This is pretty much what New Super Mario Bros. should have become after the Wii version.

To be honest more than even the wonder flowers I think my favourite part of this is just how many new enemies appeared. I swear it has the be the most amount a Mario game has introduced. And they're all so different that many levels are based entirely around how they behave.

But the wonder flower thing is great too. Providing all kinds of amusing, fun, challenging moments. Or even making things unchallenging and just letting you feel like a beast. While some ideas do show up more than once it never feels reptitive...except that one where you turn in to a slime. That's a weird one. It shows up in world 5, appears 3 times there (something no other wonder power does) and then appears AGAIN in world 6.

There's also a few times when a wonder flower activates and I just think "...this would have just been a basic level gimmick in an old game", but those are few and far between, and in general this whole focal point of the game is incredibly fun.

Like most Mario games going for 100% is almost essential for actually finding any meat in the game though. These levels feel super short when just running through them, more so than even normal. There were times when I missed a flower coin (replacement for star coins, but function the exact same) so I had to run through a level again and it took me less than a minute.

Lots of characters to play as, including mainstays like Mario, Luigi and Peach. Yellow Toad and Blue Toad return, but not regular Toad for whatever reason. Daisy is added as a playable character for the first time(?) in a mainline platformer. Then there's Yoshi (in 4 colours) and Nabbit, who act as easy mode since they can't use power ups, but don't take damage. Yoshi also has flutter jump and can swallow enemies (no eggs though) while Nabbit...actually I didn't play Nabbit to know what, if anything, his special ability was.

While I appreciate letting Yoshi act like Yoshi in exchange for not using power ups, despite no one else getting unique properties (like Luigi's higher jumping or Peach's floating), having this invincibility should have been a toggle for everyone. It makes no sense to lock certain characters behind what are basically difficulty modes.

Speaking of, badges are here to affect difficulty too! They can range from helpful like letting you float with your hat, or doing a double jump, to more mundane utility like being a coin magnet, to...actually making things harder for you? Like making you jump higher but you're ALWAYS jumping, or making you invisible. I can only assume the latter are for challenge runs. Especially being invisible. In fact there are badge stages specifically designed around what each badge can do, since obviously normal levels can't lock things with the assumption you're using a specific badge, and invisibility is literally just "Haha this platforming stuff is a lot harder when you can't see yourself".

Quick thoughts on the new power ups:
Elephant: Weird and doesn't really fit how Mario has used power-ups before, but pretty fun to use.
Bubble: Not a fan. Kind of bland.
Drill: Can be fun, provides nice protection from enemies above you, making it fairly unique, at least in this game.

There's no "easy-mode" power up like the Tanooki or Cape this time. I guess playing as Yoshi with his flutter jump and/or using certain badges does that.

I'm rambling without purpose now. The game is very fun and creative. Every level offers something new. It's just very short.

When I was younger I had 3 Yu-Gi-Oh games on DS - This one, Spirit Caller and World Championship 2007. For years I've had the opinion that Spirit Caller was my favourite. After replaying both that and this, I can say my memory did this game dirty.

Duel World mode is exactly what I want in a Yu-Gi-Oh game. It isn't really a story mode, it's sort of just maps with duel monsters that you can duel, who use a variety of decks generally focused on themselves as their key card. But what makes it great is that there's a ton of little gimmicks in each world. For example in the very first world there's a colosseum where you use structure decks (based on the ones from the real world at the time) to duel the AI with another random structure deck. It's a great way to earn the in-universe currency early on when your own deck would be lacking since you have 13 ready-made decks to use. And if you win with all 13 you get an extra reward, which is a single copy of every Amazonness card! Though admittedly that reward sets a standard not really met by any other challenge in the game. You can get cards from actions in the duel world, but it's generally just a single copy of a random card and never a full playset of an archetype. For example in one world there's a monster who is being "burned" by some fire-related card, and if you win the duel you can save him and get that card. There are chests in some maps which could contain a card (usually chest-related), fight a mimic monster, have DP (the currency of the game) or nothing. Even just winning against random duellists have a change of giving you a card related to them/their deck.

