A hands-on look at Japan's new Kid Icarus card box sets

One of the complaints I hear most often about the AR cards for Kid Icarus Uprising (other than that their in-game use is pretty limited) is that the damn things are just so hard to find. Until now, the only real ways to get them have consisted of buying the game and getting the six card pack inside, attending promotional events, buying Japanese rat poison, or grabbing some from Club Nintendo at random. Nintendo seems to be changing all that, again, in Japan at least, with the first two sets of boxed Uprising AR cards that are now available for purchase on their web store. And oh, are they ever attractive.



No, no cheap foil pouches or randomly selected assortments of cards here—each trusty box contains a specific set of twenty cards and retails for 263 yen (about $3.50). The cards are various in classification, consisting of a predetermined assortment of characters, weapons, items, and even one "stage" card per pack, which changes the background on which your AR idols do battle in-game. Each box includes a handy reference card that shows you which cards are in the volume.



Of particular note is the naming and thematic scheme that seems to be being used on these first two packs. Vol. 01 is named after the first stage of the game itself (The Return of Palutena) and Vol. 02 is named after the second stage of the game (Magnus and the Dark Lord). Each package contains twenty cards that are all thematically somehow related to the items, characters, enemies, and design of the particular level the set is based on.



Considering the highest numbered card anyone's found is #407, and noting that the website section for these cards seems to have a lot of empty space in the package list on the left side, I think it's probably reasonable to extrapolate that Nintendo will eventually release the whole series of Kid Icarus AR cards in these level-based packs. It's possible they'll combine some of the game's stages into a single pack, giving us around 20 total volumes of roughly 20 cards each to meet that total of 407 (perhaps some packs would contain an extra card here or there). At their retail price of 263 yen, that would mean the entire set would end up costing 5260 yen (about $65).



The cards are functionally and physically identical to all the other previously available cards, and the art is interesting to look at. It's especially neat to see minor enemies or items that only appear rarely in the game bearing their own hand-illustrated card as well. I've only actually set the meager assortment of AR cards I have into battle in Kid Icarus Uprising once, and yet I still feel powerless to resist these sets. I know I'll buy every stupid one of them because I am an idiot. Hey, it beats eating a pouch full of machine-packed chocolate wads to get one stinkin' card in return.