Dragon Poker is one of my favorite Japanese app games. It’s a really fun marriage of RPG mechanics and poker, played in real time with users from all over the globe. So I thought that it was about time that I make a post about Dragon Poker!
On top of this post are ten of my favorite card illustrations from the game. In order from left to right, top to bottom: Zashikiwarashi, Aires, Miris, Baal, Kidomaru, El Topo, Cancer, Aileen, Beelzebub, and Demon Librarian Monica.
If you’re at all interested in trying out Dragon Poker, now is the perfect time to do so. The game is currently in the middle of a special 3-year anniversary event, so if you start playing before 5/23/2016 then you will get to choose a free God-tier card, which is a very good way to start the game, You can also farm the anniversary event dungeon for an extremely good Dragon-tier card. AND on top of all of that, until 5/29 you also get another free Dragon-tier card just for downloading another one of game maker Asobism’s games (details here).
Beneath the cut I explain more about what I like and don’t like about Dragon Poker, just to give some more context for those of you interested in app games who might be thinking of checking it out!
Why Dragon Poker is Great
★ It’s a fantasy RPG but, like, with poker. During a quest you ally yourself with four other players, and each players chooses a card dealt from his or her deck to try to complete the best possible hand that all five of you can make. The strength of your hand determines the strength of your cards’ skills, such as attacking, healing, casting status effects, etc. So yeah, it’s got all the fun and addicting elements of a strategy RPG game AND all of the fun and addicting elements a poker game, plus the social aspect of getting to meet and interact with other players.
★ Gameplay is never repetitive. You might farm the same quest with the same deck 100 times over and never have the same experience twice, because you can't predict who your fellow party members will be or what sorts of cards they will have in their decks. Even if you get bored with the regular quests, there is also a pvp "Colosseum" area where you can challenge other players to five-on-five card duels. The Colosseum is NEVER boring and often nail-bitingly suspenseful, because dramatic reversals of fortune are par for the course in a Colosseum duel. So if you sometimes get bored with the repetitive nature of farming in some individual app games like PAD, then you might want to give Dragon Poker a try.
★ A lot of the quests are beautifully designed (some of the background graphics are gorgeous), and the game music is always great.
★ There are lots of fun weekly events with really diverse themes. Like, one week the event dungeon is Lovecraft-themed, and the next week it’s retro Golden Age of Sci-Fi kitsch, and the next week it’s freakin’ Candyland. You never really know what’s coming next.
★ This game is INSANELY generous with giving away free Dragon Stones, which are the in-game currency. Like, generous to an absolutely crazy degree. In addition to earning Dragon Stones just for logging in daily and/or completing missions, you also get up to FIVE (!!!!) Dragon Stones each time you evolve a card for the first time. And guess what? The card catalog is huuuuuuuuge. I’ve been playing for eight months and there are still hundreds of farmable cards that I’ve never bothered to evolve, not to mention all of the gacha cards which haven’t blessed me with their appearance yet (although I still hope to meet many of them someday), which means that there are THOUSANDS of free Dragon Stones waiting for me to unlock them in the card catalog. And on top of that, sometimes Dragon Stones even drop during regular quests!!!!!
★ The gacha isn’t terribly generous, but it’s so easy to accumulate massive amounts of free Dragon Stones in a short amount of time that you’ll end up being able to pull the gacha SO FREQUENTLY that the law of averages will work out so that you’ll get enough good cards to not really ever feel like the gacha is being unfair.
★ The “Training” function is, in a word, awesome. You can choose to send any card in your deck on a Training quest for three, six, or twelve hours at a time. When your card is done training, they’ll come back to you having earned experience, leveled up, and accumulated rewards such as gold coins, gemstones, orbs, and more! Yes, you read that right. So if you have work or school during the day, you can just send a card on a Training quest in the morning, then check back with them in the evening, and they will have leveled up and farmed rewards for you WITHOUT YOU EVER HAVING TO LIFT A FINGER. Even better, while a card is Training you can still use them in your deck with no penalty, so you can send cards on Training missions and play the game normally at the same time!
Why Dragon Poker Isn’t So Great
★ It’s time-consuming. There’s no “fast” way to complete a quest, due to the nature of the game. You’re playing with real people, and you have to wait for the other members of your party to choose their cards and make their moves. If you’re used to really fast-paced individual games like Puzzles and Dragons, the relatively slower pace of Dragon Poker can sometimes be frustrating, especially since so much of your time is spent waiting for other players to make their moves.
★ It’s also a monster memory-eater and battery-guzzler. Dragon Poker takes up a whopping 1.2 GB of memory on my phone, and I can’t even think of playing without being plugged in. Doing just a few quests without my phone being connected to a charger can completely drain my battery.
★ It takes a very, very long time to build up a good deck. You need to reach at least rank 150 to be able to unlock all of the support slots in your deck (absolutely necessary for endgame-tier dungeons), and to be perfectly honest, most players won’t earn a high enough deck cost to challenge endgame-tier dungeons until they’re over rank 300. There are no OP cards that will allow you to just defeat any dungeons. This game doesn’t work that way. The only way to build a strong deck is to accumulate enough good cards in every suit and class to be prepared for any type of boss, and to accumulate a high enough deck cost to stack all of your best cards together. Again, if you’re used to games like PAD or Divine Gate where if you get the “right” gacha unit you can defeat almost anything, this can be a very frustrating game to play.
★ Due to the social nature of the game, it can feel pretty embarrassing when you have one of those inevitable moments in which it’s your turn to be That Guy who fucks up a hand and screws over the other members of your party. Fortunately, most of the players that you encounter are likely to be helpful and understanding. There’s a “shout” function in every quest that allows players to communicate with each other, and when one player screws up the other players usually spam the shoutbox with encouraging messages like “Don’t worry!” and “That happens to everybody!” Yes, you will sometimes encounter rude players - and even the occasional troll - but that’s true of pretty much every game that involves actual human interaction.
★ Although the game graphics are almost always gorgeous, the card artwork is… sometimes not. The monster cards tend toward the as-gross-to-look-at-as-possible style of artwork, and (most unfortunately) many of the human female character cards look like they were designed by twelve-year-old boys drawing one-handed. What I mean to say is, there is a LOT of bikini armor in the card catalog. Like, a lot. Although a few of the scantily-clad female characters can actually look kind of cool (such as Sfatlicllp), mostly they just come across as juvenile and eyeroll-inducing. But hey, for a fun time you can always play Female Armor Bingo whenever you get a new girl card in Dragon Poker!
Final Words
Having given my honest opinion of the game, I still highly recommend trying it - it’s just so goddamn fun!!! - especially if you’re at all interested in Japanese app games.
There is an excellent English language wiki for the game, which contains a thorough Beginner’s Guide and links to more Japanese resources. Although ultimately I think you do need some Japanese language ability to be able to play the game (especially to, like, use the shoutbox and stuff) it still shouldn’t be too hard for anyone with at least a smidgen of Japanese to have fun with Dragon Poker.
By the way, my user ID is 3763725. Add me as a friend!!! :)