Other fun challenges in these worlds include things like duel puzzles, consecutive duels where life points carry over, having to use a monster-only deck, in one world every duel is a tag duel, and many more.

Not everything is a gimmick duel though (except tag duels in the 4th world). There's plenty of spirits around to have regular duels against, but these additional challenges are just a fun way to shake things up and get you to try out different decks.

As I said though the rewards are never as good as the colosseum makes you think they'll be. Generally they'll give you an anime character to duel in "World Championship" mode. The mode the game is named after. IN that mode you can...just kinda duel opponents and nothing else. It does eventually unlock 8-bracket tournaments, but otherwise there's no real difference from dueling here to dueling in duel world. Of course the opponents here are different (beating a spirit in DW mode 5 times unlocks an "upgraded" version of them in WC mode, so like beating Skull Servent 5 times with unlock King of Skull Servants. And as mentioned there's anime characters here who aren't in Duel World).

Depending on how much completion rating you feel like doing the game is actually super non-grindy. I think you only ever need to beat every opponent once each to get to the end. Of course unlocking more stuff will have a bit of a grind. As mentioned unlocking opponents in World Championship mode will involve beating everyone in Duel World 5 times each. Beating X opponents in WC mode unlocks packs too. You DO unlock packs every time you reach a new world so it's not like doing the bare minimum would leave you stranded with your starter deck, so it's really just rewarding the grind with more options.

Actually getting DP in this game is a little different than Spirit Caller. In the latter, along with all regular bonuses post-duel you got a big bonus every time you levelled up where you'd get DP = to your new level x 100. In this game there is no levels, so instead you get DP equal to the amount of total duels you've had divided by 10. It starts very slow but eventually you'll start getting a lot of money for every duel. However there's also a consecutive win bonus. Let me say this right now - if you want to cheese the system just save after every battle and do a reset to the menu whenever you lose a duel. You can effectively go the whole game with a full consecutive win bonus which will result in massive amounts of cash the further you get. I was too dumb to do that, but if you want to cheat your way through a 16 year old game in a very niche franchise, there's your way.

Anyway that's all I have to say. Duel World mode is fun and much better than the dragged out story modes of Nightmare Troubadour and Spirit Caller.

Addicting match 3 game with a Pokémon skin. Very minor Pokémon mechanics are added, like catching the Pokémon you defeat and type effectiveness mattering. The Pokémon are all mono-type in this to simplify things a lot, which ironically can throw you off if you know Pokémon match ups very well because you can forget if a dual type represents one or the other of its types.

Some Pokémon will also have basic effects like becoming stronger if you're at less than half health, but these seem pretty rare, and the only Pokémon that has an effect that really tries to fit the Pokémon itself is Ditto which acts as a wild card.

There are some Pokémon that needs conditions to show up in a stage, but 99% of the time it's as basic as "defeat the previous Pokémon with a high combo and/or in one hit", but sometimes it's something flavourful, like beating Eevee with a fire move to make Flareon spawn. On the other hand sometimes it makes no sense, like needing to defeat certain with their own type to make their evolution spawn (and this isn't like acting as an evolution stone like Eevee since these ones will evolve by level up).

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.

There's a lot I like about Yo-Kai Watch, like the fact it takes place on a much smaller scale than a lot of JRPG's. For example the whole game takes place in one city and its outskirts, so instead of a scaled down city that you can fully explore in 20 minutes, this one really feels like a liveable place. This also means dungeons are just stuff like old mansions, or abandoned hospitals.

The Yo-Kai themselves vary a lot in quality. They're far from my favourite set of monsters in a creature collecting game, but there's some good ones. A lot of uses of recolours though. Where they really shine in their actual role in the story, be it in the main story or in side quests that make use of their unique gimmick powers effecting the world around them. Sometimes they even act as a gameplay mechanic, like the mirror yo-kai which you can use as a fast travel system.

