Love/Hate #24: Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist

Here we go again.  I have owned only two other Yu-Gi-Oh! games, both on the Game Boy Advance. Both of them were great and played almost to death. I certainly played the first one to death, namely the Worldwide Edition.  Despite occasionally dated cards, there were plenty of strong, relevant cards to make this game extremely fun. I actually managed to beat the campaign, set in Battle City and had duelled most of the opponents into strong win/loss records for me. I played Mokuba over 100-200 times, great way to get cards but he would occasionally kick your ass with Cyber Stein and Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon.

The other was Yu-Gi-Oh! Ultimate Masters: World Championship Tournament 2006 on the GBA. Set in the GX era, it wasn't  too much of a jump for me. This was before Synchros and whatnot and had most of the cards I owned at the time (and still have) and I was able to mostly clear that as well, not sure if I did all the challenges (probably not,must check) but I think I cleared the equivalent of the campaign.

My own history with Yu-Gi-Oh cards is detailed elsewhere, or indeed I will  create a separate post for it if not.

I picked this game  up relatively recently, December 21st, 2019. I only installed it January 31st and played it on the weekends so... maybe 5-6 times, for a total of 19 hours as of today and 14/21 achievements  unlocked.

It starts out kind of tough as you get a starter deck and a few cards and have to go... I tinkered with the starter deck a little  bit  but opted to use the 'story decks' for a while in the campaign mode. There are 5 campaigns and naturally I went for the original one first, followed by GX and the 5DS. As of writing I am a tiny bit of the way into Zexal.

I insisted on beating Kaiba with Exodia. So I lost a few times before it worked...

The campaign was quite fun and would not be matched by the later ones. Also was nice that it wasn't best 2/3 or anything.

Some wacky Joey dialogue on these cards. Why.

I was surprised by the small selection of animations for attacks, mainly for signature cards.

Nice to see one of my old favourite cards. Used to use Prisman in the old 2004 game. With Magic Cards, of course.

I quite liked using the story decks for a while. Got tough after a while  though,especially as they are very stall-y and not fast enough for my liking.

Some duels are deliberately reversed. You can also reverse them yourself, to get 100% completion and new rewards.

There are plenty of dialogue boxes and reasonable exposition at the start of duels. I mainly skipped them but actually stopped to look at someof the later GX/5DS to figure out what the hell.

My aggressive decks started emerging around Battle City. Just pure Beatdown. Also some old faves like Guardian Angel Joan.

I like and dislike the card shop. Slow to get stuff but not too unreasonably random.

Made Strings draw himself to death. I had to.

The duels run really smoothly. You can even change how often the prompts appear but be careful. It didn't  offer me certain prompts to save myself with traps when I set it to minimal.

The actual penultimate duel and what happens when you click 'reverse'.

The beginning of GX. The difficulty did not spike.

My powerful cards were more than adequate to defeat the GX campaign as well.

5DS. Synchro monsters weren't  too tough either.

I started to put together my Dragon deck. Works better in real life than on the screen! But  I'm still missing a bunch of cards from it.

XYZ monsters are great until they're used against you.

I switched back to doing all the reverse duels of the original campaign and tried to get the achievements: reflect damage, effect damage and chain king. Reflect and effect were easy with a turtle, burn heavy deck I put together. Fun too.

Good old Red Eyes!

Of course DM Girl gets an animation.

Guardian Sphinx was an MVP in that defence deck.I got the achievements.

I bought so many Bakura boosters just to get 3 of this guy.

The best! The best! The best!

Had to switch back to full time beat down while doing the reverse GX campaign; Cyber Dragons are SO difficult to fight and don't get me started on Elemental Heroes. I got the Chain achievement and called time on this game for a while.

Final assessment:good, but will never hit the nostalgic highs of the older games. The last 7 achievements might be awkward as 3-4  of them rely on online play to get and that scene is almost completely dead (I tried).  I will buy a friend this game and beat them at it just to get those, however, if I have to. The remaining ones are complete Zexal, complete Arc-V (?) and complete all Duelist challenges (all reverse duels AND individual 'duelist challenges' you can do, haven't looked at yet).

Hard to put together a full, balanced deck. Always feels like there's something missing, necessitating more duels and opening boosters.

So there's plenty left and not TOO hard to get a perfect game. Will return soon or much later but will get full completion.

I will move onto something else soon for the moment BUT March 2020 is when I play Final Fantasy XIII to completion for the first time so watch this space.