Rating of
4/5
The Carrot AND the Stick
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/07/24
Way back in the year 2002, while I, as a brand new college graduate, was hunting for the legendary, mythical, and long-extinct “entry level job,” I took a break from sending out resumes and filing rejection letters to sit down and watch some FOX afternoon cartoons. At the time, anime was just starting to blow up, and I expected to see some ‘Pokemon’ dancing across my screen, while audience-insert trainer Ash Ketchum failed to grasp even the most basic mechanics of pokemon battling, in spite of doing it for years. However, I did not see ‘Pokemon,’ but rather an unknown anime with a nonsensical title: “Yu-Gi-Oh!” (with the exclamation point), which I quickly learned was Japanese for “King of Games.” The anime in question followed the exploits of a group of Japanese High School Students *sigh* who were competing in a card game tournament revolving around a game known in-universe as ‘Duel Monsters.’
I was immediately enthralled. As a former Magic: The Gathering player, I had always been intrigued by the basic concepts of Card Battles, but the core mechanics in Magic essentially forced a highly-restrictive form of deck construction, and would frequently result in uncompetitive, lopsided duels based solely on luck, as bad opening hands or failures to draw specific cards early on would result in even the best strategy fizzling out. “Duel Monsters,” on the other hand, used a different kind of card economy that struck me as genius, and I immediately set out to find the real-world counterpart of the game I had seen being played on-screen.
Tracking down “Yu-Gi-Oh!” cards in 2002 was NOT easy, as I wasn’t the only person captivated by the anime. I was forced to order some cards from a Friendly Local Game Shop… in California. They were not cheap, and thanks to some egregious mismanagement by Konami’s chosen Western distributor, Upper Deck (better known for baseball cards that card games, there were a number of censorship, poor localization, and rarity issues, but I ultimately enjoyed the ever-loving crap out of playing the “Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game” (as it is called in the West, vs. “Yu-Gi-Oh! Official Card Game” in the homeland), eventually roping both my mother and my grad-school friend, Matt, into dueling with me.
Unfortunately, as was the case with Magic, and which seems to be the case with all Trading Card Games, as the years rolled on with a constant torrent of new sets, new decks, and new promo cards coming from more and more directions, it just stopped being fun trying to keep up with all of that. I ultimately stopped buying new cards or following their releases around 2008, after amassing a card collection worth around $5,000, largely for the same reason I started playing: The anime. “Yu-Gi-Oh! GX” had succeeded the original series… and I hated it.When “Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s” aimed to supplant “GX” with an even more absurd and unenjoyable worlds, along with bizarre new card mechanics in the game, I tapped out. I briefly returned and bought a couple decks for myself and Matt during the holiday season of 2010, when we went to our own Friendly Local Game Shop and I discovered, with delight, that the then-current anime “Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal” (which I still have never seen even a single episode) had introduced the stupidly-named, but incredibly fun Xyz Summons (pronounced “ex-ease”). However, with the new anime series sequestered away on Cable TV, I didn’t have anything to keep me narratively engaged, so I stopped playing again in the face of such an overwhelming card database.
Thus we come to the present: 14 years after I last touched a “Duel Monsters” card, I have been in an underwhelmed gaming funk after playing some of the most promising titles about which I had built up years of personal hype, only to find them lacking. Instead of spending my free time gaming, I’ve been wasting it flipping through the free streaming channels on my Roku TV while working on other, non-gaming projects. Lo and behold, I stumbled across a Roku channel that runs nothing but “Yu-Gi-Oh!” anime… ALL the time! And, damn it, in spite of myself, in watching a few random episodes of the latter seasons of “5 D’s” and the much newer “Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS” (which is not what a zombified version of Nick would moan, but is an acronym for Virtual Reality Artificial Intelligence Network System… so something that alive-Nick would moan about instead) I found myself itching to play “Yu-Gi-Oh!” again. So I fired up some emulators and tried to recapture the joy of dueling in the past by playing some of the classic Game Boy Advance titles… but they don’t have ANY of the cards released in the last 15 years. Then I thought I’d try out the ‘Tag Force’ games that released on the PlayStation Portable… after all, they’d be all new experiences to me, having never owned a PSP. Alas, like so many other ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’ videogame adaptations, they refused to stick with dueling, and bolted on an awkward and annoying social sim, which I hated almost immediately. Thus in my longing to reconnect with my favorite Trading Card Game, I looked around at the most recent offerings and found them to be rather slim pickings. Fortunately, two of the three modern games are Free2Play, so I wasn’t out anything by trying them. “Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links” was so slow-paced and boring that I dropped it in less than an hour, in spite of being the single-player focused option. “Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel” (“Master Duel”), on the other hand, had a certain something that kept me thinking about it after playing, in spite of the overwhelming deluge of new and unfamiliar cards and its predominant focus on PvP duels. Ultimately, I stuck with it, cleared all of the Solo content, and continue to enjoy replaying those Solo PvE duels on a daily basis to earn Freemium Currency… all while never setting foot into the PvP lobby even once.
