Japan OCG: July 2001
NA TCG: March 2003
(Pre- "Joey-Pegasus" format)
Another good simulation of the Yu-Gi-Oh format at that point in the series, although it's held back slightly by the delay of getting new cards from the updated card list. Labyrinth of Nightmare isn't the most groundbreaking of packs with regards to the Yu-Gi-Oh meta, however it contained a handful of neat additions and themes that would have been nice to experiment with if these cards didn't take a while to obtain. At the very least, there's not necessarily a main goal or so much as a story to really gauge where you should be at- it's fundamentally the most open YuGiOh game to date and would have been the perfect game to have on car trips/vacations, with the usual chunk of neat packs to open but also a lot of extra goodies to unlock and achieve through grinds. Really the only 'end-game' (and when I decided to put the game down) was when the 'Pyramid Puzzle' event concluded, the only real story even to occur that mirrors the Marik/Card Hunter section of Battle City, but doesnt go past that into finals or any major tournament or anything. Beating this just unlocks a few more features like allowing once randomly encountered card hunters to be fought more easily on the map, a new tournament type and a new completion status element appears at the top of your options menu, filling out symbols once you achieve feats such as opening every type of pack, obtaining every card, beating a tournament 10 times, etc. Otherwise the game continues the same, with no other end goal. Mainly the game consists of you traversing a map screen with several districts, populated by random citizens to talk to and duelists to battle. Every action taken moves the player to that district and allows them to see the adjacent districts, but also moves the day forward. The only things distinguishing the days are Saturdays hold tournaments in a random district and Sundays will always give a free weekly pack of 5 cards. Otherwise it's off to the races, duel as much as you want.
Much like Eternal Duelist Soul, you are given the choice between 3 decks (although the actual contents is determined by several pools of random cards), and just like EDS this doesnt skimp out on the good stuff. Depending on which of the 3 decks, you're given the same amount of cards but 5 cards are different out of 3 colors, each color having two pools of 5 cards to fill the gap. Most of these 5 cards are extremely powerful and relate to the color of the deck: green is good spells, black is monsters and red is traps. Before I knew the card pools I picked the green deck and found myself grabbing maybe one of the best pools as it contained Pot of Greed, Snatch Steal, Nobleman of Crossout, Premature Burial and Harpie's Feather Duster. Other cards in the pools include the San-Witch combo, Jinzo, all 5 Exodia pieces, Torrential Tribute, Imperial Order, Mirror Force Bell(??? not called Ring oddly) of Destruction, Upstart Goblin and Swords of Revealing Light. Doing the math, EDS has a bit more variability but still give you a ton of power cards, but SDD's main 35 cards still contain a ton of power cards, including Graceful Charity and MST.
In general the 'good stuff' cards you can get are way easier to obtain, which is nice but can completely steamroll a lot of the competition early on. I didn't go without losing a few times, but you can easily make a meta deck that trounces most of the cast. I'm glad that the decks begin as good as they do, and the opponents aren't immediately weak, but after the first chunk of the game (lets say after 20 battles) your deck can have most everything you need to counter most everyone else. Probably the best way to go through the game is to save clearly stronger opponents for later- however my idea was to just battle each opponent in a row so that they all had the same level of victories at a time, then beat them a 10th time all in a row and unlock the Destiny Board pack, which includes most of the . Mako, Rex and Weevil are probably the easiest with Tea, Grandpa following ahead and the rest having a solid line-up of counters and range of strong offense/defense. There is a better sense of flexibility here, and if you lose a couple of times then Mokuba appears in the world map to act as a noob-friendly fight as none of his cards really top higher than 1400 attack and his AI doesn't seem to understand card effects, so this can serve as a means to earn easy packs, but he's not exactly an engaging duelist. Overall the curve is slightly better, as I do recall Eternal Duelist Soul having pretty competent duels right out the gate in the first wave of duelists with only those 5 to pick from- whereas this has several more opponents ranging in difficulty to pick, and an 'easy mode' to fall back on. That said it does begin to plateau once you've fought each fighter a few times, so I kinda wish the duelists