Yu-Gi-Oh! Month 2025
Missed Part 1? Read it here. This part? We’re diving into the fun part, for folks like me who love this game because of the connection with the anime.
From Duel Monsters to VRAINS SEVENS Go Rush
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After a while, you'll be glad the game has an Auto-Duel
feature, since there's just so many duels to do against NPCs.
Sometimes the AI will make stupid decisions, but it usually
does alright against all kinds of opponents. |
Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links started with very little content, building over time. The overarching plot of Duel Links is that Seto Kaiba, in his constant struggle to prove himself worthy of defeating the Pharaoh Atem (who left for Egyptian afterlife at the end of the original anime series, Duel Monsters), invented the Duel Links virtual world where duelists can meet and battle no matter where they actually are. At the very least, that’s what it feels like for average duelists. Characters from the various anime series, AKA the “Legendary Duelists”, exist in a variety of odd ways in this “world”. The land of Duel Monsters is explicitly said to be a simulation, so the Legendary Duelists met there aren’t real, even in-universe. That world specifically replicates the past, and as a result its characters exist all at the same time even if they didn't back in the actual series. Some characters express bewilderment that they somehow still exist, like Yami Marik (who was erased from existence; it’s a long story).
Oh, also, Duel Monsters is the only world that takes closer inspiration to the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga rather than its associated anime, but there’s still a clear inspiration from both regardless.
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| He looks just as unhinged as ever. |
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Seto is the "main character" of
the DSOD world. This is Mokuba,
the kid's looking professional! |
From there on, the later anime series were added with their characters and mechanics; first was Yu-Gi-Oh! GX and the Legendary Duelists from Duel School and beyond. Then, 5Ds was added alongside the first Synchro monsters. The game then took a detour, revealing an entire world based on the movie The Dark Side of Dimensions (DSoD), and it’s strongly implied that it is that world’s Kaiba who created Duel Links. The characters are all a year older than they were at the time of Duel Monsters. Since it’s based on just one movie, it features fewer characters, but has a handful of folks not available elsewhere. Then it was ZEXAL and the Xyz mechanic. Then it was Arc-V and the Pendulums. Then, of course, VRAINS and the Link monsters. Those last two had to change the playing field of Speed Duels, not unlike how they changed the regular game's field back when their new card types were first introduced.
Time to RUSH
However, Duel Links later kicked it up a notch by including the series past VRAINS. Those series do away with the “classic” card game and its mechanics to introduce yet ANOTHER variant: Rush Duels. Those are more accurately described as playing the way kids would have played in the schoolyard, using their own “simpler” rules, like back in the original game’s infancy.
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All your monsters are destroyed? No worries!
Just summon a whole bunch back! |
- Players start the duel with 6000 LP, and their Deck must contain between 30 and 40 cards.
- All cards use their Rush Duel design, effectively setting them apart from the regular cards, and making them usable only in the SEVENS and GO Rush worlds.
- The existing monster card types (for now) are Normal, Effect and Fusion.
- All cards with effects clearly dictate what the requirement is for the effect to be usable, and then the effect itself, removing ambiguity.
- Most cards in this mode have simple effects, rarely involving special summons.
- At the start of their turn, instead of drawing one card, players draw until they have five cards.
- During your Main Phase, unlike the original game where you’re allowed only one Normal Summon (and as many Special Summons as you can make), here you instead have unlimited Normal Summons. On every turn, you can bring out three monsters, filling up your Monster Zones, and then you can Tribute Summon as well.
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A single monster taking up multiple zones? That would
be a nightmare in the classic game... |
The one new Monster "type" is the Maximum Monster. Those are made up of three cards to be summoned at the same time, thus taking up all three of your Zones (the sides are even helpfully indicated with [L] ad [R]); but they are still considered one monster, so they can only attack once per turn. A Maximum Monster can only be played in Attack position. The individual pieces can be summoned on their own, using their stats; but if a Maximum Summon happens, the Maximum Monster’s ATK becomes a value indicated on its center card. Maximum Monsters are much harder to get rid of, and their high ATK usually means that they’ll beat most things the opponent can throw at them.
It's a new way to play, sure, but it feels like Rush Duels are still in their infancy, so they don’t feel super deep or entrancing yet; I played on that side of Duel Links a fair bit, and lots of duels just took longer to finish since a helpless opponent would just play three monsters, which I then mowed through with mine. Cards have gotten more interesting, but there’s still a way to go. Too many battles boil down to bringing out the toughest monster, and that's it.
