The new wave of mobile collectible card games — which I still do not understand — is really starting to branch out. For a while there it was all collectible fantasy creatures and demons. Now Aeria Mobile swaps collectible creatures for collectible women. It’s OK, they’re pirates.
I don’t want to be known as the mobile guy that hates collectible card games. I love collectible card games, but for me a CCG is something like Magic: The Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh — games with cards and stats and strategy. This new wave is nothing more than pretty art with numbers on it. They should call them collectible JPEG games or something, so I don’t have to feel bad when a game like Pirate Maidens comes out on iTunes and I don’t rush to play it.
Much like Zynga’s Ayakashi Ghost Guild and other games of its ilk, most of the action in Pirate Maidens involves looking at pictures of anime girls, only instead of demons these are dressed in pirate gear.
There are three factions to choose from, each with its own unique story, and players can swap between those stories at will, which is nifty. Each “card” also features Japanese voice-over, a nice touch.
But still I am left cold. It’s all a lot of screen tapping to me. I hold up hope that one day this genre variant will make sense to me, but Pirate Maidens just feels like collecting saucy anime pics with a purpose.
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