Yu-Gi-Oh: Early Days Collection Review: Part 3

The Game Boy Advance era is where I think Yu-Gi-Oh games hit their first big stride.  Up to this point, the games other than Capsule Monster GB with cheats have only reached the level of “good enough.”  Dungeon Dice Monsters comes off like an experiment to see what the designers could do with the GBA’s increased power and memory, which would explain why the monster clashing graphics are the most visually interesting and system-pushing part of the whole thing in an otherwise barebones framework.  After that, they took a big leap and made the first Yu-Gi-Oh game to follow the rules of the real card game, the game that would be released in American as Yu-Gi-Oh: The Eternal Duelist Soul.

The Eternal Duelist Soul

If you ask any old-school Yu-Gi-Oh fan to list off some of their favorite Yu-Gi-Oh video games of all time, I promise you most of them are going to mention Eternal Duelist Soul.  As a simulator for the real card game, it’s designed to near perfection and the only reason why later games are better is because EDS set the groundwork of how a Yu-Gi-Oh card game simulator should be.

Structurally, the game follows the previous Duel Monsters games, where there are tiers of opponents that must be defeated a certain number of times while you get cards to improve your deck, but besides the obvious rule shift, there are several other drastic changes.

Instead of having to beat everyone 5 times for the next tier, you only need to beat them a different number of times for each tier, opening up the next set of characters much faster.  For example, you only need to beat the first tier opponents twice each and the second tier opponents 3 times each.
Instead of starting with a garbage deck, the three starter decks players have the option of starting with aren’t too bad (for the time) and come with some of the most powerful cards in the game, like Mirror Force, Megamorph, Dark Hole and Swords of Revealing Light, the original stall card.

Instead of being rewarded with one card for winning, you’re given the choice of an expanding variety of booster packs that come with 5 cards each.
Instead of artwork made specifically for the video game, artwork is scanned directly from the real cards.  I like the original pixel artwork of prior games, but this is much sharper.

No art on the overview screen though.

There are further bonuses and goals with the introduction of a calendar.  With every duel, a day passes.  On some days there are issues of Weekly Yu-Gi-Oh Magazine and Monthly Yu-Gi-Oh magazine, neither of which you can read, but they come with promotional card packs, just like how Shonen Jump often came with promotional Yu-Gi-Oh cards.  The magazines ARE Shonen Jump and V-Jump in the Japanese version, but they changed the name for some reason.

On certain calendar weekends there are also special weekend duels and card game tournaments.  As if Eternal Duelist Soul wasn’t enough of a simulator, duels in these events are done in a best 2 of 3 match that lets players use the side deck, something only ever used for such matches in real life.

This is all done with probably the best gameplay possible.  The card playing is fast and responsive as long as you hold down the R button when the duel is loading in.  When the initial rock-paper-scissors for turn order is resolved, make sure you’re holding down the R button and you’re good to go.  When you do that, animations are short, the computer doesn’t take several seconds to think and everything is zipping by while you play a game of back and forth with monsters, magic and trap cards all working together to seize a victory against a variety of opponents.  That’s not the nostalgia talking.  It still feels amazing to play and you get to listen to some of the best music ever in a Yu-Gi-Oh game while you do.

Every single last track in Eternal Duelist Souls’s soundtrack is a mood-setting gem really showing off what the multiple channels of a Game Boy Advance sound chip can accomplish.  Choose any duel track and it’s a bop.

There’s a funny thing about the music and gameplay though.  It’s actually not how the original Japanese version is.  Remember, America was a year behind in the game releases and by the time Eternal Duelist Soul was out in America, Japan already had the sequel out.  To make the best version they could, Konami used the improved dueling interface and duel music from that sequel for the English version of this one.

If you switch to the Japanese version in the Early Days Collection, you’ll notice the main menu is completely different and the dueling interface is noticeably worse.  There’s less information on the cards on the field screen, the camera doesn’t have as good a view of the field and some of the streamlining in the English version wasn’t implemented so it’s a little awkward the way it has players change phases and select attack targets.

The worst part is that in the Japanese version, holding down the R button at the start will not speed up the game, meaning you’re forced to hold down the B button at all times to keep the animations on fast-forward.  The music in it is also forgettable and the deck construction screen has fewer filter options.  America got the better deal with this one and getting it late ended up being a good thing, but this decision leads to a case of deja-vu with one of the other games in the Early Days Collection.

Obviously, being the first of its kind, Eternal Duelist Soul has some quirks that show room to grow, mostly with how opponents make their decks and act.  All the opponents in the game are distinct from each other and have decks matching their theme from the source material, but it’s obvious the designers had to fudge some decks by putting in cards that give them a needed edge regardless of their theme.  There weren’t a lot of really good dinosaur cards at this point so Rex Raptor has Summoned Skull and insect cards didn’t have the best support either so Weevil has some Giant Rats in his deck because getting Insect Queen out is hard.  That doesn’t happen with every opponent, thankfully.  Mako Tsunami and Espa Roba have their ace cards Fortress Whale and Jinzo, respectively, so they didn’t need a competitive boost.