Missions and Characters
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If you finish all of the missions to level up
a world, your NPC duel slots are refilled. Nice! |
The mission menu is divided into four sections. The first, “Events”, has goals related to the current event, whichever it is, like a new character unlock or a special tournament. The second, “World”, is missions specific to that Yu-Gi-Oh! world. Here, you can see which missions must be fulfilled to unlock new characters to play as, and you can complete additional missions to “level up” that world. The missions get harder at higher levels, and random street duelists also get stronger based on which world in your game has the highest level. “Weekly” is self-explanatory; a handful of missions that replenishes every week; short, simple stuff. Finally, “Lifetime” is also self-explanatory; missions you can fulfill throughout your entire time playing. This involves missions for unlocking every character and fulfilling specific requirements while playing as some characters. Many Lifetime missions grant unique bonuses, like Skills that cannot be unlocked any other way.
Every single character gains experience when you use them in a duel, and can thus level up, with rewards in Gems, Skills, extra Duel slots and bonus cards. Getting all the way to each character’s final level will take you a while. The cap isn’t the same in every world; Duel Monsters characters stop at Level 45. Go Rush characters drop to a measly max level of 30.
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Better keep dueling as long as I can earn Gems with this guy.
Who looks weirdly familiar, for some reason. Was he in
a previous Yu-Gi-Oh! series or something? |
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Does it count as irony that of all the characters in this damn
franchise, for some reason Yami Yugi's deck is the easiest
to defeat? |
Newer characters also have the opposite issue at the Gate of having better decks than older ones. You can duel any Legendary Duelist you’ve unlocked, at four different levels of difficulty: 10, 20, 30 and 40. At Level 10, all their cards suck and they don’t even know to play monsters in Defense position. At Level 20, they know the basics, but their decks are still pretty much impossible (barring major bad luck) to lose against. Level 30 can prove to be quite tricky, and Level 40 is the toughest they'll get (well, outside of special events). However, since those decks are never modified despite the growing card pool, it means that the earliest characters use decks that are nowadays plain laughable, even at Level 40. Oh, some of them can be tough, but they’re few and far between. Yami Yugi was among the first characters and his Level 40 deck is so easy to beat, it’s ridiculous. An update there wouldn't hurt.
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You want 3X the rewards against a Level 40 Deck? That'll be
312 Grey Keys, and friggin' 168 Color Keys.
Jesus, that's expensive. |
You must spend Keys to duel Legendary Duelists at the Gate. Regular grey Keys, then several colored keys, always the same color for a specific character. You don’t have enough keys of a specific color? Too bad. Oh, and the requirement in Keys is greater if you want to play against a Legendary Duelist’s higher-level deck. You can also choose to increase your rewards at the end of the duel, at the cost of even more Keys; for double the rewards, it’s double the keys. You can triple, too. You earn Keys from battling regular duelists in the worlds, so which Keys you earn is completely randomized. You don’t get the keys of the color you need? Tough. I get that the idea is to encourage players to not play exclusively against Legendary Duelists, but the Keys feel very restrictive and even a waste of time, especially if you’re waiting to duel a specific Duelist to finish a mission in that world, but can’t, because you can’t get the specific colored Keys needed to duel them! Ugh. (You can trade generic grey Keys for colored ones at the Trader, but it’s fuckin’ costly.)
Bonds Beyond Time and Space
The best "story" feature in this game is that we use the characters to duel. We aren’t just slapping Yami Yugi’s face on a Deck, we have friggin’ Dan Green's voice stating our actions. “I set a card face-down.” “I Fusion Summon a monster!” Each character has one or many ace cards, and if a character uses those cards, they’ll have specific lines of dialogue for them. “My ever-faithful companion, Dark Magician!” They will have personalized lines for both victory and defeat. Even better, you can make them say stuff by clicking their picture and selecting something to say. For some reason, I love that feature. I wished there was a game with regular Yu-Gi-Oh! (like Legacy of the Duelist) but with all those voice clip options, it would elevate the game so much.
(Oh, and yeah, when a character summons one of their most famous monsters, their summon animation plays, but only on the first summon. Again: Take notes, LotD!)
Another funny thing with these characters is that they’re not limited to the summon mechanics available in their home world; it feels all weird to have Kaiba, Joey or Jaden go “I Synchro/Xyz/Pendulum/Link Summon a monster!”