Presentation
Audio-visual stuff isn’t particularly important in a game that revolves around trading cards, but “Master Duel” does a fairly good job at making everything look nice and shiny. Cards are high enough resolution to read the text on their graphics, but also include flyout boxes with all of their text that can be read at will. Some cards – typically the signature cards of prominent anime characters – have little animations featuring either live2D or 3D models that briefly appear when such a card is played. The dueling field is also not static, but can take on a variety of appearances based on the opponent’s deck theme. There’s even a spot on each side of the field for a cosmetic pet to stand there and cheer its master to victory or whine pathetically when their master takes damage. Audio is mostly forgettable generic BGM, but at least isn’t grating or distracting.
There are a few technical issues, as I noticed a bit of slowdown when dueling on certain fields, rare occasions when card images in-hand would be borked, and a few instances where cards don’t work like they’re supposed to. However, Konami updates “Master Duel” ALL THE TIME, so they do tend to fix issues as they crop-up. Of course, the major negative aspect of the game’s technical presentation is the fact that it’s an online-only title, even if you’re just trying to access the Solo PvE content, like I was. There is a total conversion offline mod available for the PC version that I’m tempted to try, but haven’t yet out of fear of losing my save and the time I’ve sunk into it.
Finally, as a Freemium game, we have to take a look at its monetization. “Master Duel” is the most up-to-date way to play the “Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game” without shelling out hundreds of dollars for new structure decks, booster packs, or aftermarket singles. Almost all of those things do exist in “Master Duel,” but they are purchased with a Freemium Currency called Gems. Playing through the game’s Solo content, it’s possible to earn several thousand gems at a relatively quick pace, allowing the player to buy structure decks and booster packs to fill out their own personal card collection. Konami also runs frequent log-in campaigns where players can earn Gems, free packs, and cosmetics simply by logging into the game each day. Likewise, there are numerous daily quests that allow the player to earn small quantities of Gems by doing things in-game… unfortunately most of these are tied to PvP duels, so my daily Gem intake was limited to about 60… while a single booster pack costs 100 and a structure deck costs 500. So, while it definitely IS possible to cough up just as much Freemium money as real money trying to amass a master-tier collection of cards, it’s not strictly necessary to pay ANY money to enjoy the Solo content in “Master Duel,” so long as you’re happy to base your personal deck(s) around the structure deck archetypes that are handed out for free or buyable for cheap.
Story
While most ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’ videogames attempt to rehash or build upon the stories told in the various and sundry anime series – often to the point of lugubrious repetition – “Master Duel” does something I’ve never seen in a ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’ game, or really any adaptation of a trading card game: It tells the stories of various cards and deck archetypes in little vignettes. These vignettes reveal the underlying narratives of how numerous deck archetypes came to be, with some much longer and interconnected tales linking various deck archetypes together.
On one hand, I really enjoyed learning the backstories of deck archetypes on a conceptual level.
On the other hand, these vignettes aren’t particularly well written or original. There is a ton of reliance on tired anime tropes from across numerous anime subgenres, and to make matters worse, I think Konami had the text translated by a Japanese employee who understands English only as a second language. The writing is stilted and repetitive (as literal Japanese-to-English translations usually are), and each vignette is riddled with typos and questionable grammar choices. While they aren’t garbled to the point of being inscrutable, they certainly aren’t as polished as I’d expect for something coming out of a corporation as huge as Konami.
