Wild Cardz

Original Title: JaJa馬!カルテット
Romanized: Jaja Uma! Quartet
Literal: Shrew Quartet

Plot Synopsis

The Card Kingdom is protected by it's four sworn guardians, the Crown Knights, aka the Jaja Uma Quartet. They are: Jo Diamonds, who can run and jump like nobody else, Casa Clubs, a martial arts expert with amazing senses, Coco Hearts, the cute psycho-magic master, and Sunday Spades, the team's leader and possessor of the mysterious and ultimately powerful trump power. These four young lasses use their card magic to defend the country from whatever evil happens its way, but this time the enemy isn't a criminal or even a supervillain--it's a giant chess piece. When a huge white pawn takes out a bridge and then starts moving in on the city, the only thing standing in it's way are the Knights. Things go from bad to worse when a second indestructible chess piece shows up, along with some lady who thinks she's an agent of God, a sleazy black marketer, and a bunch of nasty ninjas. Then there's the dashing Joker...

Review

Rating: 2 / 5
Reviewer: Marc
Review Date: 2006-06-28

Wild Cardz is a fun ball of pure hyperactive fluff. This board game themed take on the spunky fighting girl genre comes equipped with perky card-monikered knights, giant chess piece battleships, and a black market sleaze with a Mahjongg motif--the only thing it's missing is a bowl of bridge mix. A zippy romp from start to finish, there's a load of turbocharged action, a smattering of humor, and absolutely nothing else.

Don't even ask about a story--what little there is makes zero sense and there's next to no set up. Nobody ever even bothers to explain what's up with the giant chessmen. The collection of suddenly-appearing characters are equally baffling: The random black market fellow is cut-and-pasted in out of nowhere, and I have absolutely no idea what's up with his manipulative companion. She is apparently sent by "God," and has a big dog. Even the dashing Joker isn't around long enough to figure out if he's a romantic interest or just an annoyance.

If all that sounds a bit confusing, it is. Honestly, though, I didn't care--plot and character development are not the aim of Wild Cardz. Sure, there's some requisite "We've got to risk our lives to save people!" chit-chat (leaning toward Crown and Country instead of the default Love and Justice), but this series is all about action. And it has action in Spades (and Hearts, and Clubs...).

Jo can run really fast (a busty Flash in a miniskirt), and she pretty much sets the pace: The first episode is about 90 percent action and 10 percent story, and the second is essentially one long action sequence. What the action lacks in creativity and quality it makes up for in sheer volume, and it also sufficiently distracts from the total lack of substance of any sort. Result: 50 minutes of fun. Nothing more, nothing less.

Backing this up is good-enough art and cute if forgettable character designs. There is some creative flourish: Imaginative, nicely drawn background and decent card-themed magic. Coming as a bit of a surprise, the scenes of large scale destruction look surprisingly good (even if they are perpetrated by chess pieces).

The generic, upbeat background music matches the pedal-to-the-metal pace, though there's a disappointing lack of any vocal themes. (Wild Cardz would've been a prime candidate for hyper-perky Jpop.)

The Japanese acting gets the job done: The black market fellow is particularly funny, and even in the subtitles there's a scene with him and Jo yelling at each other that had me chuckling. On the negative side, the four girls sound similar. It does make sense since they look similar... except they also look similar, so it's a little hard to keep their abilities straight. Not that it really matters, and it could be worse.

The dub isn't particularly good; decent casting but sub-par acting. The writing shoulders most of the blame--the dialogue sounds like it was written by somebody with a tenuous grasp of the English language.

In all, Wild Cardz is standard all-girl hyperactive action anime in its purest form. The plot is nonsensical and basically nonexistent, but the action is fast and continuous, and it's seasoned with superpowered girls in short skirts, ninjas, and chipper banter. Wild Cardz is no masterpiece, but I enjoyed the ride. If 50 minutes loaded with cute girls and turbocharged action sounds like fun, you probably will too.

Related Recommendations

Kind of similar to any of the magical girl series, or anything else with cute girls in stylish costumes fighting evil. The best matches for the mood and action overload, however, would be the out-of-control chaos of Geobreeders and its sequel, and perhaps the tweaker of fantasy series, Dragon Slayer.

US DVD Review

Nothing special, but a solid production. The video transfer is acceptable and the Japanese and English stereo soundtracks sound fine. The English "subtitle" track, however, is a lot closer to the dub script than the actual Japanese dialogue. The only special feature is some clips highlighting the voice talents of the actors (in both English and Japanese, for a change).

Content Guide

A very brief flash of nudity and some non-graphic mass havoc along with a few small bits of off-color humor account for USM's 13-up suggestion, though really, 10-up is reasonable.

Violence: 2 - Lots of destruction, but little or no blood and death.

Nudity: 1 - Short skirts and a very brief flash or two of skin.

Sex/Mature Themes: 1 - A few non-G-rated jokes and comments.

Language: 0 - Nuthin'.

Notes and Trivia

In the original title, the linguistically-mixed "Jaja Uma" is an moderately insulting (though not particularly crude) Japanese expression for a headstrong or unmanageable woman, roughly equivalent to the rather old-fashioned "shrew." The Japanese title of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, "Jaja Uma Narashi," uses the phrase, though it doesn't appear that the title of this series is a reference to it.

Availability

Available in the US from US Manga Corps on a budget-priced hybrid DVD. Was also available on a single subtitled or dubbed VHS volume, both now out of print.

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