Reverse: 1999 Trading Cards: Shining Soul's UTTU Box
I do a confession at the top of this one: I went in completely blind. Normally before I open a box I do my homework — I pull up the Wikipedia page, sometimes I’ll even go watch an episode of the anime. This time I decided to do an old-school Archivist video and crack the whole thing knowing nothing. No idea what franchise it was, no idea who made it. And honestly? It might be the best decision I’ve made on this channel, because these turned out to be some of the most beautiful trading cards I have opened all year.
So here is the deal now that I’ve actually looked things up. These are Reverse: 1999 trading cards — the UTTU Arcanist Magazine set, made by a publisher called Shining Soul and officially licensed from Bluepoch, the studio behind the game. Reverse: 1999 is a gacha game (you roll for characters and outfits, build a party, chase the limited event stuff — you know the genre). I’d never touched it. After opening this box I kind of want to.
Here’s the full opening if you’d rather watch me figure all this out in real time:
The Box
I paid about $30 for this, and the first thing you notice is the weight. This is a heavy box. Part of that is a rigid plastic tray at the bottom holding everything in place — which I love, it keeps the box sturdy and the packs perfectly stacked. The cover art is the game’s protagonist, Vertin, in that little top hat, and the whole thing reads “重返未来 / UTTU Arcanist Magazine” with the Shining Soul logo up in the corner.
Now, the build quality here had me doing double-takes. The box style and weight reminded me a lot of the big Kayou releases — but this isn’t Kayou, and it isn’t Card Fun. This is a publisher I’d genuinely never heard of, which is part of why I got so excited. You get 16 packs in the box. They don’t look like a lot stacked in there, but they are dense and they feel substantial.
One warning: the pack wrappers are loud. You know the sound a SunChips bag makes? That crinkly, deafening, microphone-into-the-red sound? That’s these. Don’t make trading card packs out of SunChips bags, friends.
The Set
This is where Shining Soul flexes. The rarity ladder on this set is enormous, and once I pulled the official odds it all made sense:
Each pack holds 5 cards, structured as one base-tier slot, one R-tier slot, one mid-hit slot, and two cards that can climb all the way up the ladder. The full lineup runs N → R → SR → SR+ → SSR → SSR+ → LR → LR+ → LSR → LSR+ → MR → VR, and then the two chase tiers, SE and SP. Notice the LR sits at a 43.75% pull rate — when I hit one in the video I said “43%, that’s not actually that rare,” and lo and behold, that math was right for once.
The ”+” versions are my favorite little detail. An SR and an SR+ are the same card with two different treatments — usually a different foil, sometimes a totally different finish, sometimes they just move the logo to the corner. It’s a clean way to make a card you like worth chasing twice.
The SE cards are the cool gimmick. There are 6 of them — the “Remnants of the Era” series — and they come with an AR guide card. You scan the card in Shining Soul’s app and watch a little time-rewind animation play over the art. (When I kept finding a lone “AR” card and going “wait, what is this one for?” — that’s what it’s for.)
And then at the very top there’s a single SP card, “What the Clock Hands Remember,” limited to 1999 copies — a perfect nod to the franchise name. It’s Vertin again, loaded with photo-etching, a stamped gold-foil signature, 3D embossing, and reverse texturing. It’s the kind of card you’d build a display around.
The Cards
Okay, enough charts. Here’s what actually came out of my packs:
The art is the headline. This is top-tier illustration work — and I do not think it’s AI, it’s far too considered for that. Every character has a distinct outfit, a distinct mood, and the rares look so good that I’d have been happy if the base cards were all I got. The card stock is thin and has a little curve to it from the foil pulling on it, but the printing is gorgeous and the colors are alive.
Even the R cards — basically the floor of the set — are stunning. Look at this one with the vinyl record worked into the background. That little numbered “37” in the corner, the foil catching the light. These remind me of the Assassin’s Creed cards I opened ages ago, that same premium thin-foil feel — except there’s way more variety here.
Then the treatments start escalating fast. There’s a holo Vertin that throws rainbow in every direction, etched foil patterns (one of them looks exactly like the Death Star, I will not be taking questions), printed signatures, and — this is the part that floored me — cards with actual metal embedded in them. These are otherwise thin little things, and then you hit an LR that has a literal piece of metal set into it. On a card this thin, that’s wild.
And there are film-cell relic cards too — translucent windows you can hold up to the light. I genuinely did not expect a reel-style relic in a set with stock this thin. They’re not numbered, but they look fantastic backlit. This is the part of opening these where I stopped trying to sort them quickly and just started staring.
Should You Buy It?
If you couldn’t tell: yes. This is one of those rare boxes where opening it actually changed how I feel about a whole game and a whole publisher I didn’t know existed an hour earlier. It’s the same feeling I had the first time I cracked that Doraemon box, or the high-end stuff in Bling Bling — “oh, this is so much better than it has any right to be.” Even held to Western card standards, these are top tier. If you like gorgeous gacha-game art on cards, the way the Persona 5 Royal set scratched that itch, this one absolutely delivers.
When I filmed this I literally couldn’t link the set — AliExpress was being weird in the US and I had no way to point you at it. Good news: that’s sorted now, and you can grab the box I opened below.
And one more thing — there’s now a second wave, the “Starlight Edition” (UTTU Vol. 2). If you fall in love with the first set the way I did, the new one is out too:
Whoever recommended this to me in the comments: thank you. You introduced me to an entire publisher I now want to buy everything from.