The faster gameplay and more focused story mode (taking a good chunk of GX's story) make this a big step up from Nightmare Troubadour. But it still shares some issues with things like packs being too random with no way to make a deck outside of generic beatdown until at least half way through the game. It's weird that at a certain point packs start packaging obvious synergy cards that can make a deck, even if not a good one, like Dark Scorpions, while early packs are just "here's some normal monsters". And yet the strong spells and traps like Mirror Force are also thrown into these early packs.

You'll also be expected to face the same few opponents over and over, though that does make the unique story ones more exciting. They do also weirdly make some characters inaccessible to duel for way too long though. Why is Jaden of all people only faced in like 3 story-specific duels until the post game? Why do characters like the gym teacher require you to get a decent chunk of the way through the game before she'll duel you, despite showing up on the map way earlier, meaning she'll only serve to waste time every time you interact with her (which will be often as you can't tell who a person is on the map until you register them, which you can only do by duelling them a few times).

An enjoyable experience overall for the Yu-Gi-Oh time period though, and even if it takes a while to be able to make themed decks, the AI provide a chance to use decks that would never work on human players.

The spirit mechanic is great in theory, but somewhat ruined by them being very rare to find (especially when characters like Banner constantly pop up and waste your time) and even rarer to actually recruit. I only ended up recruiting a single one other than the starter one in the well.