pretty decent yugioh game for if you're not good at yugioh but want something to pick up for a few hours or so. i like how snappy duels go in this game compared to others, it's actually one of the only reasons i decided to stick with this game to the end. the difficulty varies strangely with this one; i struggled hard against bandit keith and yami malik but managed to manipulate the rng so the AI would go easy on me (the only reason i even beat them LMAO). compared to other yugioh games i've played, this is definitely the one i would recommend for people who are either beginners to yugioh or play the game casually since it's fairly easy.

Out of the "Nonsense rules" YGO games this was one of the most enjoyable ones.

A problem with the old games is that getting good cards is hard as fuck and it results in a very grindy and tedious experience just to beat the first few opponents. In this one monsters win instantly if they have a type advantage (Kuriboh beats Blue Eyes for example), letting you win any duel with garbage cards as long as you build it correctly for the matchup. This makes it kinda easy but i still prefer it to the "grind for an eternity to maybe get a playable card and pray to the rng you draw it". Your deckbuilding actually matters and lets you make some fucking progress.

Another thing i greatly appreciated as a fan of the manga is the characterization and interactions with side characters. Having a chance to become friends with characters like Rex Raptor, Bonz and even Bandit Keith is super cool.

It's far from perfect but it's an enjoyable, chill adventure. Worth playing if you're a fan of the anime/manga.

Fun little Yu-Gi-Oh! game. You can finish it in one sitting if you really want. Duels go lighting fast since it doesn't follow official rules.

It may look a bit grindy sometimes but there's a lot of ways to cheese stuff. You may need to try some duels more than once if you're going for the cheese routes, because obviously your deck won't be as consistent, but if you want a really consistent deck you would have to do A LOT of grinding, so it's worth it.

If you want to steal Yugi's spotlight in his own story, don't care much for the official rules, and want to play a Yugioh game that feel like an RPG, this is a good one

Japan OCG: July 2002
NA TCG: Late 2003

Quick rant:
The timeline for Yu-Gi-Oh! games is so fucked up. This is considered Duel Monsters Expert 7 in japan but the prior game I reviewed was considered Expert 5. Not only this, but when Expert 5 got remade in North America, it was an entirely new game just for the NA market, but the two can be considered parallels of sorts. HOWEVER, Expert 6 is a game released in Japan, but YGO: 'Stairway to the Destined Duel' exists not as the parallel to that, but as another game in all markets, considered Expert International. It feels like how Pokemon went from Red/Green to Blue and then to Yellow but in NA its just Red/Blue then Yellow but without the 'English' source code localization reasoning. I raise this issue up as going by the North American release schedule I would have actually played Stairway before this (actually I would have played Duelist of the roses, but hardware/skill issue) but when quickly charting out my play schedule I was going by the japanese release dates of some of these so my intended system going ahead is kinda fucky, rip.

In the long run it doesn't entirely matter anyway, most of these games don't translate as well onto a roadmap of the actual card game meta's history, and this game doesn't help after playing Eternal Duelist Soul.

What strategy and deckbuilding ideas I had fun formulating by the end of EDS basically never popped up throughout the quick jaunt this was. Dark Duel Stories was a game I only briefly talked about comparatively and that's because it was overall too grindy and samey for me to really want to engage with. Here, there's at least enough of a new and interesting enough premise to keep with the program until the end. Unfortunate for this game as I'll harp on for longer about how obnoxious some of the format rules and mindless the strategizing becomes.

Similar to DDS, Sacred Cards is reliant upon the format of an exactly 40 card deck with a cards being chosen on a 'deck cost' limit. Each card has a specific cost and you can only add said based on your 'duelist level', with stronger cards having higher levels and costs. The deck limit and duelist level are increased as you battle of course, but there entails the first problem, these two aren't exactly proportionally rewarded. To put this into perspective, by the 3/4ths part of the game I could fit most anything into the deck level-wise but basically nothing would fit because the deck limit was so tiny. By the end of the game I maybe had 5 cards with an attack above 1500 attack? Its not like most of this matters as a bunch of cards are given nonsense effects because the simplicity of the game doesn't mesh with the actual tcg. No flip summoning, chaining effects, spell speeds, coin flips, you can only have 5 cards in hand, even fusing is gone. Not even the mechanic from DDS/FM, just the whole concept is gone (rituals though!!!(?)).

This whole structure would mean I would have to get pretty creative to make decks by the endgame however right? Of course not, there's about 4 different variations of trap hole that are cheap as fuck for some reason, meaning if you have 3 copies of acid trap hole basically anything your opponent drops dies. There's a bunch of these cards and they just serve to clear up your opponents board while you send out 900 atk nothings to chip away their LP.

Also returning from DDS is the attribute weakness chart to varying degrees of apathy. There's a few times where matches begin with a preset field and you would want to alter your deck to suit the field and take advantage of your opponent's weakness but I considered this maybe twice.

The story follows the Duelist City arc like most things in the Duel Monsters era, but this is the first time we get to control a player going from area to area. There's nothing too special here outside of its crude animations/attempts to mirror the events of the anime. I got lost a few times trying to figure out how to progress the story.

The two saving graces that allowed me to complete this game over DDS and FM are as follows. Firstly, unlike DDS this game's structure isn't as mind-numbing, as it is fairly neat to walk around and engage with an actual story. Secondly, there's a card shop so you aren't 100% reliant on ante card rewards. This also adds to the trivialization of the game but I won't complain.

I would be easier on this game but man there wasn't a whole lot to really sink my teeth into. Hell, the Yugipedia article on the game spends a whole paragraph in its opening summary about how you can't use Winged Dragon of Ra because the game does the whole 'don't return you to the menu or let you play freely' bit and you just stay stuck on the credit screen. While I didn't feel the need to beat Forbidden Memories it had immense vibes and a lot of neat feature for the time that would have kept me busy if I had kept it longer as a kid. Once you beat Marik in this game there's nothing else to go off of, no way to just keep battling or reward. It's just a really big step down engagement-wise (also visually, this game looks really clunky) from Eternal Duelist Soul. But hey, it introduced the RPG element in the family of Yugioh games for later games to iterate on, so that's neat.