One of my best kept secrets in High School was that I was an avid fan of Yu-Gi-Oh. The anime series, the card game, I loved it all, and though I didn’t have much of a reputation I wanted to keep it. I’ve long since outgrown that phase, and Yu-Gi-Oh is hardly recognizable in modern times. What was once a simple card battle game has become heavily convoluted and, dare I say, awful. In my teens I didn’t want to fork out the cash to buy all of the cards, and so the second best option was to play the video games based on it. Playing on the home console proved decent, but the card game was obviously more suited for handheld play with multiplayer in mind. The Gameboy Advance had just released, and that’s where I ran for my Yu-Gi-Oh fix. Yu-Gi-Oh!: Worldwide Edition Stairway to the Destined Duel (I’m just going to call it Worldwide Edition because that’s a mess of a name) was my favorite version of the game back in the day, and I decided to give it a modern look. I’m happy to say that Worldwide Edition is still a lot of fun, and is still much cheaper than investing in the card game.
There isn’t too much of a plot here; you’re a faceless duelist who battles against various characters from the show with more that unlock as you meet special criteria. The game takes place during the battle city arch of the show, but there’s very little plot development. You can choose which area of the city to travel to via an overhead view and each area features little text blurbs as well as other duelists which you can choose to challenge. Each of them have a few lines of dialogue but nothing really major to be honest. That’s what I always liked about this game; it gets straight to the point. The duels are played just like in the card game, and feature the real life cards that function identically. You begin with a starter deck (you’re given a choice of three) and earn a new booster pack of cards as you beat duelists (with more options that open up as you play more), and also weekly via the in-game time system. There’s a definite sense of progress as you unlock more powerful cards and can customize your deck in more ways.
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| A duel in action. |
Card duels are played from an overhead perspective with the playfield, and your hand of cards in view. Yu-Gi-Oh games live and die by the speed of the gameplay, and thankfully the action moves at a very nice and brisk pace here. Cards are rapidly dealt, and the full images of the cards only briefly flash on screen for a moment as they go into effect which is nice. As I said earlier the game is played the same as the base card game, but for those who don’t know I’ll give a brief description. You have three basic types of cards – monsters, magic and trap. Monsters are used to attack opposing monsters and your opponents life points (getting this down to zero ends the duel with you as the victor). Monsters can be placed in attack or defense mode, and have both a defense and offense rating. Magic cards enable a bunch of special effects that vary widely from reviving monster cards from the graveyard to blocking all attacks for a specific number of turns. Traps cards can only be activated when your opponent performs specific actions, and generally these are more geared toward countering actions. It’s pretty basic and easy to grasp, but fine tuning your deck with one of the various themes takes some serious thought and strategy. There are over a thousand cards and a variety of different themes and strategies you can follow.
Unfortunately the artificial intelligence can be infuriating. Many characters from the show are featured, but many of them have cards in their decks that you wouldn’t associate with them. This is very frustrating because everyone has multiple Trap Hole cards, Torrential Tributes, Dark Holes, and every other card that causes so many headaches in this game. Sometimes the opponents feel too similar from one another, and the themes of their decks aren’t always as defined as they should be. Many of the higher level duelists rely almost entirely on trap cards and it can be overly difficult and frustrating for even a seasoned gamer like myself. The problem is that this title was always geared more toward children, and I can’t imagine the stiff difficulty will hold their interest for long. Solo play is the only way to unlock new cards, and so you’re sort of stuck with it, but the real highlight is multiplayer. You can link up with another player who has the game, and a Gameboy Advance using the link cable, and it’s an absolute blast. There’s no lag during gameplay (the action is a bit slower because two human players are selecting cards instead of a computer) and it’s so much more portable than the physical cards. There aren’t a lot of multiplayer options, but you can trade and battle and that’s really all you need.
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| The battle city map. Pretty weak graphics, eh? |
This is not a game that takes advantage of the Gameboy Advance hardware in any meaningful way. The background constantly scrolls (and changes when a terrain card is played) but it’s not particularly impressive. The simplistic backgrounds were chosen in an obvious effort to not distract players too much, but a little more care could have been put into them. The cards, unless highlighted, lack detail but are differently colored based on whether they are a monster, effect monster, trap and magic card, but the simple black portraits are kind of lame. The card art can be viewed when you highlight and inspect the card, or when one is played, and these look nice relative to the hardware but they’re a bit blurry to be honest. The music is unrecognizable from the show which is a major bummer. While there’s some variety in the character themes these are re-used frequently and it’s a little disappointing. Some of the music is catchy, but for the most part the soundtrack is pretty forgettable.
Yu-Gi-Oh!: Worldwide Edition has renewed my interest in the card game. Somewhat. It still holds up remarkably well and although I haven’t played many of the other video game iterations of duel monsters I’m going to go out on a limb and say this is probably one of the best. The game moves at a perfect pace, and includes all of the classic cards with none of this GX garbage or whatever it is that the franchise has moved on to now. There are a few issues, namely the cheap AI, but the package is solid and is a great way to play the cards without forking out some major dough for the physical real-life version. Worldwide Edition truly shines in multiplayer, and so if that’s not a possibility the game might not be worth the effort of tracking it down.
