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

Yu-Gi-Oh! Month 2025

Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution: Part 1 – Part 2

Master Duel: Part 1

Duel Links: Part 1 – Part 2

Challenges

Because it’s a card game, a lot of it lies on drawing the right cards and knowing which strategy can win you a duel. Hoping the CPU doesn’t get too many good draws, either. Since so much of this game is reliant on luck, difficulty is all over the place. You may beat one campaign duel on your first try, then need four or five attempts to win the next. There isn’t so much a curve as there is a difficulty rollercoaster. What also doesn’t help is that some duels played here with the regular rules of the game were played with different rules in the anime; as an example, several 5Ds duels were Turbo Duels, features that don’t exist here. Same for VRAINS; that anime utilized Speed Duel rules, where players have 4000 LP instead of 8000, so the decks frequently aren’t optimized for a more classic Yu-Gi-Oh! setup.

Some challenges are easier than others.

The challenges are a different story; there is no associated Story Deck for any of them, so you can either pick a pre-constructed Deck for which you own all the cards, or you can create a custom deck. These decks are supposed to be tough; it’s in the name. These duels are unlocked as a reward for your progress in the anime campaigns, since you must have beaten all of a character's campaign decks to unlock their challenge deck, as well as their portrait to slap onto your custom decks.

So many folks, and I still don't have them all.

Mako Tsunami in the campaign: Weakest shit ever.
Mako Tsunami's Challenge Deck: Will FUCK YOU UP.

Exactly, those are supposed to be tough; but there too, difficulty can vary wildly. If you’ve got a good user deck, you can speed through several of these without much thought. Oh, there’s still going to be the occasional tricky one in there; no deck has answers against every deck gimmick out there.

How many challenge decks are there to beat? 159. That’s on top of all the campaign duels, of which there are 183, both regular and reverse duels, making 366. So… yep, this game offers a total of 525 duels to win. I hope you have some free time if you want to 100% this thing.

Annoyances

Before I go back to discussing the campaign, allow me to go over other annoyances this game has. Do take into consideration that many of these issues exist when compared to its predecessor, Legacy of the Duelist (LotD).

Literally popped up while I was fishing for screenshots and
checking the list of pictures I had to take.

Okay, so first, a PC issue: Anytime you go to a different window while the game is in a duel, the game will bring up the Pause menu instantly, forcing you to click the Resume Game button every single time. That option is still available by pressing the Space key. My question is: What's the point? Why make it obligatory? There’s no reason it should be. It’s not necessary in multiplayer matches where you’re supposed to stay alert to what’s going on in a duel. It’s also not necessary in Campaign mode; we’re dueling CPUs, and if the game has a question to ask the player regarding card effect activations, it will do so on its own. After all, if the CPU is playing a combo and you don’t have anything set up to counter it, why can’t it run in the background while you tend to something else? It’s not like it’s going to take a ton of time, right?

You know a game has issues when it can't even shut down
properly 60% of the time.

I don’t know if this next issue is a problem only I have, or if it’s a recurring issue for many players. The Steam version of Link Evolution is very prone to crashing, but not often during gameplay itself. Quitting through the dedicated button in the main menu will often cause the game to freeze rather than shut down, and it must then be closed manually either through the X button and the Windows error popup. And though it's much rarer, I recall it crashing and shutting down on its own twice during regular gameplay, and both times were when either I, or the opponent, brought out Exodia; but according to the Yu-Gi-Oh! Wiki, it may happen with any 3D cutscene. Imagine you're winning a tough duel, you summon an ace card... Crash. Yeah, not good.

Imagine: You see this scene because you just brought out
Exodia "No one has ever been able to summon him!!1!"
The Forbidden One, and then crash. Nice, very nice.

Very fun seeing the Blue-Eyes when it's summoned.
Not so much when it's the 300th time you summon it.

