Wild Cardz Anime Review

Quick Review

• Reviewer: Marc
• Review Date: 2006-06-28 (updated 2011-01-10)
• 2 stars out of 5 (?)

Wild Cardz is standard all-girl hyperactive action anime in its purest form, with a board game theme. The plot is nonsensical and basically nonexistent, but the action is high-speed and continuous, and it's seasoned with superpowered girls in short skirts, ninjas, and chipper banter. What the animation lacks in quality or creativity, it makes up for in sheer volume of action, and there are a few bits of imagination in the backgrounds and magic. The Japanese acting is also reasonably funny, even if all four of the main characters sound confusingly similar. The dub, on the other hand, has abysmally bad dialogue, so it's hard to even tell if the acting is any good.

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.

Read the full-length review...

Full Review

• Reviewer: Marc
• Review Date: 2006-06-28 (updated 2011-01-10)
• 2 stars out of 5 (?)

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. It never 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... sorry).

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. 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 backgrounds and decent card-themed magic. Coming as a bit of a surprise, the scenes of large scale destruction also look surprisingly good (even if they are perpetrated by chess pieces).

The generic, upbeat background music matches the pedal-to-the-metal pace. There's a disappointing lack of any vocal themes, though--it would've been a prime candidate for hyper-perky J-pop.

The Japanese acting gets the job done: The black market fellow, given a requisite cheesy Chinese accent by Nobuyuki Hiyama, is particularly funny; there's a scene with him and Jo yelling at each other that had me chuckling based on the text in the subtitles alone. On the negative side, the four girls sound similar. It does make sense since they look similar... except that makes it even harder 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.

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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.