No, Queen’s Blood From ‘Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’ Should Not Be Its Own Standalone Game: Here’s Why
One of the delights of the breathtaking entries in the remake series for Final Fantasy VII is the surprising abundance and depth to mini-games. Fort Condor, as it launched with the Yuffie DLC for Intergrade, was an instant favorite, while Queen’s Blood in the most recent installment, Rebirth, hooked me as though the nail-biting drama with Sephiroth was an afterthought. In the beginning hours of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I was taken aback by how much I adored Queen’s Blood, tapping directly into nostalgic Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic: The Gathering energy but with a twist of Chess. Though I eagerly detoured to complete every single Queen’s Blood challenge in Rebirth, I cannot side with fans who clamor for Square Enix to release a Marvel Snap-esque standalone game.
I first heard about Queen’s Blood on one of my favorite gaming podcasts, Triple Click, where host Jason Schreier raved about the strategy involved with the card game. One of the key takeaways from that conversation was that Queen’s Blood was so addictive that players would inevitably derail the high-stakes central scenario of the story to try their hand at cards. This absolutely happened to me.
To Queen’s Blood’s advantage, the opening hours of Rebirth are incredibly strong. All the complaints about linearity and vacuous side content from Remake, the first installment, are replaced by engaging open world challenges in Rebirth. As a result of the improved world design, Rebirth feels far bigger than Remake ever did, but sometimes to a fault. When a game like Rebirth feels too big, I want something bite-sized to give me the refreshed feeling of a change-of-pace – one of the many reasons why I love the Yakuza series so much, for offering precisely that respite – and Queen’s Blood was the perfect distraction to keep me from feeling the monotony of combat and traversal.
As a card-based game, a deck-builder of a mere 15 cards per match, Queen’s Blood challenges the player to win a territorial points-based system of three horizontal rows. The player with the highest score in each row wins that total of points at the end of the match, earning them a new card to integrate with their deck, and opening up the next opponent(s) to be challenged. These cards are all based on creatures, enemies, and characters within Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, each endowed with their own unique attributes and effects. There are no equivalent analogies to cards like spells, traps, artifacts, or mana in Queen’s Blood.
Learning Queen’s Blood: Early Play
In the beginning of learning Queen’s Blood, the rules are quite intuitive: you want to establish the most territory for your own cards by strategically building out “nodes” on the board. As you create these color-coded nodes that enable you to place more cards, you additionally strategize about your higher leveled cards, saving slots with two and three nodes for your juggernauts. It’s a simple might-makes-right approach to strategy that quickly dissolves into something more layered and complex the more you engage with Queen’s Blood.
Soon into learning Queen’s Blood, you receive positional effects on some cards, meaning that they can enhance or enfeeble the strength on neighboring cards. Some of these effects apply to your own cards, while others apply to enemies (sometimes both!). Beyond the initial stages of learning how to control territory in each of the three Queen’s Blood rows, you suddenly are seeing two and three moves ahead. By playing a card with a +1 counter on each side, you know that the next two cards you place will be strengthened. Conversely, if you place a -1 counter on an enemy card, it weakens its power – and will be destroyed if the card only had one attack point to begin with. Instead of simple territory like a linear Connect Four game, Queen’s Blood adds nuance to its rules, enabling you to carve out defense and offense like a game of Chess, Checkers, or Go.
By the mid-game, you enter a Queen’s Blood tournament, featuring mini-quests and fully animated cutscenes during the tournament. In some of the most memorable, silly, and intense moments of Rebirth, Queen’s Blood takes center stage and cements itself not just as a throwaway mini-game, but something that many game reviewers have praised as having its potential for a standalone game. At the point of the Queen’s Blood tournament, I fully understood this desire to have our Gwent equivalent after Rebirth. But after the tournament, I found myself getting overpowered in a way that genuinely feels like it prevents such a standalone game from being possible.
Best Queen’s Blood Strategy: Mid-Game Deck Build
Enter: replacement cards. In Queen’s Blood, replacement cards are as their name suggests, offering you the chance to replace a lower-level card of your own with something more powerful. This ability becomes incredibly useful, not just for moving a card with one strength up to three at the last minute, earning you some crucial end-of-match points; it also opens up a world of new strategy that had previously been capped out before the tournament. That is, replacement cards also have positional effects and nodes. A space with a red enemy node would previously only be available to your opponent to place cards. With replacement cards, you can take a front-lines card and push your territory further into your opponent’s, limiting the amount of cards they can play and increasing your odds of victory.
I loved replacement cards and took to them right away, not just for their obvious advantages, but for the way they combined with other cards that I’d later acquire in my Rebirth adventure. Between booster packs purchased from merchants and the cards won from winning against other Queen’s Blood players, you end up with a combination that feels like it breaks the game wide open – almost like a balancing issue. The two cards in question that broke the game for me were the Tonberry King and Midgardsormr.
These two cards are not in-and-of-themselves game breakers. The Tonberry King, of which you can add two to your Queen’s Blood deck, even looks like a bad card on the surface. With a meager power of one and a hefty cost of two nodes, Tonberry King does not offer much advantage on its own; with its effect, however, it becomes sinister, “When allied cards are destroyed, raise this card’s power by 2.” It might not be obvious at first how this card serves the player: it’s weak, it has a high cost, and you have to destroy your own cards to activate its effect. The key is in replacement cards.