evolved and changed their strategies after a while. Maybe have X duelist have an additional strategy they could load up after you win Y times against X duelist (eg have Mako's 'penguin soldier/'flip-centric' strategy lean more into that at first but after 5 wins turn into a standard beatdown with Umi? not sure). Rather it seems like most duelists use a combination of two strategies that aren't incoherent but don't exactly have a solid win-condition. Funny enough I think the clearest two win-cons in the game come from Kaiba which makes sense and Tea of all duelists? I saw her Fusion sage and get out her Joan way more than a few times and it didn't seem like other duelists had such a plan. It is funny how certain characters have their own strategies that can be easily countered, though. Using Kaiba as an example: he would be this ultra scary boss, utilizing Cyber-Stein to pay 5000 LP to bring out Blue Eyes Ultimate turn 1, towering over any conventional monsters and jumping further in tempo than the other characters do. That said this is such a hilariously easy strategy to read and counter, his only backrow is usually a 'Negate Attack' or 'Mirror Force' which isn't that scary as this allows you to either Snatch Steal, Change of Heart (even funnier than SS since Kaiba pays the 5000 for BEUD but the difference in you stealing and attacking with BEUD against the leftover Cyber Stein kills him), Trap Hole, Dark Hole, Copycat, Raigeki, Man-Eater Bug, etc. the threat away. The amount of removal that just deflates this strategy is hilarious. Genuinely, Joey is a much harder opponent in this regard since he often carries a wider arrange of spells and traps.
To try and differentiate from the prior Eternal Duelist Soul strategy, I tried to think of a different goal from the hand control I utilized then. Unfortunately there's not as many great options at disposal as 'Good Stuff' medley. GOAT format hasn't fully matured and there's a lot of strategies that only come into play a few packs later. Labyrinth of Nightmare contains most notably the mask spell/traps, and the 'Destiny Board' cards. The former being a series of equip spells and traps that contain a variety of buffs, debuffs, battle tricks or control options, while the latter is an alt win conditions that procs once the player plays all 5 destiny board cards in the backrow and spells 'F-I-N-A-L' (or D-E-A-T-H in jp). This pack also contains the 'Revival Jam' cards that was most notable in the anime for Yugi's victory against a seemingly impenetrable defense (Sadly Lava Golem isn't out until later). Unfortunately none of these strategies are really that notable outside of the anime. In reality the best Labyrinth of Nightmare cards are actually pretty underrated, or otherwise didn't become staples until much later. Cards really begin to see a shift toward utilizing the graveyard as a source of power and the banish pile as the true final destination for cards. Monsters like Bazoo the Soul Eater and Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer boast a strong 1800 atk but really benefit having abilities that banishes your cards for a buff or sends opponents GY cards to the banish pile, respectively. The pack also contains Gemini Elf but she's been in games since Dark Duel Stories which is really fucking with my perception of how these cards are released, only compounded by me not realizing Ring of Destruction also wasn't released until a few packs later in the TCG. Torrential Tribute being a board wipe upon summon, Magic Cylinder being a redirect of battle damage, and the large equip totals you can reach with Mage Power or United We Stand (see Maha Vailo), are pretty notable releases in the pack. Along with these are other infamous such as: Gilasaurus which would eventually help bolster the 'Magical Scientist FTK', Amazoness Archer which can do burn damage multiple times a turn for tributing 2 monsters (only banned in OCG), Jowgen the Spiritualist, which became a standard in Spellbook decks and helped get 'Last Turn' banned, and Card of Safe Return, which allows a draw if you Special Summon from grave (not once per turn??? of course its banned). Above all else though this game would have been a must buy if you were a duelist, as the game came bundled in with cards- but not just any cards. Valkyrion is a neat boss monster for the magnet warriors but nothing too special, Sinister Serpent is deceptively powerful as 'discard' fodder as it returns from the GY to the hand each turn, and Harpie Feather Duster is a must-have, destroying all spell and traps on the opponents side, a staple that continues to see play (or at least side deck rep) today. Overall the card additions to SDD are pretty solid, but much of the standout cards take a while to grab or aren't the most explosive. Still, Labyrinth of Nightmare and this game do mark a pivotal shift in the metagame and way cards function.