What I don't like about the game is the battle system. Yo-kai will attack randomly with either a physical, elemental or status move (either good things for your allies or bad for the opponent). They have those 3 moveslots and will never learn anything new. The 4th slot is the only manually activated one, which is the "soultimate", which as the name implies is an ultimate move. Since the moves are chosen at random you'll get dumb shit like a physical yo-kai using special moves, or using a status effect instead of finishing off an enemy. Each one does have a personality type that will effect which move they're more likely to choose in battle, but that only takes you so far, and you're ultimately left just watching as your creatures act like idiots.

Activating the soultimate will generally one shot most common enemies, but even this gets tedious since every time you do one you have to do a little mindless mini-game with the cutscene and there are exactly 3 different prompts. So you can expect to do these 3 tasks over and over and over, and it just becomes a pain in the ass. They're as simple as just spinning the stylus in a circle.

So generally there's little strategy actually in battle, and most of it takes place in the team building. You want a team that synergies well. Each monster has an "tribe" and if you put yo-kai of the same tribe next to each other in battle they will get a little boost to a stat depending on the tribe. You can also obviously use ones that have movesets that synergise well, such as something that has a status effect that makes a team member more likely to be targetted by enemies and a wall with huge defenses, that way your glass cannon can be more likely to survive. Only problem is, since moves are all chosen at random I don't know if the AI is even smart enough to have the status effect be put on the wall and not the glass cannon (I have to give them the benefit of the doubt here since I never tried anything like that).

Bosses are definitely where the game shines. Since these battles take much longer you can't just end them with one soultimate. Even using all 6 of your team members at the start of the battle will likely only do around 20% of the total HP, then for the rest of the fight you're constantly micromanaging your members health bars, reviving dead ones, and "purifying" them when they get a negative status effect (this involves moving them out of rotation and playing a similar touch screen game to rid them of the effect). All the while finding chances to use the soultimates again once they've recharged. It doesn't matter that your yo-kai attack by themselves in these battles because you as the player are left with so much to do just keeping them alive. Also the bosses will have different areas you can target to take advantage of weak points, like blinding a giants eyes so his accuracy is lowered, or attacking hearts in the background of the fight so the boss can't use them to heal.

Perhaps my least favourite thing about the game is the horrendous RNG when it comes to befriending yo-kai. You have a random chance to get one of the 3 yo-kai you defeat in a battle to walk up to you at the end and ask to join you. There's some ways you can improve the chance, like having a team member with a specific skill, and using the enemies favourite food on them (which have different tiers). But even when you use all of the tools in your arsenal, using the highest possible rarity of food that is a particular enemies favourite (which by the way you'll have no way of knowing without a guide or trial and error) you can still fail dozens of times in a row. Like even AFTER you boost the chances it feels like throwing a pokéball at a legendary when its at full health, it's just that bad. It's even worse when you throw food at one yo-kai, only to have a different yo-kai you didn't want be the one to approach you at the end.

So yeah, cool vibes, a lot of side content and things to do, a decent, though heavily mixed, bag of monster designs, but a battle system that's boring outside of boss battles and an RNG system that makes trying to get what you want extremely frustrating.

At least it has monster fusing which is something I've wanted out of Pokémon for ages.

As the only official way to play the Rush Duel format for players outside of Japan this game is somewhat of a requirement for anyone with any interest in experiencing it.

My opinion on Rush Duels themselves is that they are OK. They're not as good as my favourite era of Yu-Gi-Oh, which is kind of late GX era, but they're much better than the clusterfuck that Yu-Gi-Oh is today. While combos aren't completely removed, there's far less focus on letting players spend 10 minute turns activating effect after effect, since spells and traps are simplified massively (no chains even exist) and every monster effect is once per turn. Being able to mass summon every monster in your hand per turn is interesting, as it means lower level monsters have a somewhat less important role since they tend to get sacrificed instantly, but you still need more than enough to not brick into a hand of tribute-only monsters.

