Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds: Duel Transer (Part 3)

Yu-Gi-Oh! Month

How to Play

5Ds: Duel Transer - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

Legacy of the Duelist - Part 1 - Part 2

Some characters who appear later in the anime
are unlocked later in the game.

You thought I was done with this one? Nope! In fact, while I may have discussed most of the Story Mode in Part 2, I still have a lot to talk about. The cards have been released since 1999 in Japan and 2002 in America. The Trading Card Game has changed drastically since then, and has brought to us thousands of cards to be collected, traded, and used in duels. Point being, with every new set released, new cards come out, new archetypes appear… New strategies show up. The fantastic aspect of newer Yu-Gi-Oh! video games is that they serve as a long history of the card game itself, as the creators of the game have access to this large backlog of cards and archetypes, from which it’s possible to build more decks than one could ever envision. It would be a waste to have so many possibilities and not use them.

After Duel Transer’s Story Mode, you unlock a special area called Niflheimr (God, I suck at these Norse mythology names). It’s a special bonus area, 20 floors (when the Story Mode has, in total, 14 floors), with nothing but Transcenders to duel, all with powerful Decks. So, if you want to beat the game, you’ll have to go through every single floor and defeat every single duelist. Each archetype you can think of that predates 2010? Each possible strategy that can prove troublesome, or set of cards that have proven popular, whether it’s in tournaments, or as troll moves in casual play? You bet.

Get ready to see a lot of those.

Example: This deck recipe focused on the infamous Stall strategy
that uses the no-less-infamous card Final Countdown.

Oh, and you want to know the best part? Most of the Decks used by Transcenders on the 20 floors of Niflheimr are ILLEGAL. As in, they use forbidden or limited cards, sometimes in a number of copies higher than you’re allowed to have in your own deck. In Duel Transer, you are allowed to have any card you want in your Deck, but you must respect the Limited (one copy maximum) and Semi-Limited (two copies maximum) state of some cards, all of which have been given this setting precisely because they were overpowered for the meta-game of the day. To fend off the opponents, you are allowed exactly one Forbidden card in your Deck. As an example, you can only run one copy of certain cards such as Swords of Revealing Light or Mirror Force (back in the day, you could only have one of either - their restrictions have since been lifted, due to the power creep).

The Niflheimr Transcenders can have three copies of each.

In short: The computer is a cheating bastard.

Thankfully, since this area opens only after you’ve completed the Story Mode, you should have access to a wide variety of Deck possibilities, so you might be able to counter most strategies. Sometimes, you just gotta get beat up a few times by the same Transcender in order to learn their strategy and, hopefully, build a custom Deck to counter that precise strategy.

I checked a number of Let's Plays around YouTube and I
was unable to find one featuring Niflheimr.
I mean, it IS a bonus area...

And like I mentioned, if you feel the desire to unlock everything, you need to thoroughly explore each floor and duel all the Transcenders, including the hidden ones. The other interesting element of Niflheimr is that you can find pages of a Tattered Journal, which explain more on the backstory of the strange woman calling herself Odin. Something about her father, an archeologist, coming to the island to study it and falling prey to a mysterious elder entity. The archaeologist died to avoid serving as a body slave for the old spirit, but his daughter was still around afterwards, and the only other option for the villainous soul… Well this got creepy!

When I played this game the first time, I used a
guide from GameFAQs in order to make sure
I would get everything, duel everyone.
This is the guide, by the way.

After you’ve defeated a Transcender, it becomes possible to buy that enemy’s deck recipe in the Shop, the same place where you can buy card packs. Very useful if you want to view recipes, but as I mentioned, most decks used by enemies in the bonus area are illegal decks, meaning you cannot load them as your Deck! (And, again, even if you could, you’d need to own as many copies of each card as needed in order to use said recipe, as you need to do for legal decks.)

Before the duel starts, you can pick your own Deck recipe
to use, as well as the opponent to duel against and the Deck
they will use, among the ones they own that you've
bought in the Shop.

