Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist (Part 1)

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 people waste their time away in Minecraft, Skyrim (I’m gonna get to that one eventually!), World of Warcraft, Fortnite, PUBG, Overwatch… I’m hooked on the damned children’s trading cards.

Someday, maybe, I will watch those shows.
I probably won't find the time for that, though.

Following last week’s review of Duel Transer for the Wii, I found myself wanting more. Thankfully, there is no shortage of Yu-Gi-Oh! video games out there. Konami has been pretty active in releasing new games on all platforms, including for PC. As far as Yu-Gi-Oh! games go, most of them are fairly basic and have a story. They tend to focus on one era of the anime, usually the era the game was released in. Still waiting for the first official game for VRAINS, so I can learn through trial and error how the latest gameplay mechanics actually work.

It only makes sense that some games based on the collectible cards would make their way onto Steam. So far, there are two: Legacy of the Duelist, and Duel Links. Looking up “Yu-Gi-Oh” on Steam’s search engine also brings up the possibility to purchase some seasons of the franchise's various anime. You can also see a lot of DLC packs, all of which are to be used within Legacy of the Duelist. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Are you ready for a trip across twenty years'
worth of Yu-Gi-Oh! history? Count me in!

Duel Links is a game taken from mobile, with different gameplay mechanics to the real game, but I’ll get around to talking about that one eventually. For the moment, we dive into Legacy of the Duelist. Remember when I said that there was a near-infinite replay value to these games? This one seems to embody this mindset, even moreso than the previous one I reviewed, Duel Transer (check out that review here). I could reasonably see myself playing this for hundreds of hours, though it does come with its flaws.

This one is also special in that it doesn’t focus on a single era of the franchise. While it came out during the time of Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V (the fifth iteration, featuring protagonist Yuya Sakaki), it actually prominently features every previous generation and their characters. This game is available on the Steam market for 19.99$.

Come along, it’s time for more Yu-Gi-Oh!

When you open the game, the Main Menu has seven sections: “Single Player”, “Multiplayer”, “Battle Pack”, “Deck Edit”, “Card Shop”, “Help & Options” and “Exit Game”.

Wow, this is gonna be an easy win!
(Taken from the Synchro Summon tutorial)

Let’s get through these options one by one, shall we? Single Player goes first. This section is more of a Campaign Mode. This section is split in four categories: “Campaign”, “Duelist Challenges”, “Tutorial” and “Downloadable Content”. That last one opens the Steam Store and lets you buy DLC packs, but I’ll get to that in time. The “Tutorial” area is the most helpful if you’re just starting; it’s a list of 18 lessons teaching every gameplay element and mechanic. The playing area, how to play, how to summon monsters or use effects, how to bring out some particular monsters (especially the ones in the Extra Deck - namely, Fusion, Synchro and Xyz monsters). If it’s your first time playing any Yu-Gi-Oh! game, I heartily recommend you start there.

I’ll explain Duelist Challenges later. Let’s get into Campaign for now. Or should I say “Campaigns”? Remember when I said this game paid homage to all the generations of Yu-Gi-Oh! that existed before its release? Well, there is one campaign per series of the franchise, for a total of 5! There’s the original show, then there’s GX, followed by 5Ds, ZEXAL, and then Arc-V.

To be honest... when it comes to summoning its
key card, the Winged Dragon of Ra, Marik's deck
really sucks.

Each series’ campaign follows the famous duels of that series. Not every duel or story arc is featured, but most of the important duels are. The campaign for the original Yu-Gi-Oh! series, as an example, starts with a tutorial duel between Yugi Muto and Joey Wheeler, followed by the epic duel between Seto Kaiba and Yugi, then we get into the Duelist Kingdom arc. A lot of story arcs from this franchise are framed as Tournaments, because it’s all about playing the darn card game. This first official Tournament in the history of the series took place on an island, with gigantic arenas displaying monsters as humongous holograms. And Yugi, as well as his alter-ego living within the Millenium Puzzle, joined the competition in order to defeat Pegasus and free the soul of Yugi’s grandfather, now stuck inside a VHS tape. I now realize how old that series is, that one of its earliest plot points involved a VHS tape. I’m feeling old now too. And after that point, there’s Battle City, the tournament that introduced Duel Disks (the wrist accessory that creates holograms of your monsters and cards).