Drawing up to a brand new hand of 5 every turn allowed duels to become very swingy. Every single turn you and your opponent get a brand new hand with no penalty for using all your cards, and no restrictions on summoning per turn, it is very hard to build up an unbeatable board. Sometimes you'll even use a monsters effect which has a cost to discard a card from your hand even when you don't need to just so you can draw an extra card next turn.

This format did have some very notable flaws though. Since you can summon as many monsters as you want, I found it was way too easy to just set 3 defense monsters every turn, meaning even if they have a full board of unbeatable monsters, unless they have piercing or position changing effects, you can wall them completely (this will lead to you decking out faster though so it's not a perfect plan, but it's great for stalling a few turns).

The maximum monsters are a neat concept exclusive to this format. Combine 3 specific cards Exodia-style, but instead of instantly winning, they form on the field together to create one super-monster, with the effects of all 3. It is only allowed to attack once per turn though, so it's even easier to stall against without the right cards to let you pierce or change opponents monsters to attack position. Also I think there's only 3 of them in the entire game, 2 of which are post-game exclusive.

One of the most disappointing things about the game is the lack of card variety. There's just over 350 in the whole game, many of which are locked behind post-game packs (2 of 6 total packs). That's less than the games that were coming out on GBA... I know it was a new format at the time, but why not just wait for more releases if you barely have enough to fill a game?

I will say though this game does utilise its cards much better than early main game Yu-Gi-Oh. While the real game focused heavily on generic beatdown with flexible staple cards, the cards in this game all seem focused on running a specific type of monster. Sometimes you'll get even more specific card themes, like 0 atk monsters, or normal monsters. You get very few spell and traps that can be thrown in to any deck, as most of them have requirements to only fit a specific focus of cards.

Having said that, I found the original starter deck to be so strong that I never really switched it at all. It's a spellcaster deck and contains 3 copies of a mirror force-esque card specific to spellcasters. As far as I remember, almost no other types had a card like this, making it way too good to pass up for another type of deck. Also there's no main phase 2 in this game, so if your opponents board is wiped out by the trap they'll be completely defenceless on your turn, outside of any traps they set themselves (and as mentioned most, if any, decks outside of spellcasters do not have any traps that can wipe a board).

The game does have a weird thing where until the post-game you can't actually edit your own deck. You can only use deck recipes which are taken when winning duels or bought from the shop. Not that it mattered to me since, like I said, the starter deck was so powerful I never really felt the need to grind out cards for other decks anyway.

Also that's technically a lie, you can unlock deck editing early by standing in a very specific spot and entering the Konami code. You'd never think to do this unless you looked it up online though. I actually did do it, but I still only ever used the feature to make tiny changes to the starting spellcaster deck along the way lol. Getting enough cards to even make a good deck for other types is tough with the limited card pool, even ignoring the fact the first deck gives you triple of one of the best traps in the game that only works in that deck.

One other thing that makes deck building a pain in the ass is the lack of a search bar. You can filter a lot of stuff which works for monsters, but trying to wade through all the spells and traps for the ones that work for specific types is just annoying. Just let me search cards that mention "Dragon" or "Machine", c'mon. Or hell, let me filter spell/traps and type at the same time to only get spells and traps that work with specific types.

As far as the game outside the Rush Duels themselves go, I don't like it. The performance when walking around the world was choppy as hell, and the characters, based on the anime which I haven't seen, are all extremely annoying and one dimensional.

The presentation in duels is fine, but he cards don't get full 3D models on the field like the DS games, they just have their artwork blown up as a static png. If the card artwork only shows the upperbody, that's all it will show on the screen. Kind of lazy, but better than most modern Yu-Gi-Oh games which don't show any kind of monster coming out of the cards when on the field.

At least all 2-tribute monsters (and some 1 tribute ones) get a full animated cutscene when being summoned, which luckily can be turned off if you want.

Also while I don't let the prices of games affect my ratings for them, there's no way this game is worth the asking price. Get it on sale if you're going to get it at all.

