0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Animetic Story Game 1: Cardcaptor Sakura

         

Animetic Story Game 1: Cardcaptor Sakura is an adventure game and is game based off of the is a Japanese shōjo manga Cardcaptor Sakura, also known as Cardcaptors the manga was written and illustrated by the manga group Clamp. The game was developed and published by Arika the game was released exclusively in Japan on the 5^th of August 1999 and is the second Cardcaptors video game to be released.

Cardcaptor Sakura is a pretty basic adventure games the follows the first season of the Anime the game includes cut scenes straight from the tv show these are interspersed with linear pathways and fairly simple mini games with a majority of mini games featuring timed sequences and patterns.

You will earn Sakura Coins by completing this mini games which can be used to unlock Sakura Coins, which can be used to purchase a multitude of concept art, voice samples, and so on, including many clips you won’t find in the main story.

The story for Animetic Story Game 1: Cardcaptor Sakura follows the story line of the first season of the Cardcaptors tv show, with the player in the role of Sakura Kinomoto an ordinary 10 year old girl who’s life is changed forever while home alone she finds a mysterious book called CLOW,  what she doesn’t realise the book contains a powerful deck of magical cards of unspeakable power and have now been released on Tokyo.

Also released is the guardian beast of the seal Kerberos who tasks Sakura to recover the cards, along with Kerberos, Sakura is joined by her best friend Tomoyo Daidouji, and a mysterious boy from Hong Kong named Shaoran Li who together will help her find all of the cards before Chaos is unleashed upon the world.

Critic reviews are next to impossible to find for this Japanese exclusive release, IGN user ratings have this game rated as a 7.0 from a total of two user ratings, so we head over to GameFAQs for their user stats, starting with the games rating which averages out at 3.58/5 from a total of twelve user ratings.

A good and largely positive spread of user rating for this game with only a couple dropping below the average rating of 3/5 these two ratings both coming in at 2.5/5, the majority of users have rated this game at either 3.5/5 or 4/5 each of these ratings has four users each the remain two users either gave the game a three of five out of five.

Difficulty wise and again we have twelve users rating this category we have a clear majority that have rated this game as simple with six in total a total of four users rated this game as easy while the remaining two users rated this game as having just the right difficulty level, averaging out at simple/easy.

The games lifespan up next with only eight users rating this category and it would seem a fairly short games with all eight users spending between two and four hours with the game averaging out at just 3.3 hours.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com, eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to, I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

So lets get down to business with Gamedude who don’t have this game listed, no surprise really with this being a Japanese exclusive title same for Retrogames.co.uk and eStarland.com so quickly moving on to Amazon.com who have plenty of Cardcaptors and Sakura themed merchandise but sadly no games likewise the co.uk version of the site as well

Now we head to Ebay.com to see if we can find any copies at all and we do with a total of four used copies on the market with three shipping from Japan the cheapest which comes with free shipping will set you back $15 or £11.37 this copy is in very good condition.

The other two copies from Japan will set you back between $22 and $28 once shipping has been added into the costs, the remaining copy which ships from the US will set you back $16.99 however a shipping fee of $16.32 bumps that price up to a steep $33.31, all four copies currently on sale at Ebay.com are complete with disc, case, covers, manual and spine card.

Written by

P J Gibbon