Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist (Part 2)

Yu-Gi-Oh! Month

How to Play

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

Legacy of the Duelist - Part 1 - Part 2

Through Part 1 last Friday, I looked at the Single-player options, namely the Tutorial section, the five campaigns each based on a series of the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime, and the Challenge Duels. Today: Everything else.

Is there a multiplayer mode? Why, yes! It wouldn’t be Yu-Gi-Oh! if you couldn’t duel others with your deck! You have the option of playing a ranked match (to try and get a place on the game’s leaderboards) or a simple player match. Of course, you can also look at the Leaderboards themselves. And, as you can imagine, illegal decks are not allowed here. You can use them to complete the Campaign Mode, because that’s just playing against AIs.

Well... Not super-busy around here lately.

You can find a match or create a match, and from there you have plenty of options: You can choose to play just a single game or a full match, set the starting amount of Life Points (2000, 4000, 8000, 12000 or 16000 - like the Free Play mode in Duel Transer), the time limit (none, or 30 seconds, or 1, 3, 5 or 10 minutes), or set a private slot. This isn't Free Duel - you don't set up these options to play against a computer, but against another human.

Now if I could set up these perimeters to play against
any CPU deck...

The following option from the main menu is “Battle Pack”. This is based on a certain type of tournament play, mostly seen on small events where new packs are unveiled in card stores. All participants are given a number of packs of whichever game they’re playing, and can only build a deck out of the cards they got in those packs they just opened. I’ve participated to one such event involving the Pokémon TCG once, accompanying a friend. The regular packs of the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise nowadays rely too much on archetypes for this to be a viable mode of tournament (since you’d open a couple packs and not even have enough cards of each archetype to build any archetype’s core strategy). However, every once in a while Konami releases a pack that has been practically custom-made for this type of event, with cards that either can fit in a lot of decks (AKA, "splashable"), or don’t have the common restrictions of archetypes. I still remember buying some of those a couple years ago, these “Battle Packs” as they were called. That’s where the name of this section comes from.

Beating an opponent in this mode can be very tricky.

You have the choice between Sealed Play in which you open 10 5-card packs, and that’s all you can use) and Draft Play (in which you gather 45 cards from 3 rounds of pack openings). Sealed Play has the first two Battle Packs released, while Draft Play also includes the other version of the second Battle Pack (called “Round 2”). In both cases, once your deck has been built with the cards from the packs, you can then use that deck in duels. Five duels, and you can choose between playing against real people in Online mode, or against a computer. Considering this game is already a couple years old, the Online mode won’t give a lot of results, so the Single Player option will be the better one.

I hadn’t really tested that mode until writing this review, in part because I was focused on beating the Campaigns. While I enjoyed this special, restrictive way to play, I don’t think I’d go back to it all that often. However, I have to admit that it’s a fun mode, one in which you need to show resourcefulness and an ability to play cards you may have never thought about before, and how to make those interact. Keep in mind that you get random cards still, so if you got a bad bunch and all the opponents got better cards… well, too bad. You get to keep the cards, though, so it’s a bonus for collection completion.

Next is the Deck Edit section, in which you can view your collection, build a deck from scratch, or load a recipe that you’ve unlocked. I don’t think there’s much to say about the card search functions, which allow you to look for a card you own based on its name, Level/Rank, Type, Attribute, genre of Spell or Trap, kind of effect, ATK or DEF…

My favorite Deck right now is a mix of Blue-Eyes, Legendary Dragons,
quick summons and opponent card destruction. Also, many Xyz monsters.

Alright, to complete this recipe I need one more Destiny Hero - Plasma.
Off to beat up this Deck some more and get that missing card.

The best feature here might be the recipe viewer, which opens as an option when you start a deck from scratch. It can be used to see how many cards you’re missing in any deck recipe. You can already get most of the cards from buying packs, but some cards are very rare and hard to get. A victory against a recipe awards you three cards from that deck recipe, and a loss awards you only one card. Also, your trunk of cards can only hold up to three copies of every card, and the card rewards for beating Campaign levels and recipes take that into account, never giving you cards that you already own the maximum number of copies you could have (3). Really, the best way to finish the collection is to keep track of the cards you don’t own yet, and go back to duel against those deck recipes in the Campaigns (each recipe indicates the name of the “level” it appears in). All the deck recipes also indicate whether they’re legal for multiplayer play. A lot of recipes contain Forbidden cards as well as Limited cards in more copies than allowed, so you can’t use them in multiplayer unless you edit them to take out the cards that aren't allowed. For single-player campaigns, you can use them.

Oh, by the way, do you know how many recipes there are in this game? Um… According to my calculations, which may be inexact… 436. That includes the Campaign Mode’s regular and reverse duels, all of the Challenges, and all the recipes that are added from DLC packs.

So many packs, so many rare cards!

Then there’s the Card Shop. Some Yu-Gi-Oh! video games out there try to have packs that resemble the real packs sold in stores over the past 20 years. Here, not so much. The packs are split in lots of 265 cards, each one representing a character from the anime.

The packs are unlocked by progressing through the Campaigns, but they’re not that difficult to get. The last pack of a Campaign isn’t unlocked even halfway through that Campaign. You always get some cards by completing duels, so you will not always need to purchase packs. However, you always get Duel Points whether you win or lose a duel, and always enough that you can buy one or two packs even if you lost; most pack costs 400 Duel Points, except the first one at 200.