This was the first Zelda game I ever beat way back when. I remembered so little of it that I couldn't even remember how much I liked it or not, so this was less of a "does it still hold up" and more of a "was it even good?". Turns out, it's very good.

I love the art style of this game, it's so vibrant and colourful. The shrinking mechanic also leads to some incredible pixel art when you end up in "close up" view so regular items are drawn as towering over you. Even when not in a close up view, I love how Link is just a few pixels on the screen, with the indicator of where he is by a speech bubble with Links head in it.

It's a relatively small world, but it's packed with so much content, so many secrets, so many reasons to re-explore old areas with new items that it doesn't waste a single bit of the small size.

I'm a big fan of the dungeons and item selection in this game too.

My only real issue with the game is that they didn't let you assign an item to the L button, meaning you have exactly 2 buttons for all of your items - one of which is your sword so realistically you're working with only 1 spare button most of the time. Luckily switching items from the menu is very fast and it never felt pace-breaking to me; I just find it weird they had an entire other button to use and just ignored it.

Some of the things for 100% are also tedious. The figurine "quest" is a very slow, very grindy process. Then there's the Kinstone fusions, an idea I love with how they can give you more heart pieces, expand the world by adding characters to areas, or even progress little plotlines of their own. But they stuffed too many of them in, and as a result a lot of kinstone fusions just lead to more kinstones which is like the epitome of padding.

If the measure of how good a game is depends on how much they have Baby Luigi doing the monkey as his idle pose, there's an argument to be made for this being the best game of all time.

For real though I think it's a bit weaker than its predecessor. The Mario fanservice and references have been toned down heavily. I guess there wasn't much new material to work with between the release of that game and this one.

It's the same battle system as before, which I love. Having all enemy attacks able to be either countered or dodged, with specific tells for which bro they're aiming their attack at is such a good mechanic that turns every basic battle into a kind of game in and of itself. And every new location you go to will give new enemies with new moves that you have to try and adapt to as fast as possible to ensure a clean run of the area.

Speaking of the locations, just like Super Star Saga, I really liked the ones in this game. Considering most of the platformer games in this series play it super safe with level themes, this and the last game have had some truly standout scenery for the Mario world.

this game is a lot more linear than the first. While that game was technically linear too, it was an actual full interconnected world and allowed a lot more freedom of the overworld before it blocked you off with a required ability. This game has Peach's castle be the hub while every single quest-area is accessed through portals. Whether intentional or not it is a pretty neat reference to Super Mario 64 if nothing else.

What makes it worse though is how it tricks you with a more open adventure. After the first couple of areas you visit, suddenly a bunch of portals open at once... except you'll quickly find if you enter any of them except the required one, you're immediately blocked off from doing anything before you can even talk to an NPC in that area. They're essentially just setting up exit points back to the castle to those locations for when you reach them via the story. Kind of a tease.

Last time one of my big problems was how the game tried to shove way too many field commands into A and B at once, resulting in way too much micro managing of your skills which constantly led to accidently using the wrong thing, or scrolling past the 1 of 4 sets of skills you can have on screen. This game kind of fixes that while introducing a new problem. See, with the DS having 2 extra buttons it'd make sense to have A and B always be jump, and X and Y be one of the bros special moves, able to switch just those with R like before. But with the introduction of the babies they take ownership of these new buttons (remember how in SSS every single Mario action was A and every Luigi one was B? That was kept, so the babies are now X and Y). They do at least give the babies their own actions, so it's spread out across the four face buttons. In fact they even trim the command list by removing the elemental attributes from Mario and Luigi, leaving all 4 characters with exactly 1 special skill and their basic jump commands. Works out pretty well - except the babies are by default always riding on the older versions back, so every time you want to use any skill you need to throw them off. You wanna use Luigi's spin move? Well first you need to press X or Y to throw the babies, which will automatically transfer control to them, so then you need to press A or B to put it back to adult Mario & Luigi, then press R to switch from jump commands to special commands, and now you can use the spin. It's just annoying they added this extra step when the babies show they are perfectly capable of moving around the world by themselves. I think the game would be a lot smoother if they just had a 4-person train, only needing to give piggyback rides to the babies to get up higher jumps.

