Yu-Gi-Oh!:
The Duelists of the Roses

The Yu-Gi-Oh! series, on the whole, has been something of a mixed bag as far as video games are concerned. The past year has produced no less than five games of varying degrees of quality. That said, it seemed in recent months that the general level of quality was on the upswing. Compared to last year’s PSX game Forbidden Memories, which was a decent approximation of the card game but left much to be desired, the GBA game The Eternal Duelist Soul seemed that it had finally gotten just about everything right. The gameplay was faithful, the graphics were fairly good, and all that was missing was a good storyline to keep the player’s interest.

That said, upon hearing that The Duelists of the Roses was coming out for PS2, I thought that they would take the opportunity to build upon the success of The Eternal Duelist Soul and make this the best Yu-Gi-Oh! game to date. Unfortunately, I was dead wrong. Instead of building on everything that made The Eternal Duelist Soul a good game, they built upon everything that made Forbidden Memories a mediocre game, and then added enough additional confusion and frustration to the game to make it nearly unplayable for all but the most rabid of Yu-Gi-Oh! fans.

Basically, the general premise of this particular installment is that Yugi Moto and Seto Kaiba are descended from the Lancastrians and the Yorkists, respectively. In a moment of desperation as they come dangerously close to losing the War of the Roses (which, apparently, revolves around Duel Monsters instead of swords and catapults), the Lancastrians summon a duelist from the future (the player) to help them battle for the sacred rose cards. However, the player has a choice of which group to join. If the player joins the Lancastrians, then he will battle a series of Yugi’s foes, like Weevil Underwood and Rex Raptor. However, the player can also join the Yorkists and battle against Yugi’s friends, like Mai Valentine and Joey Wheeler. The story’s pretty hokey and not entirely believable, but, after all, this is Yu-Gi-Oh!, not Shakespeare.

What sets apart The Duelists of the Roses from other Yu-Gi-Oh! games is that, in addition to the rest of the rules of the game, there is a movement system to take into account. The board is considerably bigger than a normal Yu-Gi-Oh! board, because all your cards must move around the board in order to attack each other, in a system much more like chess than a traditional collectible card game. So you have one card that serves as a “leader” card, much like a king in chess, and that card cannot attack or defend itself. Therefore, any time that card is attacked by an opponent’s monster, it is basically a direct attack on your life points. In addition to all the other general concerns of a standard Yu-Gi-Oh! game, you also must constantly take into account positioning yourself to protect your leader card and attack your opponent’s leader card.

While the added complexities that movement brings to the game could be overwhelming, especially to newcomers to the Yu-Gi-Oh! games, it would not be quite so bad if the game wasn’t set up to frustrate and infuriate the player at every turn. The entirety of the game, much like Forbidden Memories, is made up solely of the handful of duelists who you need to defeat to advance, and in order to improve your deck with more cards, you must enter a Custom Duel mode where you can battle repeatedly for more cards. Unfortunately, instead of providing a variety of opponents to duel, your only options are to battle a mirror of your own deck or the last deck you dueled (but only if you have a second PS2 memory card plugged in). So, if you want to improve your deck, all you can get if you only have one memory card is more of what you already have in your deck. Even then, you can only get three cards per duel, and since duels can often take upwards of fifteen or twenty minutes apiece, accumulating the cards for a quality deck is extremely slow going.

Even if you do manage to create a deck that can carry you through the duels, the odds are still severely and unfairly stacked against you. In order to even challenge another duelist, your deck must first be rated lower than his according to an arbitrary deck ranking score. Even once you’ve gotten into a duel, you’ll quickly realize that the awful fusion system from Forbidden Memories has returned in all its infamy in The Duelists of the Roses. Much like in that game, you can combine any two or more cards in your hand into a more powerful monster, if they combine successfully. However, much like Forbidden Memories, there is little rhyme or reason to the fusion combinations in The Duelists of the Roses; figuring out successful fusions is a matter of trial and error, note-taking, and memorization. The problem is that the computer has access to the full list of fusions and uses it to what is often an unfair advantage, since very few of the base cards can possibly compare to the fusion monsters, and magic and trap cards are few and far between. All of this adds up to be an extremely frustrating and tedious experience.

Control, as one would expect, is fairly straight-forward, as everything is menu-driven. All the buttons available to you at any given time are listed on the screen at all times. The only confusing part of the control scheme is the usage of the left analog stick. Instead of behaving the same as the digital pad does, the left analog stick rotates the board, which seems to me to be a fairly useless ability, and generally serves to frustrate the player more than assist. If they felt the need to include this ability, I don’t see why they couldn’t assign it to the right analog stick, where most players expect camera control to reside. Generally, though, after a game or two, controlling the action will be trivial.

The graphics are easily the high point of The Duelists of the Roses. In no other Yu-Gi-Oh! game is the cartoon representation of the card game more faithfully reproduced. Once a card is flipped over, a 3D version of that monster floats above it and moves around the board with its respective card. Much like the old game Battle Chess, an animated, non-interactive battle is played whenever one monster attacks another. Although they are extremely time-consuming in an already slow-moving game, and will probably be turned off after an hour or so of play, these movies are well-animated and do add to the atmosphere quite well.

Sound, however, is extremely disappointing. One can find only the most basic of sound effects and background music in The Duelists of the Roses. In fact, the background song is more or less the same throughout the game. You won’t be missing anything by pressing mute and putting on a CD in the background. (The Yu-Gi-Oh! CD, “Music to Duel By”, perhaps?) Even more discouraging, there is absolutely no voice acting to be found. Considering the miniscule amount of dialogue in the game, it would have taken very little of the TV cartoon’s voice actors’ time to record all the lines of text in the game, so it’s rather sad that the game’s designers didn’t take the time to add that in and complete the multimedia experience.

Overall, The Duelists of the Roses is a graphical step forward for the Yu-Gi-Oh! video game series, but overall is a giant step backward. Forbidden Memories, despite its flaws, was a somewhat worthwhile investment because of its $30 price tag and the fact that there were no better Yu-Gi-Oh! games available at the time. Now, The Duelists of the Roses costs $20 more than the best Yu-Gi-Oh! game currently available (The Eternal Duelist Soul) and does not provide even a fraction of the play value. Unless you’re an obsessive Yu-Gi-Oh! fan who must own every bit of Yu-Gi-Oh! paraphernalia, definitely rent The Duelists of the Roses before you consider a purchase. After all, $50 is a lot to spend on a game that does everything in its power to keep from being played.