The main issue is just that I look into the typical decks by the end of GOAT format, and much is still missing by this point in YGO, we still haven't gotten to the Gravekeepers, the Chaos cards, PAC-MAN, pure Hand control, Umi beatdown, Zombies, Monarchs and other finalized decks in GOAT format by the end of 2005. I guess you can do Clown Control, Last Warrior lock-out, and some other neat decks but much of the deck building still falls on very proto-thematic philosophies where the best deck is still a 'Beatdown' deck but maybe with a specific flavor of a given attribute. Each subsequent pack still gives the same amount of 'good' cards from this point on (mostly, kinda) so this isn't the fault of the game or the distribution of cards but I do plan as later games (given that all other variables remain positive) begin to have larger times gaps between releases and more booster sets fill out the pool, will just get better as the access to more variety will incentivize more kinds of playstyles and in a sense, replayability. Sidenote, why is mystic tomato so hard to find? There's a lot of cards like these that seemed pretty essential during the meta around this time and Tomato has yet to really show up in my playthroughs despite stuff like Sangan and Witch being pretty easy to snag in this game. All three of these are some of the strongest 'recruiters' (ie cards that pull another card from the deck according to a given criteria, such as any monster with less than 1500 atk/def or have 'dark' attribute). It's just fairly odd to not see it at all in the game during my playthrough not in any pack early on nor in any opponent's deck (afaik), but Shining Justice (the light attr. equivalent) and Giant Rat (the earth attr.) are pretty par for the course. The card is only available once you reach 10000 duelist points, which isn't difficult but was about where I put the game down. It does get me thinking about how the strategy and thought about the meta has evolved over time; was Mystic Tomato considered superior over several other cards in the meta, even other staples? I do know about certain battling philosophies such as Solemn Judgment not being as universally played due to a mindset where the 'pay half your current LP' condition was deemed too risky. Maybe the self-replacing 'pull from deck to field upon destruction' was considered more lucrative than Witch/Sangan's more broader but perhaps slower 'pull from deck to hand' effect? Very interesting/perplexing to think about, especially since the latter cards were more limited on the banlist at the time anyway. Also funny to think about how many of the much harder and grindier packs to get contain cards that aren't really all that good, just kinda fan-servicey or subpar. At the end of the day at least, most cards are available anyway through the password system, but I do try to avoid that myself. By the end of the game much of my deck looked similar to how I left EDS, although I did try to swap in a few different flavors here and there to spice things up, like Toll/Chain Energy burn (terrible idea), Clown Control (very impractical when incomplete) and Maha Vailo. Maha Vailo is a very funny card, gaining an additional 500 attack points for each equip spell attached to it, including stuff like Premature Burial. A Premature Burial Maha Vailo on top of Sword of Dark Seated and Axe of Despair turns a 1550 attack card into a 3050 and then its effect puts it to a whopping 4550, and this isn't the worst it can get. Sadly, Mage Power and United We Stand are fairly late in the game to get, otherwise I would have run as much as I could. I wish Ben Kei was available to create this juggernaut of an equip spell deck, but alas.