This also applies for battles. Why are the babies relegated to sitting on their partners back when they show multiple times they're more than able to fight by themselves? Their stats outside of power and stache (luck) don't even apply in most non-baby-only battle unless the older bro faints, leaving the baby to step in as an extra life. However I do kind of get this one, as only the babies have hammers now, so it might be hard to think up ways for enemies whose moves can be countered with hammers to not be unfair on the older counterparts who don't have them.

My least favourite change of the game is the swap between bros moves to bros items though. In terms of them being a limited resource that's actually completely fine. The game gives you more than enough of every item without you ever even needing to buy them, which itself is always an option. I also even like actually using them, as each one is essentially it's own mini-game, and the extra buttons can often be used in smart ways, such as the shell items which normally have Mario and Luigi kicking them back and forth between it hitting an enemy. A simple concept, but a baby rides the shell and if you press the babies button when the shell hits the enemy it deals extra damage. I like the idea idea.
But they're just so horribly balanced. On one hand you get some items which are better versions than older ones, like red shells that do more damage than green shells, while also not stopping if they defeat one enemy, and start attacking the next one. These are fine. They do make the first item redundant, but as a concept having an "upgrade" version of an item is fine.

To demonstrate this, let's look at 4 (out of only 10 total) items.
Firstly there's the Cannonballer. It shoots all 4 characters into the sky at one enemy and they all fall onto the enemy in a random order - press their corresponding button as they land and deal big damage. Nice and simple.

Then there's the direct upgrade from this - the trampoline. It does more or less the same thing, except it targets all enemies (a random one is chosen each time a character drops) and it goes on forever, progressively getting faster, until you miss a button input.

All well and good! Then there's the Chain Chomp item which actually comes between these 2. It's another "lasts forever and gets faster until you miss an input". In it the adults will run across the screen one at a time being chased by a Chain Chomp, while the baby rides on the back of the chomp by the tail. Press the adult brothers button to jump on the enemy, and press the babies to swing a hammer for a bit of extra damage. It's a fine concept but a bit redundant isn't it? It's just doing more basic jump damage. It can't really do anything that the trampoline can't do, even with the fact the babies use hammers because if you use it on a spiked enemy the first jump will fail and the move will end.

Then there's the copy flower which you get AFTER the trampoline. In it all the bros, adult and baby, create an infinite amount of copies of themselves and it's yet another "jump on an enemy until you miss a prompt". But while the trampoline has one character falling from the top screen at a time, this move has multiple of the characters running from left to right, making it much harder to keep track of AND the damage even seems to be less per hit. So what's the point? Why would I ever use the copy flower which just has me jumping on the enemy in a much harder to track pattern than the trampoline which also just has me jumping on the enemy, in a much easier to follow pattern? And if you miss a prompt for the copy flower it insta-ends the move, while if you do for the trampoline it let's you still attack with the remaining 3 brothers as they fall down. So why is this one of the last items you unlock? It's so stupid and I want answers!

Ok other than that it's a great game.

Not too bad, but nothing special. Each world/zone brings about a new gimmick which gets used in increasing difficulty for 5 or so levels before entering the next zone and getting another new gimmick to play with. For the most part the game is pretty easy due to the fact it keeps balancing itself around having to use at least 1 level per zone just to teach the player a new mechanic. Though I didn't try the post-game levels which is where I imagine the true challenge lies.

Kind of concerned how they managed to stretch this into 3 sequels.

It's basically a level pack for Peggle. It's a little disappointing just how little has changed. But first I'll say that I think this one does better in regards to the level themes. The game takes place in the dreams of the Peggle masters, and each one is centered around a different thing, with the majority of them even telling a story. This doesn't just help keep the levels more unified, but the peg placement felt so much better entwined with the backgrounds. In the last game the background had some cool art, but for the most part the pegs felt at best lazily placed around the objects in the picture, or at worst just slapped haphazardly all over the spot. But in this one not only has every background being more carefully chosen to fit a story, but the pegs feel carefully placed, with some pretty neat details, like a bowling ball rolling down the alley is circled by moving pegs (the ball itself is stationary, it's just that the pegs kind of emulate what the movement would be like).