Here, have a menacing Blue-Eyes.

The GX era focuses quite heavily on Fusion monsters.

Meanwhile, the Yu-Gi-Oh! GX campaign covers some arcs from that particular show, from Jaden Yuki’s early days at the Duel Academy (yes, a school that teaches dueling… that concept just gets sillier as time goes), all the way to the climactic duel against Yubel and then some. Oh right, for those who don’t know, Yubel is a demon from the card game, and who eventually becomes trapped in Jaden’s head. Mind you, this is also the series that had monsters from the card game as actual duelists. Oh, and this guy...

This guy looks like Judge Claude Frollo was put through a
peacock factory and then forced to be in a dumb game anime.
And he isn't happy about it.

The 5Ds campaign features the important duels of Yusei Fudo’s story, starting with his escape from Satellite, joining the Fortune Cup, becoming a Signer and meeting the other Signers, combating the Dark Signers, then later dueling in the World Racing Grand Prix and defeating the fifteenth ancient evil of the entire franchise. This is the series in which many Duels took place on motorcycles, while racing. Don’t Duel and Drive, kids. It’s also where Synchro monsters were properly introduced. As for “fifteenth ancient evil”, I’m barely exaggerating; this franchise has a thing for villains that have existed for millennia and somehow have their history tied to this silly children’s trading card game anyway.

It never ceases to amaze me how much these guys take everything so
seriously... only to then duke it out at a card game.

I would tell you that Yuma is the one with crazy hair, but that would just
confuse you further. It's the one on the left.

My knowledge of ZEXAL is fairly limited as well. I know it involves that kid with weird hair, who comes into contact with an ancient spirit - what? So far, it sounds exactly like the first series, but that's gonna change. The kid is Yuma Tsukumo, who encounters the entity named Astral. It has lost its memories, and will only retrieve them if Yuma can collect a number of creatures known as the Numbers, a category of Xyz Monster cards. This show marked the beginning of Xyz monsters, the black cards, and the various new gameplay mechanics involving them (such as overlaying, Ranks, CXyz summons and so on). Most opponents will use them, and quite effectively too, so you better learn to use them as well.

We could move on to Arc-V, the series Legacy of the Duelist was released in, but… there’s not much of a point. After going through four entire series’ worth of duels and decks to be created, it’s like the developers got lazy and created only one duel. …Or did they?  That’ll be explained later.

Blue ones come with the base game, yellow ones are DLC.
As you can see, most of Arc-V is locked behind price tags.

Looks like I'm winning that one.

Mind you, not every duel of every series is shown. Some duels get skipped for a reason or another. In some cases, it makes sense; it wouldn’t be possible to replicate some of the more bizarre duels of the series. Other duels won’t feature particular cards, either because they didn’t exist prior to the release of this game (but were released later)… or were so insane they were never released at all. That happens too. However, it also means that every Duelist needs to have a 40-card Deck by their side, not counting the Extra Deck! Few, if any, duels shown in the various anime have a character reveal exactly all the cards in their Deck; the duels end before that. Therefore, the developers at Konami had to build both Decks involved in every duel, always picking at least 40 cards for each duelist.  It seems like an innocuous detail, but it’s actually quite interesting. See, a lot of duels featured in earlier series had imprecise strategies, or some card effects that didn’t make it onto the cards released at the time. As a result, the older decks available here are fitted with newer cards to include those effects that weren’t there at the time, as well as other cards that help boost the deck’s power since the metagame may have changed radically since.

Very few decks here will have a Side-Deck, simply because they can only be
dueled in Campaign Mode, and thus are fought only once and do not follow
match rules. Most DLC-unlocked decks do have side-decks, though.

Very few of the deck recipes unlockable here are outright bad; some of them are pretty weak compared to the strategies of other decks, but none of them are exactly harmless either. Well, except maybe Joey’s first deck, the one you fight against during the first tutorial… Overall, these changes to famous anime decks are quite welcome. Most decks, in order to fill in the 40-card limit, will also resort to splashable cards (that is, cards that can easily be added to most Decks to help the main strategy, whether they're monsters that are easy to summon, or Spells and/or Traps to help the Deck's strategy or disrupt the opponent's).

Against Challenge Duels, you HAVE to use a Deck you
own. Either a completed recipe or a custom creation.