I also wish there was an actual calendar or any way to see how many weeks have passed. You can only tell what day it is but there's no other measurement of what time has passed, and certain packs and events go off a weekly timer as to when you first see them, like the KC Cup. Trying to find tournament locations and proc events such as the Card Hunter encounters can be kinda odd as I swear its only in one corner of the map and might take a week or two after the warning announcement to pop up. In this regard its kind of hard to get a feeling as to how you actually progress into the Pyramid Puzzle quest, especially when I encounter Lumis and Umbra twice but it didn't seem like a different encounter. Of course, this is in reference to a duo during the Battle City arc this is based off of and you can't really fight two duelists at the same time so it could have been a fight against Lumis and then Umbra but as two separate card hunter encounters? I'm wasn't sure at first, the dialogue and play-style didn't seem any different. It only took me a while to find out that certain townspeople will appear as Rare Hunters. I had figured these encounters were based off a random encounter, but you'd fight each member in a set order from Strings to L&U to Exodia guy to Arkana to Odion, etc. Nah, actually I found Arkana last despite Odion being like a second in command for Marik, very weird and I'm glad I realized that sooner than later because I didn't talk to any towns person between then and the start of the game.
The tournaments are kinda hard to find at times, but they're a neat function once you do find one on a Saturday. I still don't entirely think the side deck is necessary against any of these opponents but its still neat you can set one up just in case you have a specific but flawed strategy in mind and need potential backups in a best of 3 format. More interestingly I think are the 'Target' weeks where you're asked to seek out two specific duelists that are given to you and beat them for a special pack. This is a neat idea, and got me to understand the kind of patterns that each of these duelists follow. What does confuse me is that there's supposedly interruptions that can happen if two duelists are on the same district on the map? I tried seeing what I could get but each duelist was matched already to a certain combination. Tea was always in the same area as Bakura, Kaiba was usually alone or with Ishizu, Joey was usually alone, Yugi was usually alone, etc. I don't know if that's a case of me playing the game onVBA or what.
Overall it's slightly better than the Eternal Duelist Soul, but only by a slight degree. It's got more cards and a lot of the best cards are extremely easy to get once you know what packs have what, but because of this much of the later chunks of the game feel like a grind. Originally I was gonna place this about similarly to EDS but the lack of any major story kinda just frees you to do anything, at your own pace. Once I realized this, I figured this would actually be an excellent game to have had as a kid or on a long trip, definitely has that 'On a deserted island' feel. It's not as big a jump in card pool as I had hoped, but all things considered it's an improved game and better intro to the card game than Eternal Duelist Soul.
NA TCG: March 2003
(Pre- "Joey-Pegasus" format)
Another good simulation of the Yu-Gi-Oh format at that point in the series, although it's held back slightly by the delay of getting new cards from the updated card list. Labyrinth of Nightmare isn't the most groundbreaking of packs with regards to the Yu-Gi-Oh meta, however it contained a handful of neat additions and themes that would have been nice to experiment with if these cards didn't take a while to obtain. At the very least, there's not necessarily a main goal or so much as a story to really gauge where you should be at- it's fundamentally the most open YuGiOh game to date and would have been the perfect game to have on car trips/vacations, with the usual chunk of neat packs to open but also a lot of extra goodies to unlock and achieve through grinds. Really the only 'end-game' (and when I decided to put the game down) was when the 'Pyramid Puzzle' event concluded, the only real story even to occur that mirrors the Marik/Card Hunter section of Battle City, but doesnt go past that into finals or any major tournament or anything. Beating this just unlocks a few more features like allowing once randomly encountered card hunters to be fought more easily on the map, a new tournament type and a new completion status element appears at the top of your options menu, filling out symbols once you achieve feats such as opening every type of pack, obtaining every card, beating a tournament 10 times, etc. Otherwise the game continues the same, with no other end goal. Mainly the game consists of you traversing a map screen with several districts, populated by random citizens to talk to and duelists to battle. Every action taken moves the player to that district and allows them to see the adjacent districts, but also moves the day forward. The only things distinguishing the days are Saturdays hold tournaments in a random district and Sundays will always give a free weekly pack of 5 cards. Otherwise it's off to the races, duel as much as you want.
