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There's little doubt that Yu-Gi-Oh! is the new Pokemon.
All the symptoms are there: A television show that's addictive as
crack, a collectible card game, and video games based on the former.
Granted, these elements have arrived in a slightly different order (Pokemon
began life as a video game based on an anime comic book series,
which then begot the cartoon and card game, and Yu-Gi-Oh! began as a
card game based on an anime comic book series, which then begot the
TV show and subsequent video games), but the end result is the same.
Yu-Gi-Oh! is not going away any time soon, and I (much as I was, and
still am with Pokemon) happen to be just as addicted as any crazed,
hyperventilating nine-year-old. I've accepted it, honestly; I filed
both under the category of "guilty pleasures" and gone on about my
business. (As far as I see it, they're no worse than soap operas,
bubblegum pop, or slasher flicks. But I digress.)
I recently found myself needing to quench a Yu-Gi-Oh!
thirst that can't simply be satisfied by the Saturday morning fix.
The cards have called my name in the store on several occasions, but
I've resisted that particular urge. This is mainly because I
remember how much money Magic: The Gathering sucked from my meager
high-school earnings several years ago, and I frankly do not relish
the idea of repeating that particular experience. I had tried a
video game substitute for the card game a few months ago, in the
form of Yu-Gi-Oh!: Forbidden Memories. That particular game
left a sour taste in my mouth, mainly because the rules had been
dumbed down significantly, and the system by which you earned cards
was so anemic that it was nigh-impossible to build a decent deck.
Then I came across Yu-Gi-Oh! The Eternal Duelist Soul, and it
taunted me with its promises of a pure representation of the card
game and its portability on my under-used Game Boy Advance. Finally,
my lovely and patient wife purchased it for me as an early birthday
present. I met it half with anticipation, half with caution after
the disappointment that was met with Forbidden Memories.
However, my worries were unfounded. The Eternal Duelist Soul is
everything that Forbidden Memories was not; it is an excellent
simulation of the card game.
It should be noted up front that when I say, “The
Eternal Duelist Soul (EDS) is a simulation of the card game” I
mean exactly that. EDS strives to do this one thing and do it well,
to the exclusion of all else. What this means is that there is no
real story to speak of (unless you consider a calendar function that
occasionally provides you with free cards or a tournament to compete
in), and no bells and whistles outside of the confines of the card
game. You pick an opponent and you duel. If you win, you pick a
booster of five cards. You then go back to the menu screen to do it
all over again. In other words, if you're expecting anything from
EDS other than the card game, then these aren't the droids you're
looking for.
That said, EDS is an extremely well-done simulation of
the card game, and while it may lack the meager story components of
Forbidden Memories, it more than makes up for it by filling
in all the gaps in gameplay that the former title left. EDS follows
the rules of the card game to the letter. Though it includes a
disclaimer in the manual that the rules are only accurate as of the
game's publishing, which is all one can ask from a non-PC game. This
means that winning will be more dependent on strategy than solely on
who can bring out the biggest creature.
For those unfamiliar with the card game, each player
begins with 8000 life points, and the goal is to reduce your
opponent's life points to zero. You accomplish this by summoning
creatures to attack your opponent or his/her creatures; if your
creature's attack is higher than the defending creature's attack,
then the overage spills over to your opponent's life points. In
order to turn the tide of battle, there are also magic cards and
trap cards that can be played. Magic cards are usually played on
your turn to achieve a specific effect, like destroying all
creatures on the board or drawing extra cards. Trap cards are played
face down on the field and can be activated when a certain condition
occurs (usually on your opponent's turn); for example, Trap Hole
will allow you to destroy a creature as it is summoned if its attack
is greater than 1000. Though the actual rules are more complicated
than this single paragraph would suggest (and I'm sure I'm leaving a
lot out of this simple explanation), it is enough to give the basic
idea of the game.
EDS takes a rather Spartan approach to making all of
this come alive on a video screen. A fairly simple interface
provides access to everything you will need to do in a game.
Control, therefore, is fairly intuitive; A selects cards and menu
options, and B cancels, as well as ending the current phase of a
turn. When more than one option is available for a card (for
example: view, play face down, or activate) these are shown below
the selected card to allow you to pick one. Once you have the actual
rules of the game down (which are fairly easy to pick up after a
couple of games), maneuvering around the game is a cinch.
I do have a couple of complaints about the interface
that are fairly big, and surprising that they weren't addressed in
play-testing. One is that it is impossible to take back a move.