Of course, if it’s a Yu-Gi-Oh game, no matter when it’s made, no matter what technology is available, the AI is going to do some stupid things.  The most consistent here is that they refuse to change attack mode monsters into defense mode even when they’re wide open for defeat in doing so, but I’ve also seen them use two copies of Swords of Revealing Light at the same time, like they think that’ll make me even less able to attack.  I get a good chuckle out of Yu-Gi-Oh AI making dumb moves as long as it doesn’t happen too frequently.  It’s like the lovable AI idiots in the original Star Wars Battlefront games.  It just wouldn’t be the same without them.

Needless to say, Eternal Duelist Soul is a big winner.  I still open it on the collection from time to time.  It has great gameplay, great music, great artwork and it keeps me coming back, later games be damned.

The game after Eternal Duelist Soul in the collection is the aforementioned Japanese sequel and the only one in the collection not translated into English except it is, basically.  I’ll explain when I get to Yu-Gi-Oh: Worldwide Edition.  For right now there’s a very interesting duology of Yu-Gi-Oh games that are much more divisive than Eternal Duelist Soul.

The Sacred Cards

This never happens in the game.

Yu-Gi-Oh: The Sacred Cards and its sequel, Reshef of Destruction, moves far away from the gameplay of Eternal Duelist Soul and goes back to the rules of the Game Boy and Game Boy Color games.  That means the attribute affinity system, deck capacity, duelist level and getting one card per win is back.  The dueling itself has the same lack of phases and odd tribute system as before, but there’s now a full 5 spaces for magic and trap cards, you can see compressed images of monsters on the field without needing the cursor on them and the lack of animation for most everything that can happen makes the gameplay run at a speed that rivals the first Game Boy game.  Fusions are gone entirely, but ritual spells are now possible to use, if impractical.

None of those are big changes.  That would be the framing behind the duels.  Sacred Cards is an adventure game with an explorable world full of characters to talk to and duel as you go through a story, meaning there’s a real end goal that isn’t just unlocking all the duelists.

The story is based on the Battle City arc of the source material.  If you don’t know, it’s a tournament Seto Kaiba holds in which anyone can duel anyone else anywhere, without the need of a fixed duel arena, and must obtain 6 locator cards from other players in order to find the location of the finals.  In the series, there is also a rule that the loser of a duel must give their rarest card to the winner, but in Sacred Cards players can put a card of their choice up for grabs that may or may not be their rarest.

You don’t play as any Yu-Gi-Oh character in this game though.  Sacred Cards is essentially an official self-insert fanfic that writes itself in such a way that the player character ends up dueling (sometimes optionally) every major character from Battle City.  You get to duel the different Ghouls, go up on the blimp for the finals, duel Ishizu for one of the Egyptian God Cards and even Bandit Keith is in the game.  In the manga Keith is kinda sorta dead (before R), but these games seem to follow their own continuity that takes characters and plot points from both the anime and manga.  Some dialogue makes it clear that Duelist Kingdom happened, but no specifics are given.

Sacred Cards’ story doesn’t give much time for character motivation and the dialogue is very straightforward.  The player is dropped into a crazy plot and has to deal with all the different scenarios that entails with only minimal explanation given and I kind of love that.  It’s like in Pokemon where the player has to deal with Team Rocket when what he really wants is to get the damn gym badges and everything else is a stepping stone.

One of those stepping stones is apparently Joey.  I hope you don’t like him because he got the shaft in this game.  You get the locator cards from all his opponents while you only ever see him lose and struggle to get to the finals, where he also loses.

Sacred Cards is not a well-written story on its own, but it’s sure as hell a fun one and, besides the card game itself, a big part of that comes from the audio and visual aspect.  Backgrounds in the overworld are static, but sharp and gorgeously detailed.  Character portraits are high quality scans of the manga with animated mouths and eyes that are so sharp they look almost like the later editions of the Ace Attorney games, where they scanned in the artwork directly into the game instead of pixelating them to fit on the Game Boy Advance.

As nice as it looks, it’s the music that steals the show in this game.  I haven’t played every single Yu-Gi-Oh game, but Sacred Cards probably has the best soundtrack of any game in the franchise and definitely one of the best soundtracks to ever come out of the Game Boy Advance.  Konami got the composer of Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 for this game and you can tell he was not half-assing anything.  Music is used to accentuate ominous or tense moments, there’s impressively clear ambient noise for locations without music and the duel music is the kind of stuff you’d hear from top-grade orchestras.  Remind me again why this collection doesn’t have a music player.