Much like Eternal Duelist Soul, you are given the choice between 3 decks (although the actual contents is determined by several pools of random cards), and just like EDS this doesnt skimp out on the good stuff. Depending on which of the 3 decks, you're given the same amount of cards but 5 cards are different out of 3 colors, each color having two pools of 5 cards to fill the gap. Most of these 5 cards are extremely powerful and relate to the color of the deck: green is good spells, black is monsters and red is traps. Before I knew the card pools I picked the green deck and found myself grabbing maybe one of the best pools as it contained Pot of Greed, Snatch Steal, Nobleman of Crossout, Premature Burial and Harpie's Feather Duster. Other cards in the pools include the San-Witch combo, Jinzo, all 5 Exodia pieces, Torrential Tribute, Imperial Order, Mirror Force Bell(??? not called Ring oddly) of Destruction, Upstart Goblin and Swords of Revealing Light. Doing the math, EDS has a bit more variability but still give you a ton of power cards, but SDD's main 35 cards still contain a ton of power cards, including Graceful Charity and MST.
In general the 'good stuff' cards you can get are way easier to obtain, which is nice but can completely steamroll a lot of the competition early on. I didn't go without losing a few times, but you can easily make a meta deck that trounces most of the cast. I'm glad that the decks begin as good as they do, and the opponents aren't immediately weak, but after the first chunk of the game (lets say after 20 battles) your deck can have most everything you need to counter most everyone else. Probably the best way to go through the game is to save clearly stronger opponents for later- however my idea was to just battle each opponent in a row so that they all had the same level of victories at a time, then beat them a 10th time all in a row and unlock the Destiny Board pack, which includes most of the . Mako, Rex and Weevil are probably the easiest with Tea, Grandpa following ahead and the rest having a solid line-up of counters and range of strong offense/defense. There is a better sense of flexibility here, and if you lose a couple of times then Mokuba appears in the world map to act as a noob-friendly fight as none of his cards really top higher than 1400 attack and his AI doesn't seem to understand card effects, so this can serve as a means to earn easy packs, but he's not exactly an engaging duelist. Overall the curve is slightly better, as I do recall Eternal Duelist Soul having pretty competent duels right out the gate in the first wave of duelists with only those 5 to pick from- whereas this has several more opponents ranging in difficulty to pick, and an 'easy mode' to fall back on. That said it does begin to plateau once you've fought each fighter a few times, so I kinda wish the duelists evolved and changed their strategies after a while. Maybe have X duelist have an additional strategy they could load up after you win Y times against X duelist (eg have Mako's 'penguin soldier/'flip-centric' strategy lean more into that at first but after 5 wins turn into a standard beatdown with Umi? not sure). Rather it seems like most duelists use a combination of two strategies that aren't incoherent but don't exactly have a solid win-condition. Funny enough I think the clearest two win-cons in the game come from Kaiba which makes sense and Tea of all duelists? I saw her Fusion sage and get out her Joan way more than a few times and it didn't seem like other duelists had such a plan. It is funny how certain characters have their own strategies that can be easily countered, though. Using Kaiba as an example: he would be this ultra scary boss, utilizing Cyber-Stein to pay 5000 LP to bring out Blue Eyes Ultimate turn 1, towering over any conventional monsters and jumping further in tempo than the other characters do. That said this is such a hilariously easy strategy to read and counter, his only backrow is usually a 'Negate Attack' or 'Mirror Force' which isn't that scary as this allows you to either Snatch Steal, Change of Heart (even funnier than SS since Kaiba pays the 5000 for BEUD but the difference in you stealing and attacking with BEUD against the leftover Cyber Stein kills him), Trap Hole, Dark Hole, Copycat, Raigeki, Man-Eater Bug, etc. the threat away. The amount of removal that just deflates this strategy is hilarious. Genuinely, Joey is a much harder opponent in this regard since he often carries a wider arrange of spells and traps.
