"Ultimate Blade" (アルティメットブレイド) is a PC-98 game that I've played a bit lately, so I thought I'd put some info here since there's pretty much none on the internets, even in Japanese.

Plot: a form of mixed martial arts becomes wildly popular in the (then-) future. The player character loses in the finals of the biggest tournament in the world, and then decides to raise some cute girls well hypothetically there are 3 male choices too cute girls to win the next time the tournament is held.

Basically it's a raising sim, but with a card-based combat minigame you play as a major focus as well. Each month, you can pick four things for each of your students to do, including basic stat training, technique training, and goofing off to relieve stress.

Strength affects damage dealt (I think; I don't have a manual or anything). Constitution determines HP, Stamina determines your stamina - basically a second HP bar that also makes a fighter lose if it hits zero, and depletes somewhat due to your own attacks even if you don't get hit. I have no clue what the Speed stat does.

There are also attack/defense values for the four attack types in the game. I suspect the attack value affects the quantity (and quality??) of attack cards you get, because a character with unbalanced stats consistently gets more cards of their preferred attack type than any other. It probably also affects damage with that attack type.

Basically combat consists of drawing a hand of cards, choosing one to play, and higher number wins. (Some kind of rock-paper-scissors deal with the attack types for tied numbers, I think.) There's also a defense card that seems to have varying potency; I don't really know how it determines whether you block.

In order to actually win fights, you will probably need to learn some combo techniques that use more than one card at a time. This adds the numbers on the cards together to determine strength, usually does a lot of damage, and perhaps most importantly can be used to cycle mediocre cards out of your hand much more effectively than playing them one at a time. This is crucial for the inevitable periods when you have nothing but low-value cards in your hand.

Seems hard to win any fights before ~3-4 months of preliminary training, although if I had better info on the stat system, I might be able to squeeze out a win earlier. /shrug.

Page last updated Jan 27, 2016.

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