There is, however, one important use for deck recipes: The ones you have bought can be dueled as opponents in Free Duel Mode. If you want to go against any deck, legal or illegal, that is. On top of that, you can customize the duel however you want: Set a time limit to turns (from 30 seconds to 5 minutes or unlimited) and choose between playing a single duel or a match (in which case you need to win two duels out of three), as an example. The best feature, in my opinion, is that you can choose the starting amount of Life Points for yourself and the CPU in this mode - from 2000 to 16000. You will get experience points by playing in Free Duel Mode, but the experience you earn will be scaled on the starting number of Life Points (since the normal amount is 8000, so you will receive only 1/4^th of regular EXP if you play a duel on 2000 starting LP, half at 4000, 1.5X at 12000 and 2X at 16000). I personally loved to play this mode at 16000 LP, because of the increased EXP gain, but also because some opponent decks focus on swarming the field to attack repeatedly and attempt a One Turn Kill (taking the opponent from 8000 to 0 in a single turn), which is much more difficult to do at 16000 and may give you a chance to fight back. Sure, it makes duels longer, but it’s worth it.

You can view every pack being opened one at a time... or skip this
and view all of your card pulls in one list.

The Shop menu lets you buy deck recipes using Duel Points, but also packs. Many packs have repeat cards, and some packs only appear on particular floors of the Story Mode. There are packs with special requirements - among them, one pack in particular can only be unlocked by ending a game in a draw, which is an extremely rare situation that must basically be provoked with one peculiar card. Late into the game, you unlock more special packs, like the Konami pack, the Rare and Premium card packs, the Random Pack (which picks at random among most cards in the game), various special packs that either focus on real-life seldom-printed cards or cards famous in the Yu-Gi-Oh! series up to this point. There’s a nifty option here to buy quickly 5 packs by pressing C on the Nunchuk, or 10 by pressing Z, with a maximum of 50 packs that you can buy in one go. Since each pack has 5 cards, that’s 250 cards you can get! On top of that, each pack keeps track of the percentage of cards you have from its selection, so if you seek to finish your collection you can focus on the packs you own the least cards from.

Also on the topic of the Shop, you might want to buy deck recipes as you find them in the levels, as they can get pretty expensive and there’s a lot of them. Only a handful of recipes can be unlocked without being bought, by playing the game (mostly by beating floors of the bonus area of Niflheimr), the others must be bought. In total, that’s 314 decks you can duel against. That’s a lot, isn’t it?

So many recipes - this is gonna take time.
Also, it's pretty great that each recipe indicates the percentage of cards
you own from it.

The Status menu in the game can let you see stats such as your current level, your number of victories, losses and draws for the entire game, how many different cards you own, as well as how many cards you own in total, all copies counted. The Options menu lets you change elements such as the text speed, the music/sounds volume, and other factors such as Auto-Draw (turn it off to manually draw a card instead of letting the game draw it for you), the placement of cards (Automatic to let the game place cards for you, turn it off to place cards wherever you want since on Automatic the game will by default play/set cards starting at the center of the field and move towards the edges of the board). You can even turn on or off the card animations and the duel effects.

The Load Data option of the main menu lets you load a different save file, I’m not too sure of the point of that since you can just return to the main menu and go back to the save file screen from there. Unless it's a way to retrieve your save data in case you lose your copy of Duel Transer and buy a different one? I don't know.

Stardust Dragon - IN 3D!

The Database gives you access to a lot of data, such as your win/lose ratio against every duelist of the game (normal Transcenders all count as one, but the list includes even minor, one-time duelists and even the faceless yet named ones that are seen early on in the Story Mode). The Card Album lets you see all the cards you own in the game, kind of a redundant option in my opinion. The Movie Theater option features 51 animations, one which is the pre-menu intro of the game, and the others are animations that you must unlock by summoning the monster it features. Most of them are Synchro monsters, and there is one animation for that monster’s summon and one for its attack. The last animations involve the various Earthbound Immortal monsters, as well as two special ones for Exodia and the Destiny Board (two alternate victory conditions that can be tricky to pull off). It’s a bit of a challenge to unlock all animations. The Database has a Help section that provides more information on how the game works, the Wii game itself but also the duels, and finally a section in which you can check the list of Forbidden/Limited cards in the Wii game (since it will differ from the real-life card game, considering this game’s latest update was in 2014).