Sacred Cards is often accused of being way too easy.  I’m more of the mind that it’s a very casual-friendly game and besides that there are a handful of tough parts that require thought into deck construction.  It’s not difficult to make the game a lot easier, but figuring out how to make things easier is part of the challenge in its own right.  That said, I personally recommend using the cheat for max deck capacity.

Cheating might seem like overkill for a game that’s already fairly easy, but every time I play The Sacred Cards, and whenever I see someone else playing it, like this particularly funny text-based Let’s Play, everyone seems to resort to the same tactics and that’s because a lot of the cards in the game are left to the wayside because their deck capacity is too high to work in a deck.  Some, like ritual monsters without the ritual spell, cannot be used at all because of their cost.  Opening up the deck capacity lets all the cards get a chance to be played.  The duelist level does enough to keep players from getting cards that are too strong too early.

The Sacred Cards could’ve used some more work in its balancing, like shadow attribute monsters being too strong or the player being given more money than they’ll know what to do with, but I still think it’s a fun experience.  Definitely play it.

Reshef of Destruction

 

The Sacred Cards was a modest game with some high production values with a story on the shorter side that twisted around the plot of the manga and anime to suit the player.  Reshef of Destruction one-ups it by making an entirely new plot wholesale.

In Reshef of Destruction, as explained in a front-loaded plot dump, the power of the Egyptian God cards are sucked out of them and the cards are turned to stone in order to power the resurrection of something called Reshef the Dark Being.  How cards turn into stone from that is beyond me, but Yu-Gi-Oh could never decide what the cards are made of.

Are they steel shurikens?

With no physical form, Reshef has to rely on someone else to get things done.  The main villain driving the plot to resurrect Reshef is a man named Sol Chevalsky, who looks exactly like Pegasus, is missing an eye just like Pegasus and has Pegasus’ men from Duelist Kingdom in his employ.  I wonder who it is.

In order to restore power to the Egpytian God cards and gain the power to stop Reshef, Ishizu needs the Millenium Items, but after Battle City, the items have been put into the care of various guardians from around the world and the Millenium Puzzle is stolen at the start of the game.

The plot is a globe-trotting adventure where the player and his posse travel to different countries and retrieve the millennium items, along the way meeting a lot of old faces in new settings.  It is the best part of Reshef of Destruction.  It’s probably the best story any Yu-Gi-Oh game has ever had.  It gives one-off characters from the source material more to do, showing what they do when they’re not competing in card games.  It plays with what’s established and makes a villainous faction that’s both old and new with the Neo-Ghouls, who are working separately from Chevalsky’s ambitions.  At one point the player has to go back to all the different duelists all over the world they met on their journey to make the Yu-Gi-Oh equivalent of The Avengers.  It’s great.

I even like Reshef as an idea for a villain.  Chevalsky is effectively Reshef’s proxy in the human world and that makes Reshef seem like he’s a creature from beyond the realm of mere mortals, similarly to the Egyptian God monsters themselves.  Like Ra and Osiris (Osiris is in Slifer’s Japanese name), Resheph is the name of an Egyptian deity.  In fact he’s also in the series Danmachi, only he looks… Different.

While the god cards are commanded by chosen humans, Yu-Gi-Oh’s Reshef commands a chosen human instead and it’s his lack of screen time that I think works in his favor.  The last level of the game has a room that goes into his backstory a bit so there’s at least some explanation as to where he came from.
 
The graphics and sound for the story are still on point from Sacred Cards.  It still has those beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds, but the character portraits were changed into smaller ones with more than one expression.

Norihiko Hibino Came back for the music and it’s still amazing, but a few duels now also have little voice acting samples in them from the anime’s English cast.  It only amounts to declaring their turn and declaring an attack with their signature monster, but that’s a cool bonus.
 
I think most people would agree with everything I’ve typed so far, but anyone who knows Reshef of Destruction will also tell you that all of that effort and all the good things about it are completely ruined by one gigantic problem: the mother fucking grind!

Any and all discussions about the quality of Reshef of Destruction might as well begin and end with the absolutely mind-melting amount of grinding that is required to make it anywhere in the game.  In Sacred Cards, you got enough Deck Capacity to make it to the end just from playing normally.  You got 5 for regular duels, 30 for the more important ones and the Deck Point cost of cards were a little wonky, but manageable.

In Reshef of Destruction, you get ONE deck capacity for a regular duel and 3 for an important one!  Do the math!  You have to duel your ass off just to make any progress anywhere!  It is Earthbound Beginnings levels of grinding!  I challenge anyone to give me one other game with a grind worse than Reshef of Destruction in the decade it came out!  I'm dead serious!