To try and differentiate from the prior Eternal Duelist Soul strategy, I tried to think of a different goal from the hand control I utilized then. Unfortunately there's not as many great options at disposal as 'Good Stuff' medley. GOAT format hasn't fully matured and there's a lot of strategies that only come into play a few packs later. Labyrinth of Nightmare contains most notably the mask spell/traps, and the 'Destiny Board' cards. The former being a series of equip spells and traps that contain a variety of buffs, debuffs, battle tricks or control options, while the latter is an alt win conditions that procs once the player plays all 5 destiny board cards in the backrow and spells 'F-I-N-A-L' (or D-E-A-T-H in jp). This pack also contains the 'Revival Jam' cards that was most notable in the anime for Yugi's victory against a seemingly impenetrable defense (Sadly Lava Golem isn't out until later). Unfortunately none of these strategies are really that notable outside of the anime. In reality the best Labyrinth of Nightmare cards are actually pretty underrated, or otherwise didn't become staples until much later. Cards really begin to see a shift toward utilizing the graveyard as a source of power and the banish pile as the true final destination for cards. Monsters like Bazoo the Soul Eater and Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer boast a strong 1800 atk but really benefit having abilities that banishes your cards for a buff or sends opponents GY cards to the banish pile, respectively. The pack also contains Gemini Elf but she's been in games since Dark Duel Stories which is really fucking with my perception of how these cards are released, only compounded by me not realizing Ring of Destruction also wasn't released until a few packs later in the TCG. Torrential Tribute being a board wipe upon summon, Magic Cylinder being a redirect of battle damage, and the large equip totals you can reach with Mage Power or United We Stand (see Maha Vailo), are pretty notable releases in the pack. Along with these are other infamous such as: Gilasaurus which would eventually help bolster the 'Magical Scientist FTK', Amazoness Archer which can do burn damage multiple times a turn for tributing 2 monsters (only banned in OCG), Jowgen the Spiritualist, which became a standard in Spellbook decks and helped get 'Last Turn' banned, and Card of Safe Return, which allows a draw if you Special Summon from grave (not once per turn??? of course its banned). Above all else though this game would have been a must buy if you were a duelist, as the game came bundled in with cards- but not just any cards. Valkyrion is a neat boss monster for the magnet warriors but nothing too special, Sinister Serpent is deceptively powerful as 'discard' fodder as it returns from the GY to the hand each turn, and Harpie Feather Duster is a must-have, destroying all spell and traps on the opponents side, a staple that continues to see play (or at least side deck rep) today. Overall the card additions to SDD are pretty solid, but much of the standout cards take a while to grab or aren't the most explosive. Still, Labyrinth of Nightmare and this game do mark a pivotal shift in the metagame and way cards function.
The main issue is just that I look into the typical decks by the end of GOAT format, and much is still missing by this point in YGO, we still haven't gotten to the Gravekeepers, the Chaos cards, PAC-MAN, pure Hand control, Umi beatdown, Zombies, Monarchs and other finalized decks in GOAT format by the end of 2005. I guess you can do Clown Control, Last Warrior lock-out, and some other neat decks but much of the deck building still falls on very proto-thematic philosophies where the best deck is still a 'Beatdown' deck but maybe with a specific flavor of a given attribute. Each subsequent pack still gives the same amount of 'good' cards from this point on (mostly, kinda) so this isn't the fault of the game or the distribution of cards but I do plan as later games (given that all other variables remain positive) begin to have larger times gaps between releases and more booster sets fill out the pool, will just get better as the access to more variety will incentivize more kinds of playstyles and in a sense, replayability. Sidenote, why is mystic tomato so hard to find? There's a lot of cards like these that seemed pretty essential during the meta around this time and Tomato has yet to really show up in my playthroughs despite stuff like Sangan and Witch being pretty easy to snag in this game. All three of these are some of the strongest 'recruiters' (ie cards that pull another card from the deck according to a given criteria, such as any monster with less than 1500 atk/def or have 'dark' attribute). It's just fairly odd to not see it at all in the game during my playthrough not in any pack early on nor in any opponent's deck (afaik), but Shining Justice (the light attr. equivalent) and Giant Rat (the earth attr.) are pretty par for the course. The card is only available once you reach 10000 duelist points, which isn't difficult but was about where I put the game