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I legit want to see Duel Monsters characters and
the antics they could get into with all the
post-GX summoning mechanics. |
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There is something so oddly satisfying to beating Kaiba
with Joey. Or any aggressor in the franchise, using one
of their victims. (Mai against Marik, etc.) |
My other favorite aspect of this concept is that the characters do know each other, and have interactions just like they would have in the anime itself. As an example, expect Joey Wheeler to be belittled by everybody – and when he wins, the other duelists are surprised or shocked. You can beat opponents using characters that would have zero chance against those opponents in canon, like friggin' Tristan beating the likes of Kaiba or Yugi. It’s just one example; if two characters interacted at any moment, expect them to have personalized lines at the start and end of a duel. Not every existing interaction gets its bit, but for each one they seem to forget about, you’ll find two more you wouldn’t have thought would be in there.
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I may have lost, but even there, we get to see true words
of friendship from Yusaei to Jaden. Gotta love to see it. |
It goes a step beyond; characters that shouldn’t be able to interact at all may often have special lines. And it’s even better on the rare occasions where characters from different worlds duel each other. As an example, regular Yugi in the DSoD world can duel against Yami Yugi of Duel Monsters, causing Yugi to believe for a moment that the Pharaoh has returned. Poor guy. Yami Yugi, Jaden Yuki and Yusei Fudo met each other (in the Bonds Beyond Time movie) and they’ll have lines for each other. (Same goes for Paradox, that film’s villain, which was added to the 5Ds world; he will recognize all three of them.) As a fan of the series, this is So. Much. Fun!
You can duel anyone using anyone else, with the only hard line being that the characters from the series using classic Yu-Gi-Oh! (from Duel Monsters to VRAINS) cannot play against Rush Duel characters, and vice versa.
Final thoughts
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It's wworth putting in the work, at least if you want to
get a decent collection and a chance to do well in PvP. |
I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface, there’s just so freaking much to Duel Links. But if I make a Part 3, it’ll just repeat stuff I’ve already said, or I'll go into even more minute detail, to an extent even I can’t stand. So I’m capping this here.
Holy crap, there’s so much. It just never ends. Like any good mobile game that’s been going on for a while, there’s more content than you’re likely to ever see. There are constant incentives pushing you towards PvP, but there is enough content for a solo player that you can fare well even by only sporadically dueling other humans for the needs of the occasional mission.
Speed Duels are different enough from classic Yu-Gi-Oh! that Duel Links forces you into a whole other mindset, be it for deck-building, how things play out during a duel, or how to strategize with Skills, but also with the game’s different banlist system and the effects often modified for the format. With about seven years under its belt, the game has amassed a massive number of cards to build with, and has even gone beyond by including Rush Duels, which require their own secondary collection. You can play as any one of over a hundred characters, and conduct unlikely duels between characters who never met. Each character has their own Skills, including many that are unique to them, meaning that there are tons of things to experiment with.
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That's just the latest packs. There's about a
hundred more. No, I'm not joking. |
The biggest issue with this game? Its free-to-play system, which complicates collecting cards scattered across loads of regular booster packs as well as some Selection Packs that periodically appear. Missed your chance? Too bad. Sometimes, Skills cause deck construction to become so restrictive that they become a detriment, not to mention you frequently need very specific cards as well – you don’t have them? Shill Gems into whatever pack contains them.
And of course, the regularly shifting metagame means that a deck that was great recently, and which you may have invested actual money into, may no longer be so great when newer cards come around. As was learned extremely quickly with this game’s changes to turn phases, any card that blocks the opponent’s actions during Battle Phase can leave them unable to hit back. Some cards are also specifically locked as character level-up rewards. The system behind the game involves so many items for stuff and features that it takes a while to know what everything is used for. Skill chips? Box chips?
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I'm nowhere near getting to Level 40 with this
guy. |
Duel Links is great practice for the Speed Duel version of Yu-Gi-Oh!, which has since been adapted to the physical card game; but as a result, it’s only good to learn that format, and thus if you want to learn the “classic” card game you’ll need something else… Like, say, the other two games I covered this month. Duel Links’ worst issue, however, is that it is extremely grindy; progress is tedious, and though there is the incentive of playing as anime characters to interest a player, it can still take a long time to see returns. After all, it did begin life as a mobile game, and therefore has the same trappings of specific stuff locked behind paywalls as well as instances forcing you to wait before you can progress. Every duel you conduct against a non-Legendary Duelist NPC will deplete your gauge of available duels, and each unit of that gauge takes a full 30 minutes to refill, thus locking you out of a major feature for a few hours. However, if you are more the type to play against other humans, there is no such cap on PvP.
So yeah, I guess I better stop there now. Just like that, this month knocked out 7.5% of everything I had left to play in my collection. I sure won’t complain about that!
More reviews will be coming up soon!
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