The biggest issue with every card pack is that you get 7 Commons and 1 Rare card, and some Rare cards have very, very low odds of appearing. On top of that, even though your trunk can only contain up to three copies of every card, you will keep getting copies of cards you already have, even if they just vanish. You don’t even get to sell them back for Duel Points or anything, they serve no purpose.

Oh good, just the 23rd time I get that one.

Duel Transer had special card packs, unlocked late in the game, which contained almost exclusively cards you didn’t own already. Admittedly, here, you can get cards you don’t have by repeatedly dueling against Decks containing those cards. But there’s nothing letting you get those cards quickly. On top of that, you cannot mass-buy packs in Legacy of the Duelist - instead, you have to buy one pack, open it, look at the cards you got, buy one pack, look at the cards… one… by… one… slowly… and it’s such a pain! Can’t buy 5 or 10 packs at once! Okay, some calculations: If you play for a while, you’ll quickly gather 10,000 Duel Points. You can spend that money on 25 packs, at 400 DP each, and with no quick mass-buy option, it’s long, boring, and time-wasting.

I’d argue another issue is that there’s no Free Play mode. My favorite feature of Duel Transer, the Wii game, was that you could duel against any recipe you unlocked, and set your own parameters (such as picking Duel or Match, the maximum time allotted for a turn, or the amount of starting Life Points). It was a quick way to level up, collect the in-game currency, practice against some decks, and refine your strategies. Then again, Duel Transer also had a Level Up system, which I felt was unnecessary, but at least it gave better rewards as you progressed. Arguably, the Campaign mode isn’t much different since you can go back and replay any duel, anytime, but I would have liked a mode where you can set parameters of your own and challenge yourself.

And as you can imagine, I had to buy them
all for this review.

Last but not least… the Downloadable Content. All 17 of them, each at 5$. On top of the base game at 20$, so if you want to buy everything, outside of sales, that’ll be 105$. Thanks, Konami. Every DLC pack includes two pre-constructed decks, usually containing cards you can NOT get in the base game from buying packs with Duel Points. So if you want some very particular cards… welp, you’ll need to buy those. Each DLC pack also includes a few duels with characters that weren’t part of the base game - as an example, the first DLC for the original Yu-Gi-Oh! series features the duel between Joey and Bonz, the zombie-themed duelist, as well as the duel between Kaiba and Pegasus during the Duelist Kingdom arc. There are other DLC packs for the original series, mostly involving the “Waking the Dragons” story arc of the anime with many of the released cards and the characters unique to that arc, such as Alister, Dartz or Rafael. DLC packs for other series of the franchise do the same, though GX only has two, 5Ds only has one, ZEXAL only has one. And in two cases, the packs contain the famed duel against the “Final boss” of that series. Jaden’s duel against Yami Yugi? DLC pack. Yusei versus Z-One? DLC pack. ZEXAL? …Okay, that one’s final duels are in the base game, alright.

Arc-V, the last show of the franchise at the time of Legacy of the Duelist’s release? The base game only has one Duel - every other duel must be obtained by buying the damned DLC packs. The Arc-V duels are split among not one, two or three DLC packs… but among 10 packs. You heard right: To get everything there, you gotta shill out 50 bucks.

Why is the final duel against the big bad of the series
a DLC content exclusive??

Admittedly, not all’s bad. On top of the pre-constructed decks with cards that can’t be obtained otherwise, the included duels can also be played in reverse, and you unlock additional Challenge Duels the same way you’d unlock them in regular campaigns, for characters added through the DLCs. Last duel a character appears in, and they’re defeated, that’s how their Challenge Duel is unlocked. Admittedly, they won’t count towards Steam achievement completion (since those only take into account the duels of the base game), but it’s still nice. Wished it wasn’t 5$ a pop, though, as some of these DLC packs really aren’t worth that price. But hey, I guess it’s less scummy than forcing players to pay 10$ for an extra save file… I doubt Konami will ever be allowed to live that one down.

Dueling all the tiime, all day... it'll take me hundreds of
hours to get all the cards.

I think I’ve covered everything. So, how does this fare? Well… it’s pretty good. The throwback to 20 years of collected history across five Yu-Gi-Oh! anime is definitely a welcome concept. It allowed me to learn more about every series through meeting their characters, their Decks, and following the progression of the Campaigns. That every single character gets at least two Decks, from one to 20+ Campaign Decks and a Challenge Duel deck, is also pretty cool (though sometimes the archetype/Deck used by that character in the Challenge portion may seem arbitrary, not fitting the character’s theme or style from the anime). This game has everything: The classic Decks, the classic monsters and strategies, a way to collect them all, and some extras against the most powerful Decks of a time. All across over 400 deck recipes. That is humongous.

Unlike Duel Transer, this one doesn’t have animations for the anime characters, only for a few key monster cards. The surrounding backgrounds for the duels change quite a bit, which is nice. The story segments in the Campaign are pretty cool too, even if the characters are mostly stills with different facial expressions and all the dialogue is written.

The only place where Kaiba can actually defeat Yugi.

My issues were almost all described in this post so far: There’s no option to mass-buy packs in the Shop, nor do we stop getting cards that we already own in three copies. There is no Free Play mode allowing someone to play against an unlocked Deck recipe with options of their choosing. The difficulty is all over the place and unequal across Campaigns, but that’s a common problem of games for this franchise. The more annoying aspect is with the DLCs, which give out cards that can’t be obtained in the base game, and sometimes offer way too little bonus content for the 5$ price tag of each.

But overall, it’s still a fun experience, I recommend this game.

The Stardust Dragon is creepier than I remember it.

Next week… I need something short and quick to review.