Besides making the whole game one of the most tedious ever made, this means the problem of rigidity in player tactics is astronomically worse than in Sacred Cards.  Anyone who has played this game has resorted to the exact same tactics with the same few cards because playing any way other than optimally means it’s damn near unbeatable!
The story is great, but the grind fucks with the pacing like I’ve never seen before!  Playing through it is like quickly hitting a brick wall and being unable to progress the story, then grinding for literally several hours, dueling the exact same people ad nauseum, just to make a little more progress, then hitting another brick wall and starting it all over again!  It’s as if the designers hated the players!

It sucks so hard because the writers, the artists, the composer and even the English localization team put serious effort into this game, but their contributions are wasted all because of the designers of the actual game!

Wait a minute… What’s this?

That right there is why Reshef of Destruction was the game I was second-most interested in next to Capsule Monster GB.  With Capsule Monster GB I asked how good the game is now that it’s playable without a language barrier.  For Reshef of Destruction, I asked how good the game is without grinding.  The answer, it turns out, is pretty good.
 
It’s crazy how just those two cheats change Reshef of Destruction from the worst game in the collection to one of my favorites!  All Konami had to do was remove the deck capacity bullshit and they would’ve had a hit!  It’s a complete and total game changer!  No more brick walls!  No more mandatory grinding!  Cards that were literally unusable because of their deck cost can now be used!  The cheats make Reshef of Destruction actually fun!

Granted, it doesn’t solve every problem.  There are still other befuddling design decisions Reshef of Destruction is known for that don’t have any cheats to fix them and the game has universally been rightfully criticized for them, but I find that those design decisions were such big problems because they worked in tandem with the deck capacity grind for maximum frustration.  I’ll explain.

The shop you would buy cards from in the original game is gone.  Now you get all your cards from Grandpa Mutou’s shop.  Apparently gramps looked at the people selling Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes and Clock Tower 2 for hundreds of dollars and thought they were brilliant businesspeople rather than worthless dregs of society that should be beaten within an inch of their life and forced to watch someone play the games right in front of them.  All the cards in the shop are at insanely high prices and every means of getting money, be it through selling cards or winning duels, gives out a pittance.  In my playthrough I maybe got 4 cards from him for the entire game so players have to be selective.

As badly designed as it is, having unlimited deck capacity and duelist level mitigates the need for his shop in the first place.  With the cheats, as long as you’re anteing good enough cards, you’ll walk away from duels with solid cards that you can immediately upgrade your deck with.  Without the cheats, the card shop is needed because all the good cards from winning duels can’t be used and you have to go buy something you can use and that means more grinding.  Play with cheats.  If you want you can use the cheat to get every card.  I already explained why I won’t do that, but I won’t discourage it for Reshef of Destruction.

Imagine dealing with a powerful multiplying monster with no cheats!

The other major sore point for people is the field scanning.  Reshef of Destruction adds continuous effects to the gameplay and even though Eternal Duelist Soul had no problem implementing them, Reshef of Destruction went about it in the most cockamamie way I can think of.
Every single time a move is done, every card play, every attack, every card face down and every effect activated, makes the game take a third of a second to scan the field just in case there’s a continuous effect.  Then, if there’s a monster with a continuous effect on the field, a text box comes up to declare the monster’s continuous effect each and every time it scans.

Yes, it’s horrible game design and whoever thought it was a good idea should be put in a bedlam house, but I think how bad it is has been overstated.  Continuous effect monsters aren’t common and the game does everything so fast otherwise that the field scan doesn’t slow it down enough to be painful.  It still plays faster than the first Dark Duel Stories, that’s for sure.
I think the field scan was a big problem before because the grinding meant a lot of duels and when you’re forced to duel and just want to get it out of the way, anything slowing down the process is made a hundred times worse.  It doesn’t help that one of the borderline required tactics without the cheats is to use Mammoth Graveyard, which has a continuous effect.  Slifer has one too, but if you got out a monster with no affinity weakness that can get 9999 attack points, that duel is about to end unless you drag it out like the guy in the video above.

There’s also the matter of life points carrying over between duels and forcing the player to travel all the way back to their room to save and restore them.  I should point out that this is a short jog away for the player even if they’re in China or the Galapogos.  It’s the miracle of a world map screen.  I was constantly going back to the bedroom to save in Sacred Cards anyway and the running speed is fast enough that it only takes a few seconds.  The few times you’re forced to duel multiple times with no healing can be helped with the save states.

Much like Capsule Monsters GB, it might come off as discouraging that Reshef of Destruction is only enjoyable with cheats, but there’s a good game in here when its critical failing is stripped away.  Up until the final boss, anyway.  That’s a load of bullshit whether you cheat or not.
 
All three games this time are good enough to contribute to the Early Days Collection’s value, even if one of them needs cheats to be any good.  The final few games are where they begin to settle into being mostly yearly installments with updated card pools, albeit with one more oddball game thrown in.