down. It does get me thinking about how the strategy and thought about the meta has evolved over time; was Mystic Tomato considered superior over several other cards in the meta, even other staples? I do know about certain battling philosophies such as Solemn Judgment not being as universally played due to a mindset where the 'pay half your current LP' condition was deemed too risky. Maybe the self-replacing 'pull from deck to field upon destruction' was considered more lucrative than Witch/Sangan's more broader but perhaps slower 'pull from deck to hand' effect? Very interesting/perplexing to think about, especially since the latter cards were more limited on the banlist at the time anyway. Also funny to think about how many of the much harder and grindier packs to get contain cards that aren't really all that good, just kinda fan-servicey or subpar. At the end of the day at least, most cards are available anyway through the password system, but I do try to avoid that myself. By the end of the game much of my deck looked similar to how I left EDS, although I did try to swap in a few different flavors here and there to spice things up, like Toll/Chain Energy burn (terrible idea), Clown Control (very impractical when incomplete) and Maha Vailo. Maha Vailo is a very funny card, gaining an additional 500 attack points for each equip spell attached to it, including stuff like Premature Burial. A Premature Burial Maha Vailo on top of Sword of Dark Seated and Axe of Despair turns a 1550 attack card into a 3050 and then its effect puts it to a whopping 4550, and this isn't the worst it can get. Sadly, Mage Power and United We Stand are fairly late in the game to get, otherwise I would have run as much as I could. I wish Ben Kei was available to create this juggernaut of an equip spell deck, but alas.
I also wish there was an actual calendar or any way to see how many weeks have passed. You can only tell what day it is but there's no other measurement of what time has passed, and certain packs and events go off a weekly timer as to when you first see them, like the KC Cup. Trying to find tournament locations and proc events such as the Card Hunter encounters can be kinda odd as I swear its only in one corner of the map and might take a week or two after the warning announcement to pop up. In this regard its kind of hard to get a feeling as to how you actually progress into the Pyramid Puzzle quest, especially when I encounter Lumis and Umbra twice but it didn't seem like a different encounter. Of course, this is in reference to a duo during the Battle City arc this is based off of and you can't really fight two duelists at the same time so it could have been a fight against Lumis and then Umbra but as two separate card hunter encounters? I'm wasn't sure at first, the dialogue and play-style didn't seem any different. It only took me a while to find out that certain townspeople will appear as Rare Hunters. I had figured these encounters were based off a random encounter, but you'd fight each member in a set order from Strings to L&U to Exodia guy to Arkana to Odion, etc. Nah, actually I found Arkana last despite Odion being like a second in command for Marik, very weird and I'm glad I realized that sooner than later because I didn't talk to any towns person between then and the start of the game.
The tournaments are kinda hard to find at times, but they're a neat function once you do find one on a Saturday. I still don't entirely think the side deck is necessary against any of these opponents but its still neat you can set one up just in case you have a specific but flawed strategy in mind and need potential backups in a best of 3 format. More interestingly I think are the 'Target' weeks where you're asked to seek out two specific duelists that are given to you and beat them for a special pack. This is a neat idea, and got me to understand the kind of patterns that each of these duelists follow. What does confuse me is that there's supposedly interruptions that can happen if two duelists are on the same district on the map? I tried seeing what I could get but each duelist was matched already to a certain combination. Tea was always in the same area as Bakura, Kaiba was usually alone or with Ishizu, Joey was usually alone, Yugi was usually alone, etc. I don't know if that's a case of me playing the game on
Overall it's slightly better than the Eternal Duelist Soul, but only by a slight degree. It's got more cards and a lot of the best cards are extremely easy to get once you know what packs have what, but because of this much of the later chunks of the game feel like a grind. Originally I was gonna place this about similarly to EDS but the lack of any major story kinda just frees you to do anything, at your own pace. Once I realized this, I figured this would actually be an excellent game to have had as a kid or on a long trip, definitely has that 'On a deserted island' feel. It's not as big a jump in card pool as I had hoped, but all things considered it's an improved game and better intro to the card game than Eternal Duelist Soul.
Zapken
1 year ago