The trouble with Yggdra Union is that it has almost nothing to engage the player once a battle has started. There’s a Passive/Aggressive meter that you can adjust shortly thereafter. Passive lowers attack power and raises defenses, and vice versa for Aggressive, which means they equal out to be the same in the long run. Considering that a single enemy may take two, three, or even six battles to destroy, there’s a lot of downtime. Sometimes it felt like the portable version of Minesweeper--a distraction meant to eat up time.

I spoke about the five-hour mark earlier, which is when you get to start using the special abilities of the cards, such as magical attacks and healing spells. Since you can’t choose more than one card for a given battle, and it can be used multiple times, there isn’t any strategy as to when you should use a special ability. Considering how often enemies futilely used the same attacks on me, which I was impervious to, the A.I. doesn’t seem to have a strategy for them either. In fact, judging by the A.I.’s near-complete lack of movement on the map and callous disregard for the formations of my characters, the A.I. doesn’t have much of a strategy for anything.

This isn’t to say that the battles are easily won. On the contrary, enemies usually have the home field advantage and like to cluster together, hidden in the safety of fortresses and towns which grant defensive bonuses. This is why using those powerful cards in the beginning was a mistake. As it turns out, some of those weak cards had some pretty nice special abilities, but using them now would be suicide. I don’t know about you, but I just love it when a game punishes players for following the rules and playing intelligently.

I thoroughly enjoyed the opening moments of each map, looking over the terrain for bonuses and counting moves to make sure that I engaged the enemy with the perfect formation. After that, it was back to 20 minutes of occasionally pressing one button to keep my little soldiers swinging in the most non-violent war this side of a NERF fight.

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