Let’s say you play some low-cost, low-power cards like Heatseeker in the early game. This card might offer you nothing in the way of power and points, but it offers you territory – an opportunity to advance and play more cards – and an interesting effect: “When destroyed, add Heatseeker Minion to your hand.” Heatseeker Minion is another low-cost, low-power card that serves the same purpose, albeit with no additional effect. Suddenly, with the combination of Tonberry King, replacement cards like Grandhorn, and cannon fodder cards like Heatseeker, the strategy takes shape.
Minmaxxing Queen’s Blood: The Late Game
The idea is to get the Tonberry King out on the playing field as quickly as possible while maximizing your territory with weak, expendable cards. Once you establish your territory to where your opponent is no longer advancing on your own, it’s time to strike with your replacement cards. A one-power card becomes a three-power card when you replace it, adding two points to your row, and whichever row your Tonberry King is placed in gets two additional points as well. In other words, the total points on the board change by four for each replacement made.
On its own, this replacement strategy is incredibly powerful and turns the flow of Queen’s Blood from Checkers to Chess. Imagine how much more powerful this strategy becomes with the two additional components I added: the second Tonberry King and the Midgardsormr. The Midgardsormr card is similar to Tonberry King, only it costs three nodes to place: “When allied and enemy cards are destroyed, raise this card’s power by 1.” Note the slight difference in effect. Tonberry King raises by two when your own cards are destroyed; Midgardsormr raises by one when either you or your opponent loses a card. In other words, even if your opponent also plays a replacement deck, you still benefit.
With this replacement logic in mind, I stacked my deck accordingly. There may have been some slight adjustments along the way as I gained new cards and tweaked my deck. But by the time Rebirth opened its world for fast travel and some late-game Queen’s Blood, I was long past the point of feeling like I needed to edit my deck further. Here is the deck arrangement that carried me through the ranks from Blood Peasant to Blood Executioner: Gigantoad, Grandhorn, Mandragora, Archdragon, Capparwire, Heatseeker, Mindflayer, Tonberry King, Midgardsormr.
There is some wiggle room with this deck assembly. Mindflayer, for example, was something that I barely used until this final deck configuration with Midgardsormr. Once the equation evolved from destroying my own cards to raise my points into destroying enemy cards to raise my points, Mindflayer made more sense given its effect, “Lower the power of allied and enemy cards on affected tiles by 1 while this card is in play” (recall that lowering an enemy card with one power destroys it and reclaims that territory for my own cards). I think this deck arrangement could totally work without Mindflayer and instead with something less potentially detrimental to your own strategy, as there is some genuine risk in kneecapping your own ability to play cards if Mindflayer is drawn before your replacement juggernauts. But in general, this deck only gave me issues with my initial hand; in the event that I mulliganed, my opponent had zero chance.
Considering that Queen’s Blood was the one form of side content in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth that I never wavered from, as I began cutting corners on combat challenges and towers by the end, I find it a little disheartening that I hit the skill ceiling of Queen’s Blood so soon. This replacement deck I curated felt unfair, like the first time I played against a Sliver deck in Magic: The Gathering. There’s simply no counter that the opponents in Rebirth could offer me, and so even by the end, I entered the final battle of Queen’s Blood without using a card that the game spent several cutscenes praising: the Emerald Witch.
Should Queen’s Blood Be Its Own Standalone Card Game?
Without spoiling the uniquely compelling plot of the late-game Queen’s Blood story, there emerges a threatening card that has the power to corrupt players and destroy any competitors in its way: the Shadowblood Queen. After tracking down opponents and cards from around the globe and facing no real challenge due to my overpowered replacement deck, I arrogantly began the final Queen’s Blood match without even reading the description of the Emerald Witch – this all-important counter card. I emerged victorious against the Shadowblood Queen on the first attempt, a pure testament to the deck I had built rather than the strategy I felt myself employing in the earlier game.
If I got to the end of this mini-game and didn’t need any of the other cards, especially ones that I was watching cutscenes telling me I couldn’t survive without, I felt like I had the equivalent to Exodia in my Queen’s Blood repertoire. If Queen’s Blood was to be translated into a standalone game, whether digital or physical, I argue that it would have to be completely restructured. For Queen’s Blood, as it exists now, has an optimal strategy; once you find it, the challenge evaporates. If I was in a lunchroom skirmish with my Queen’s Blood deck, I would avoid the rich kids because they would all be playing replacement decks.
The logistics of Queen’s Blood as a standalone title do not make sense to me, given my experience. I wouldn’t want to see designers of such a game eliminate the replacement decks entirely, but when half of the challenge of deck building is enduring the trials of battling opponents over an elongated story, it’s hard to imagine the same hooks would sink into me with a standalone title. The reality of a Queen’s Blood standalone game absolutely has an appeal for myself and obviously many games journalists who have argued passionately for this mini-game’s merits. That being said, the current iteration of Queen’s Blood with the replacement-based strategy would not remain fair – or, more importantly, fun – for very long.
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