Konami is continually adding vignettes to Solo mode, and combined with daily duels for Gems, any attempt to quantify the amount of time I spent playing “Master Duel” will be meaningless for other players. Suffice to say, “Master Duel” has a lot of enjoyable Solo content. There are over 8000 cards in the database. You WILL be able to spend a lot of time enjoying and losing yourself in the world of ‘Duel Monsters.’
Gameplay
There’s not a whole lot to say about “Master Duel’s” gameplay other than this: It’s friggin’ “Yu-Gi-Oh!” If you’ve played it before and enjoyed it, it’s still basically the same game as before, only with a crap-ton of new card mechanics and a metric ass-ton of new cards to… NOT memorize, because, seriously, 8000 cards is too much!
There are a couple of minor things I don’t like about “Master Duel” compared to the real game (or previous versions thereof which I used to play). Most prominent of these changes is the fact that the player who goes first not only skips their Battle Phase, but now ALSO skips their Draw Phase. When I was an active player, ANY amount of numerical Card Advantage (e.g., having more cards in your hand than your opponent) was obsessed over, so baking a disadvantage like that into the rules is questionable to me. I always prefer to go second in a duel because of this… but apparently I’m wrong, because the majority of competitive “Master Duel” players will simply disconnect from the match if they lose the coin toss and have to go second. There are some things I will never understand!
One of the major ways in which playing “Master Duel” is more convenient and simple than playing the real game is the exhaustive deck-building tool, which allows players to search through that massive database of cards based on a huge number of card parameters as well as keywords. There’s even a handy button to filter out “related cards” to any given card, making it much easier to sniff out cards that may be key to certain deck archetypes, but that have weird, unrelated names.
The other excellent feature in “Master Duel” with no real-world counterpart is the ability to craft almost any card without having to rely on luck and booster pack purchases to get it. I suppose the single-card aftermarket is the real-world analog, but in “Master Duel” any card that wasn’t received as a promo or part of a structure deck can be dismantled in order to accrue material based on its rarity. Then, the player can choose any card in the database and simply conjure a copy by spending material of the same rarity, at a roughly 3:1 ratio (i.e., you get 10 material for dismantling a card, but generating one costs 30). I found this system to be incredible for obtaining common and rare cards, but super rares and ultra rares are still frustrating to create because, naturally, you simply don’t get as many out of packs, many of them are useful, and thus there are far fewer super and ultra rare cards that can be consigned to disassembly.
As a Solo-focused player, I only really experienced half of what “Master Duel” has to offer, but it was definitely the good half. Each chunk of Solo mode takes place within a ‘gate,’ with a couple of text blurbs, brief cinematics, and typically three (though occasionally more) on-theme duels before the gate is considered ‘clear.’ However, each duel can be played using either an on-theme loaner deck provided by the game or the player’s constructed deck of choice. Some of the loaner decks can be incredibly frustrating to use compared to a player’s preferred archetype. However, the existence of these loaner decks allows the player to have a ton of exposure to all of the game’s cards and archetypes without having to collect them all first. I discovered some good new archetypes through loaner decks, and through the AI opponents (whose decks are all fully viewable before the match) I learned of numerous newer cards that make older deck archetypes (that I was actually familiar with, but that underperform) into competitive powerhouses.
Overall
If you want to play “Yu-Gi-Oh!” either by yourself or against psychotically-competitive randos WITHOUT having to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on physical cards, “Master Duel” is a great option. As a Live Service game, it is continually updated with the newest rules and cards, so it doesn’t suffer from going out of date, as did earlier games in the series. As a Freemium game, the cost of entry is literally nothing, which is significantly less than even a starter deck in the physical game. Between the numerous story vignettes and their associated tutorials, even a green beginner (or geezer who hasn’t touched a card in over a decade) can quickly get up to speed on the new mechanics while dipping into previously unheard of backstory and lore for deck archetypes both old and new. The only question is whether to spend money on Gems or go out and buy some physical cards. With the former, Konami can make your purchases disappear at their whim, whereas with the latter, you’re on your own to find people to duel against. Regardless, the most insidious thing about this IP is how damned well the anime works in making me want to play the game!
Presentation: 4/5
Story: 3.5/5
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