Unfortunately it doesn't actually introduce any new ways to shake things up. It definitely does a way better job crafting its levels, but it doesn't throw in anything that we hadn't actually seen.

There's literally only 1 new master which you unlock at the very end. Every other master plays exactly the same, which is a missed opportunity. Since these take place in dreams, it would have been cool if they got new powers that either fit in with their dream topic, or allowed their usual powers to be superpowered. The latter would need some rebalancing of levels to not make them as easy, but at least it'd be fun and new.

It's also kind of disappointing that there aren't even any new kinds of pegs.

I'm still giving it a 9, because at the end of the day, despite being disappointing as a sequel, it's a tiny improvement on Peggle, an amazing game. I think the best time to play it would be if you haven't played the original Peggle for a while (if at all) and get that itch to play again, well now you can play again with new levels. Going straight from one to another will feel like one long game, which may be exactly what you want to be fair.

With this being the first DS Yu-Gi-Oh game, it was also, I think, the first game that had sprites of the monsters on screen when they were on the field, an aspect that continued for most, if not all, DS Yu-Gi-Oh games. I always loved this, and it's such a shame that even the most modern games don't do it.

As far as gameplay goes it's a very grindy game. You're kinda just forced to repeat duel the same opponents over and over until a plot thread shows up randomly. You don't get much currency per duel to unlock packs, so getting enough cards to try new decks is a slow process. There is a decent selection of cards at least, it's not my favourite stage of Yu-Gi-Oh! (which is around 2008-2010ish), and actual card archetypes are lacking, but there's enough in here to make decks on specific themes, whether that be monster attributes, types or even ideas such as burn or more interesting ideas I can't properly implement like forcing opponents to ram their cards into a high attack monster. Plus some specific cards will have enough support to build a deck around, like Dark Magician.

Unfortunately along with a slow progress of currency the way card packs work means that cards needed to make any deck are usually split into at least 2, if not more, packs, and they're usually spread pretty far apart. For example the first Toon cards you can get are in pack you get by finishing a story event you'll be about level 8-10 for. The second pack of Toon cards doesn't unlock until level 14 - which doesn't seem like a big jump, but there's quite a lot of duels between levels (you'll finish the game around level 18). This kind of thing will just happen all the time - unlock some pieces of a deck in one pack, then wait a long time to actually be able to unlock enough cards to make the deck usable.

There were a couple of duels that implemented something interesting to their mechanics. The building you're in is about to explode and you have a timer to win the duel, but instead of a literal timer it's a turn timer, and specifically the card "Final Countdown" is automatically played at the start of the duel. It's a fun way to use card gimmicks as in-game mechanics. It just doesn't show up nearly often enough, meaning the majority of story battles are just regular duels. Well, technically a lot of them are shadow duels, but shadow duels happen randomly outside of the story too when you run into a bad guy at night. If you lose a shadow duel you get an instant game over, so it just encourages saving often.

What you want from this game will more or less determine how good it is for you. Do you want to relive 2005 Yu-Gi-Oh against a set list of AI opponents over and over while slowly being able to make new decks? Then it's a pretty good game. Do you want a game with a rich story, fast progression and ability to make any deck you want as fast as possible? Bad game. I actually went in to it both expecting and kind of wanting the former, and I was still somewhat disappointed just because I felt the grind was too much. Like I'm fine dueling AI opponents a few times, but they could have easily cut the game time in half while doubling the amount of currency you get, thus leading to less needing to face the same people repetitively and more chances to make fun decks. The post game is just basically an infinite amount of dueling who you want and unlocking more and more cards, so there's no real reason to hide the credits behind so much of this exact thing.