All throughout the history of gaming, there have always been certain franchises that have been considered “cash cows”. Ever since Capcom squeezed the rock of Mega Man on the NES until blood began to spew forth, there have been series that have produced game after game, and the loyal fans would happily take what was given, with no regard for quality in some cases. One just needs to look at the proliferation of Street Fighter, Pokemon, Army Men, or similar series to see that sometimes the dollar signs associated with a name is more important than the quality of the games themselves. Yu-Gi-Oh!, with its army of prepubescent (and older) followers, seemed to be the latest inductee into this club of dubious distinction, with no less than five different games released in the year 2003 alone. Despite the deluge of games, it seemed that the GameBoy Advance would be the platform of choice for the discerning Yu-Gi-Oh! gamer, featuring dueling simulators like The Eternal Duelist Soul and Stairway to the Destined Duel, which were short on story but long on playability.
On the surface, The Sacred Cards looked to be the best of both worlds. The game adds a story to the tried and true dueling mechanism to create, finally, a Yu-Gi-Oh! game that feels more like an RPG than a strict simulation of the card game. Unfortunately, where Konami giveth, Konami also taketh away. The story and RPG elements are shallow at best, and the dueling system is dumbed down to a shadow of its former self, resulting in a game that is utterly disappointing, and easily one of the worst Yu-Gi-Oh! games to date.
The game’s story closely mirrors the second season of the cartoon series, focusing on the Battle City tournament (though the city here is called Domino City instead). Millionaire Seto Kaiba has sponsored a tournament in which duelists challenge each other on the streets of the city. However, it quickly becomes clear that this is no ordinary tournament, as strange individuals calling themselves Ghouls begin to appear, controlled by a duelist named Marik Ishtar, who seems to have motives beyond simply being the champion. If you’ve watched the cartoon (which you likely have if you’re willing to spend your limited gaming budget and time on aYu-Gi-Oh! title), then you know roughly what is going to happen. Though The Sacred Cards presents the story in a rather watered-down and truncated fashion, and takes a couple of liberties, it does stay fairly consistent with the cartoon version.
Unfortunately, that’s about the best compliment that can be given to the game. To put it simply, the gameplay is a complete mess beyond the story. The RPG element holds back the game more than it enhances it. Basically, instead of just progressing from duel to duel as you would in the previous two games, you now get to wander around aimlessly looking for the next person with whom you need to duel in order to advance the story. Given that there are no non-duel related puzzles to solve at all, the RPG overworld mostly serves to artificially lengthen the game. Right from the beginning, I knew that this was going to be trouble, when the game forces the player to challenge every other duelist for a duel and be turned down before the game is allowed to start officially. This tactic is used throughout the game, holding you back until you talk to one particular person or duel a particular person an arbitrary number of times. While I applaud the decision to make Yu-Gi-Oh! more of a true RPG, like Pokemon Trading Card Game for Gameboy Color, the actual implementation is a complete letdown.
However, The Sacred Cards’ flawed RPG interface would be forgivable if the dueling system were as good, if not better, than those of its predecessors. However, The Sacred Cards’ dueling system is a stumble backward for the series, abandoning everything that made Eternal Duelist Soul and Stairway to the Destined Duel good. First off, the duel screen has been altered, making cards more difficult to recognize by sight and forcing the player to scroll up and down to see the entire playfield. There is a nice option to press L to see the attack and defense of all the cards on the field, but this is about the only positive aspect to The Sacred Cards’ new dueling interface.
To make matters worse, there are rule changes that are inconsistent with the card game that seem inexplicable. The hand has now been reduced to five cards from seven with no way to draw more than five and then discard at the end of a turn, so cards that allow the player to draw extra cards, like Pot of Greed, are now essentially useless. Trap cards now activate automatically when a condition that is designed to react to is triggered, rather than allowing the player to choose whether or not he or she wants to activate it. This removes a good deal of strategy involved in the game, as the ability to perform actions on your opponent’s turn has been mostly removed, and traps cannot be saved for the most inopportune time.
The worst rule change, however, is the increased emphasis of card types in the game. Each creature card belongs to one of twelve elemental types, and each element is stronger than one other element and weaker than one other element. What this means is that if two creatures battle, and one has an element that is strong against the other’s, the card with the stronger element wins automatically, regardless of the attack or defense scores involved. Essentially, this reduces The Sacred Cards to a fancy game of rock-paper-scissors, and reduces a lot of the challenge of the game. Once I figured out this system, I played each duelist exactly twice. I would play him once, figure out which element(s) he was using, adjust my deck appropriately, and then play him again with a decided advantage. At this point, the game became mostly mechanical; there was very little interaction from me required, as every duel was mostly the same.
Just to add insult to injury, The Sacred Cards imposes arbitrary limits on deck building. Basically, each card is assigned a cost according to its relative strength, and the player has an upper limit of the combined cost of the cards in his or her 40-card deck. This upper limit is raised as the player wins duels, but this is generally in baby steps; in order to really be able to build a deck that has any power behind it, one must duel the same opponents over and over, likely for a period of several hours. Given the amount of strategy that has been removed from the duels themselves, and that, even if this was a full recreation of the game, that dueling the same handful of opponents repeatedly is no fun after a while, this seems like a rather poor design decision intended, again, to only lengthen the game which is incredibly short otherwise. To make matters worse, decks must be exactly forty cards, no more and no less, so deck building can take an absurdly long time as the player attempts to find a suitable combination of cards that does not exceed the power limit. There is now an ability to purchase cards with money (or Dominoes, as the game refers to its local currency) won through dueling, which does help matters a bit, but is also discouraging given the number of cards one would want to purchase but would never realistically be able to use as a result of the deck limitations.
Graphically, The Sacred Cards is something of a mixed bag. The overworld graphics are pretty good, especially the in-game representations of Yugi and company. While the characters are obviously shrunken down on the GBA screen, they are still quite recognizable on first glance. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the cards on the dueling screen; the card art is compressed to a small size poorly, so most cards are unrecognizable from a glance on the playfield. In general, the purpose of the graphics in a game like Yu-Gi-Oh! is simply to be functional, but The Sacred Cards fails to reach even that mark at times.
Sound is equally unremarkable. Background music is certainly there, and it’s not offensive or annoying, but you won’t remember any of it once the GBA is shut off. Similarly, while there aren’t many sound effects called for in a card game, the ones that are present are fairly simple, like the whoosh of a card being destroyed.
I really wanted to like The Sacred Cards. I generally tend to enjoy Yu-Gi-Oh! games, and given the quality of the previous two games released for the GBA, I had high hopes. However, everything about The Sacred Cards, with the possible exception of the RPG overworld, is a step (if not several) backward from the standard that The Eternal Duelist Soul and Stairway to the Destined Duel established. This may have to do with the fact that The Sacred Cards was released in Japan prior to those two games, but that is certainly no excuse for Konami to release it here without bringing it up to the level of quality that is expected from GBA Yu-Gi-Oh! games. Simply put, the game is too short and much too easy, the dueling interface is a step backward, and the rule changes keep this game from being an accurate dueling experience. If you desperately need a Yu-Gi-Oh! fix, then this might be worth a rental for you; you’ll certainly be either finished with or tired of The Sacred Cards long before it needs to be returned. Otherwise, pick up one of the other GBA games and leave The Sacred Cards on the shelf where it belongs.