Granted, were this a real card tournament I would expect this would
be the case, but there have been a number of situations in which I
just accidentally pressed the wrong button and ended up screwing up
a turn. This is especially vexing when accidentally moving a monster
from attack to defense mode or vice versa (an act that is
accomplished by rotating the card 90 degrees), and should be fairly
routine to adjust. Alas, once you turn that card, you can't turn it
back until the next turn, which can be extremely frustrating.
My other main complaint about the interface is in regard
to viewing cards. That is to say that when you need to, you often
can't. There are several hundred cards available in the game, and it
would take either an extraordinary mind (or a photographic memory)
to remember the full text of all of them. However, when any given
card is played, and you're asked if you want to react to it, you're
not given the option to view the card before making a decision.
There have been a number of times when I've had to go to the
opponent's graveyard (aka discard pile) to look at a card and see
what it did. This puts the human player, especially one encountering
a card he/she has never seen before, at a disadvantage
unnecessarily.
One other minor complaint I have regarding the
presentation is the game speed. This game really crawls along, with
some minor animations that one wouldn't mind skipping and long
pauses between computer actions. You can hold down B to speed these
moments up, but that gets tiresome after a while. A simple menu
option to adjust the game speed would have been a great solution to
this problem, and I'm surprised that none was included.
As far as the actual gameplay is concerned, the computer
opponents (once past the first batch, who are complete pushovers)
provide a decent amount of challenge. Other than games I've won in
the first few turns as a result of just sheer luck, most victories
won against the computer opponent in EDS are hard-fought. That's not
to say that the AI is perfect, of course; it does have some peculiar
habits and grievous errors of judgment. In particular, it makes no
effort to protect its cards or its life points at times. On several
occasions it has had a card with low attack and high defense that it
left in attack mode simply because it had attacked with it once and
was apparently too lazy to shift it back to defense mode, despite
the fact that that one card would hold back all my monsters
single-handedly. On another, with 1000 life points left, the
computer attacked with a monster that required that it pay 1000 life
points to attack, thereby losing the game before the monster even
got a chance to come after me. All in all the computer puts up a
fight, and even after a number of games it doesn't really get too
boring playing against it.
The one major flaw that Forbidden Memories had
that I feared would be replicated in EDS was deck building;
Forbidden Memories yielded one card per victory, making deck
building extremely slow and made putting together a solid strategy
nearly impossible. EDS solves this issue by allowing you to choose a
booster of five cards after each victory, so you can have a decent
pool of cards to pick from very quickly. Plus, even if you really
suck and can't win a duel, after every seventh match you'll
automatically get the "Weekly Yu-Gi-Oh" with five free cards in it
for you, win or lose. The password feature, which I thought was
interesting but poorly implemented in Forbidden Memories, is also
included here. Basically, if you own a Yu-Gi-Oh card, it comes with
a number in the corner which can be input into EDS so you can obtain
that card in the game. Unlike Forbidden Memories, there are no
constraints on the password system in EDS, other than that you can
only obtain one of any given card via a password, which is more than
reasonable. It would be nice if the game allowed you to build
multiple deck configurations, as it only allows you one play deck at
a time, but this is really a minor quibble more than anything else.
As far as graphics and sound are concerned, as one would
expect with a game such as this, the audiovisuals are extremely
utilitarian. The board is laid out very nicely, taking up the entire
screen, with the background denoting any sort of a field advantage.
Cards are represented as small colored rectangles on the board, but
can be enlarged to their full size upon closer inspection. In that
view, all the card art looks as though it would on the card, as one
would expect.
There are no 3D animated battles like there were in
Forbidden Memories; what is presented is essentially no-frills.
Sound effects are extremely basic and really add very little to the
game; music is similarly bland and repetitive, but you really lose
nothing by playing this game with the sound off, because there is
very little that any sound could do to enhance the playing
experience of a card game.
Overall, Yu-Gi-Oh: The Eternal Duelist Soul is a fine
video representation of the card game proper. If you or your
children are interested in the card game, but you don't want to get
sucked into the vortex of debt that inevitably results from
involvement with a collectible card game, then EDS is certainly
worth your attention. While it won't do much for you if you need
more than the card game to be entertained, or if you're expecting
something that follows the TV series more closely than the card
game. It does give you the closest thing you can get to playing the
card game without sucking your bank account dry, and the card game
really doesn't need much added to it in order to be fun. It may have
taken three tries, but it seems that with The Eternal Duelist
Soul Konami has finally found the Heart of the Card
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