Yu-Gi-Oh! Ultimate Masters: World Championship Tournament 2006

Screenshots

Notes

Yu-Gi-Oh! Ultimate Masters: World Championship Tournament 2006 is an adaptation of the Yu-Gi-Oh Trading/Collectible Card Game, aka Duel Monsters, one of several on the GBA (3 made it into the challenge for reference). If you really don't know anything about Yu-Gi-Oh, I suggest you look it up elsewhere (also where you living under a rock in the early 2000s?) As for my experience with the franchise, I enjoyed the anime as a child, and more recently the Abridged Series on Youtube, but was never really into the trading card game. It's also worth noting I'm not a big fan of TCGs/CCGs in general, the only one I've played much of is Hearthstone, but I've lost interest in that too.



I'm abandoning Yu-Gi-Oh. I really didn't want to, as 2 in a row right at the start of the challenge is a bad precedent, but the game has broken me. This is within the rules as the game doesn't have a traditional story mode or ending, and I've played for more than 2 hours (more like 10). This evening has hammered home that I'm not having fun. I beat the same opponent twice in a row easily, and then proceeded to lose 14 times in a row before getting the 3rd win, due to a combination of abominable luck and occasional misplays. Then I looked it up and discovered I need 5 wins, not 3, to unlock the whole of the next tier of opponents. Blargh.


I've played a representative sample of the game's modes, and I think I've seen everything in the game barring just more cards and decks, which doesn't interest me that much.


In Free Duel you fight opponents with set decks in regular duels. More are unlocked in tiers by repeatedly beating the earlier ones. In Duel Puzzle, the only mode I really enjoyed, you get a set board position and have to figure out how to win in one turn. In Limited you have to win with a deck that obeys certain restrictions. In Theme you have to achieve an objective other than just winning in the traditional way. And in survival you have to win as many duels in a row as possible with a single life point total.

The game has so many cards, to a Yu-Gi-Oh noob like me it's overwhelming. Apparently it's all the cards released when the game came out (give or take a few). I have 380 already and that's only a small fraction of the total. And every one of those has a paragraph or 2 of text you need to read to understand it.


I don't want to ramble too much about why I don't like Yu-Gi-Oh. A few short points though:
* Lack of resource management other than cards and life means the game lacks depth.
* Too many powerful cards means "normal" play of regular summoning and fighting monsters is almost non-existent.
* No standard effects/keywords means almost every card has a lot of text on it.
* Very fiddly rules around chaining and countering.
* Activation of cards on the opponents turn makes for a slow and clunky video game version.

Graphically the game is a little disappointing, as you can't really see card art in the main view and it's not exactly stellar in the zoomed in view. That's probably inevitable on the GBA's screen though. The interface is functional enough when you get used to it. The deck management interface is complex but has solid functionality for managing the hundreds of cards you'll accumulate. Background music and sound effects are unintrusive, nothing spectacular.