And of course, on every duel of the Campaigns, you are allowed to use either the Story Deck (the one based on the actual duel of the anime), a recipe unlocked earlier for which you own all the cards, or your own custom deck, which can sometimes prove easier to use. After all, you’ve built your custom deck with effects and cards that you know and enjoy, and sometimes with better cards than the ones the Story Mode deck uses. On top of that, since the Story Mode deck often makes use of strategies you may not know about, you’re not always aware of the synergy of cards needed to achieve the best outcome. (And that's not factoring in good old luck that can either give you an easy win or screw you over, like playing a duel in the 5Ds campaign where you never get a chance to draw a single Tuner in order to bring out a Synchro monster.) The big advantage of Story Mode Decks is that once you’ve collected all the cards of a Deck, you can then load it as your own and actually learn to use it through trial and error, trying out new strategies you may not have known about. If you lose during a Campaign duel, the game will give you a hint on what to do with that duel's Story Mode deck so that you have better chances next time (and yes, you get that advice even if you used a custom Deck.)

An example of a Reverse Duel: You play as Bandit Keith
against Joey Wheeler.

Oh, and here’s the other best part of all this: Every Campaign duel can be played in reverse. What does that mean? It means that, while each normal duel sees you using the character who has won that duel in the original continuity (so, usually the main characters), once you’ve completed that duel you unlock the option to reverse the roles and play with the opponent’s deck. It’s an interesting concept, because it means both decks of every duel can be unlocked as recipes. On top of that, due to the rule of drama ever present in Yu-Gi-Oh!, opponents have very powerful decks, and it allows you to try out their strategy. (Of course, some main characters of the various anime are featured in a lot of duels, meaning you’ll unlock multiple recipes for them - I think both Jaden Yuki and Yusei Fudo have 20 deck recipes each, with all if not most unlocked through Reverse Duels only.) Last but not least, each time you beat a character in a Campaign duel the first time, you unlock them as an avatar to be used for your own Deck (there’s over a hundred of those to collect!). For the record, Reverse Duels count towards completion, so you're highly encouraged to play them.

It's not even the full list - there's 6 more below.
And then nearly 24 more for every other series.

This is where the Duelist Challenges section comes in: You unlock those as you progress. As I explained, the Campaigns follow the various duels throughout the five series (at the game’s release). Many Duelists appear only once in a series, while others take part to multiple duels (that includes most protagonists and secondary characters). You only unlock a character’s Challenge Duel after you defeat that character for the last time in a Campaign. Does a character show up only once? Well, that’s an easy unlock. Do they appear two, three times? Then you get the Challenge Deck to duel against after the last time you face them in the campaign. Reverse duels count in that number, too, so you might have to defeat each Yu-Gi-Oh! protagonist 10 to 20 times in Campaign Mode, through Reverse Duels, before you get to unlock them in the Challenges section.

In the anime, this guy literally had a monster with printed ATK and
DEF values of 100,000. A hundred thousand. The real maximum is
5,000. As you can guess, that monster doesn't exist here.

And, well, much like any other part of the game, the difficulty for Challenge Duels can be all over the place. It’s a common issue with Yu-Gi-Oh! video games in general - most characters use archetypes nowadays, and every archetype has a strategy of its own. If an archetype is built with effects that easily get rid of your favorite personal strategy, that’s how the ball rolls. That’s why many titles of the gaming side of the franchise encourage experimentation (such as here, with a wide variety of deck recipes to unlock, as well as wildly different strategies and cards to use), so that you can find the strategy that suits best your play style, or the strategy you need to beat the current duelist who’s being a pain in the ass. However, while some Challenge Duels have exactly the name they deserve, others may be a cakewalk. Intended easy difficulty, or the Random Number God decided to be merciful to you this one time and gave the computer a crappy hand? It can be hard to tell at times!

Since each Challenge Duel has its own associated Deck (and the Challenges mode has an achievement for completion), it’s recommended to beat them too. Now, whether you prefer to wait after you’ve completed the Campaigns, or beat them as you unlock them, that’s up to you.

I cannot, I swear, I can NOT read that without hearing LittleKuriboh's
Marik voice.

Anyway, this covered a lot of ground, I think it would be best to keep this up with Part 2.