 2 is sky-high, and I just didn’t feel the compulsion to whip out a ladder and explore it. The task was so monumental that I felt daunted, and Yomi 2’s predilection for randomness – something that I tend to dislike – meant that I never enjoyed the core enough to persist for hundreds of games. I could absolutely see why someone would, in the same way that I can see why players choose a character and master them in a fighting game. But it’s not me. Yet it might be you.
Yomi 2 in many ways is an exquisite attempt to bottle the spirit of a fighting game and then pour it onto cards. Calling it glorified rock, paper, scissors is unfair, as there is so much that you can do to turn the randomness to your favour. You can anticipate your opponent, build a library of moves, and master individual characters.
What Yomi 2 isn’t is accessible. I’d also suggest that card game players won’t automatically like it either; you need to have the instincts and desires of a fighting game enthusiast to get something out of it. Which is a muddled recommendation: I didn’t enjoy Yomi 2, as its skill ceiling and difficulty was so high that only extreme persistence was going to get me up there. But I think there are plenty of gamers who will see that as a red flag to a Balrog, and will get a kick out of solving Yomi 2’s card-fighting core.
Important Links
Yomi 2 Combines Street Fighter Style Psychology And Card Battles – https://www.thexboxhub.com/yomi-2-combines-street-fighter-style-psychology-and-card-battles/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/yomi-2/9PBXK0JMQZKB/0010
There’s a Complete Edition too – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/yomi-2-complete-edition/9N3VL420MCBQ/0010