There was, of course, an option to play against real humans through the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, but I got the game pretty late so I never got to duel much in that area. Most Duelists were spamming Six Samurai decks at the time anyway, and I was grossly unprepared. Besides, the Connection ended in 2014. Four years ago already… Wow.

So that covers everything. Geez, so much content. Okay, so where do I even start? Well, I should preface my final words by saying that, by design, games based on the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise have a near-infinite replay value. Even the earlier games had enough cards to encourage a player to try various strategies. In newer games, with access to thousands of cards and dozens upon dozens of archetypes, strategies and playstyles, the options are limitless. You can try every strategy you could ever wish, or even devise your own. You can use existing deck recipes (the ones you can load, anyway) as templates, add or remove monsters or Spells or Traps… Or you can have fun and make Decks whose sole purpose is to bring out some monsters that are infamously difficult to summon (and which, sometimes, just aren’t worth the effort). You might attempt famous One-Turn or First-Turn Kill strategies, if you feel like it. The biggest tragedy of talking about a game as old as this one is that official outlets for Yu-Gi-Oh! strategy help (such as, say, the Wiki) have evolved along with the physical card game, and thus will mostly feature decks that contain cards too recent to be in this Wii title. The card game has evolved tremendously in 8 years.

If you want to have a sliver of a chance to beat this game, you need to learn to use Synchro summons to your advantage, because I guarantee you that most opponents will use them. The difficulty increases steadily as you progress through the Story Mode, discovering the various existing strategies and how you can defeat them. Your pool of cards is very small at first, but your collection is meant to grow over time, to build decks with more precise strategies.

I also felt that the game was a little on the slow side, in part caused by the fact that you need to move (with the Directional Pad of the Wii remote) the cursor around the playing mat to carry many actions, which is sometimes long and tedious. In Battle Phases, the game will by default place the cursor on your leftmost Attack position monster at the start and after every attack, even if you have no desire to use that monster in an attack this turn. Minor gripes, but they can be annoying.

There really isn’t much to say about the music, which hardly changes (a regular track that gets replaced by a “Boss” theme against plot-relevant opponents, and new tracks that play when you have the upper hand or when you’re about to lose). Similarly, there isn’t much to be said about the graphics themselves, since most of it will be the usual Yu-Gi-Oh! board on the field. Admittedly, some hexagon tile map environments can look pretty impressive, and I love the animations for all the major characters of the anime that show up here to duel in the tournament. The animations for the key Synchro cards and other important monsters are also quite impressive, and a treat to watch when you actually unlock them.

That AP system is such a pain in the neck, too.

Really, my biggest gripe is the hexagon tile map system, which is very annoying early into the game and only gets marginally less annoying as you level up. A lot of items are gated off based on the number of Action Point rolls you do, and if you have a few bad rolls it’s more than enough to see some items vanish from the current board… and if you wanted them, well, tough luck - gotta start this entire board over, duels and all. Remember that these boards can have from three to sixteen duelists, many of which block the way and have strategies that can requires five to twenty minutes to defeat (and that’s not counting whichever losses you get that force you to start a duel over!). It’s a very long and painful grind to get everything that can be obtained in the game.

Quick, beat Crow before he swarms you with Blackwings!

I get the core idea: You don’t have to duel every opponent, and with some luck you can even skip most of them if you only aim to beat every floor, especially in Niflheimr where the cheating Transcenders are a pain in the ass. Thankfully, all the cards that can be found as floor items can still be obtained in packs.

Oh, also, this game is missing one famous card from the anime, Slifer the Sky Dragon. The only reason is that the card didn't exist in a playable form at the time of the game's release, which is a shame...

But hey, at least there’s no content hidden behind DLC. Pay once, get the full experience. It’s more than I could say of other Yu-Gi-Oh! video games…