This is another game where I'm not even 100% sure where or how I heard about this thing, but I remember it being described as "Yu-Gi-Oh meets Monopoly with a Ganbare Goemon theme", and like any rational person, I knew I HAD to experience this thing XD. I got it on ebay for like $8 back when I lived in the States, but never got around to playing it. I held onto it though, and after having it with me for over another year and a half in Japan, I finally sat down and beat it XD. It took me about 8 hours to play through all 7 stages of the story mode.

The story of the game is typical wackiness for a Goemon game. These cursed cards are taking over the minds of gods and yokai and the Goemon crew have to go around defeating them to break the curses. Along the way you'll see a lot of familiar faces from previous Goemon games who even have some small voice clips to go with them, which add a little extra flavor to each opponent. You'll also see a really tasteless gay/trans joke or two, which while annoying and shitty is also definitely not out of character for this series. The story is very bare bones and does what it needs to in regards to giving the game a single-player mode.

Mechanically, the game is more or less what I gave at the start: Yu-Gi-Oh, Goemon, and Monopoly. together at last(?). The basic gist of things is that you all start with a deck of 50 cards (Monsters called Mononoke, equipment, and spells) at the inn space on the board. You need to go around the board hitting each checkpoint before you can return to the inn for a big pile of free money. Along the way, there are special spaces like shops, caves that teleport you to another cave, and torii gates that heal status effects. There are also neutral spaces where you can summon monsters, and if the element (of which there are five) of the monster and space align, the monster gets a free level up. If you land on a monster that isn't yours, you have to fight it, and if you win the fight the attack points that overkilled the monster take away HP from your opponent's life points (very much like Yu-Gi-Oh). Monsters can be leveled up either at the end of your turn or by beating another monster, and to tilt the odds in your favor even more, you can play equipment cards during battle to beef up your monster's stats. That all sounds complicated, and it is for a video game board game, for sure, but that's about as simple as I can describe what took me like 3-ish hours of bumbling through the first few single-player stages to figure out XD

The problem, however, is that past the cool concept, the board game itself isn't actually put together that well, nor does the game have all that much polish either. I could go on for ages about the problems the game has, but I'll try and make this as concise as I can:

- The game has effectively 3 currencies: Money, Cards, and Life Points. These three currencies don't work together well enough, and you get SO much money from one, let alone two runs to the inn that money becomes worthless very quickly.

- Money is only valuable in the early game, as monsters are cheap to summon, equipment is VERY expensive (good ones anyhow), and you lose money to whomever beats you in combat. Most games are decided in the first few turns, especially if one player gets unlucky enough for the other to get them into low or even negative money. If you have negative money, you've gotta start selling played monsters and cards in your hand, and there is basically no coming back from that.

- Much like SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash, the power creep of better cards is absurd, and unlike that game there is basically no reason to keep bad cards in your deck. You're here to stomp your enemy with powerful monsters with unfair abilities, and if you aren't trying to do that, you'll almost certainly lose.

- While stronger/rarer monsters take more money to level up directly via turn actions, all monsters level identically through combat, whether rarity C or rarity A. That method is by stealing the levels of whatever they kill, so if a level 1 fresh monster kills a max-level 5 monster, that winner is now level 5. This means that strong monsters get SUPER strong and nearly unkill-able, making sure that comebacks are very rare.

All this boils down to games feeling like you're SUPER at the mercy of the RNG of card draw (which is basically just one card a turn, as you need to land on a shop to use it instead of just passing by it) and whichever player has the better deck. The only reason I was able to beat most stages on my first or second try was because the AI is pretty dang bad and I also got very lucky (particularly on the last level). When it rains, it POURS in this game, and it makes for very unengaging matches past the first half-dozen turns or so. Whoever can make it back to the inn first is almost certainly going to win.

Then on top of that, the game has absolutely inexcusable quality of life features. There is just no way to look around the board. You can zoom in and out from your current position, but unless you're in the middle of an action that involves picking a space or a monster (such as playing a spell card for removal, or picking the monster you want to fight at the end of the turn), you cannot look at the things on the board. You also can't bring up your cards to look at unless you're about to play one. Want to look at what equipment cards you have before you take a fork in the road that will land you on a monster or not? Tough luck. That is literally impossible. There are also no descriptions for what special spaces do in-game (I still have no idea what the boat spaces do), and there are also no indicators to where exactly caves spit you out before you land on them. The amount of information and convenience needlessly kept from the player is absurd down to the point where the game has no pause menu. If you wanna exit a match mid-game, you've gotta restart your console. There simply is no pause menu for such things mid-game. While you can at least see what the special ability and stats of a monster are mid-fight, that is cold comfort given the mountain of other bad UI decisions this game is filled with.

The presentation is also fairly rough beyond the bad UI and insignificant/crappy writing. The boards are very detailed 2D sprites that your tiny 3D models walk around on. The boards are very pretty, yes, but the paths between spaces can often be obscured by that detail, and combined with the lack of a mini-map or the ability to look around the board at will, sometimes you'll go one way only to figure out it doesn't lead anywhere close to where you thought it did. The music is quite nice, but there aren't many tracks, most (if not all) of them are from past Goemon games, and they often don't fit the atmosphere of "board game" very well. The only really good thing I can say about the presentation is that the graphics overall look quite nice, especially the card art.

Verdict: Not Recommended. I was pretty disappointed with this game. As I played more and more, it sunk in just how utterly broken so many of the basic building blocks of the card game were. Even at its best with some more polish, I think this game would be just okay, but with how bad the board game is on top of how rough the surrounding experience is, this game is impossible to recommend even if I didn't absolutely hate all my time with it. There are so many other board game games to play that are so much better than this, that even if needing to know Japanese to play it weren't an obstacle, there is just no real reason to go back and play this unless you're like me and simply NEED to witness this mechanical madness with your own eyes XD