Oh, and those 3D cutscenes? Well, specific cards – mainly ace monsters used by major characters in the various anime series – have an animation that plays during a duel. In the original LotD, those animations played when that monster attacked. This time around? That animation plays when that monster is summoned. A completely unskippable animation, there are no options to remove those, I’ve checked, I’ve tried. Oh, and if the deck you’re using is made to summon that monster repeatedly? Well, guess what will play again. And again. And again. And a-fucking-gain, instead of just once in a duel! The first few times, it’s fine, but afterwards, it gets extremely annoying to see those cutscenes over and over, with no way to cut through. One monster in the Link era has an animation that felt twenty seconds long, for God’s sake. (They're unskippable when the AI triggers them, too...)

One... At... A... Time. At 42,555 Duel Points, that means
buying 106 packs that way. Christ that's long.

Speaking of another non-duel annoyance: Buying packs in the Card Shop still takes forever. Through both winning and losing duels, you’ll gather a lot of Duel Points to spend there. I’ve frequently had five digits' worth of points to spend, at 400 points a pop. But there’s still no bulk-buy option; you buy one pack, it opens, you view the eight cards, back to the selection screen, pick a pack, rinse and repeat. What? You want to buy ten at once and see them all open together? Get real! You want convenience, Master Duel is right next door. Some dude’s gonna talk about it on his blog next week.

The one advantage this game has in regards to its Card Shop compared to the previous LotD is that the pack algorithm was reworked; when you have three copies of a card, chances of getting that card again in its respective pack are lowered, meaning that you will be wasting a lot fewer Duel Points trying to get the last lousy cards in comparison to how things went before.

From a game to the next…

Another bother: Little has changed when it comes to pre-constructed decks used by CPUs across the campaigns that we could already play back in the original LotD. Thematically, it makes sense, as campaign decks don’t need to change all that much; they must still follow the cards used by their users in their duels taken from the anime series. They can’t be too different. But as a result, most of the campaign decks from Duel Monsters all the way to ZEXAL remain unchanged, meaning that if you’ve already played through the previous game, you can do it all over again for much of this one.

Odd-Eyes Performapal Magicians VS Yosenjus.
I think the opponent may have a bit more consistency.

Things only get interesting by Arc-V; LotD’s base version had only one duel in that section, with everything else locked behind DLCs. Since there are none of those this time around, it means we have a full campaign to go through, following the beats of that anime. When LotD came out, the then-newest mechanic of Pendulum monsters was seeking its footing and identity. (Some could argue that it’s still kind of dismissed, since one basically has to build their deck around it if they intend to use it.) Most Pendulum monsters at the time were archetype-specific, and thus very few could be added into any deck without issue. Since then, things have gotten better for the mechanic, and a lot more varied and versatile Pendulum cards have been released, but I suspect that very few decks outside of Arc-V (and a few Challenges) use them, precisely due to the archetype limitations baked into several of them.

Who says you even need Links? ...Okay, fair, most decks
at this point do need them.

Strong board packed with Links... Would be a shame if I
wiped it with my dragon...

In comparison, most Link monsters have loose requirements, and can thus easily be tossed into any deck – so there could be some way to include them in previous challenge decks, yet they aren’t. Instead, Link monsters almost exclusively exist in the challenge decks of VRAINS characters, the folks who are already shown using Link monsters in their associated campaign. None of the other challenge decks see major changes throwing in the new mechanics. Bit of a missed opportunity, but maybe the goal was to ensure the challenge decks unlocked earlier on were still manageable for a new player.

I’ll freely admit that I was spoiled by another Yu-Gi-Oh! game I played long ago, Duel Transer, which included a Free Play mode with options regarding free duels, like starting with a different quantity of Life Points (2000, 4000, 12000 or 16000), or having the ability to play a proper “best 2 of 3” format. I wish those features made a return, but no game seems willing to throw them in.

Final words

I’ve covered everything now. My final verdict on Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution? If you already have the original, this new one won’t add enough to justify purchasing it at full price. Yes, it has two new complete campaigns, includes 2,500 new cards, and is a much better teacher of both Pendulum and Link mechanics and monsters, but that may not be enough nowadays. (The game did come out before the card game’s current Master Rules, which change the game significantly, so a few mechanics had to be adapted; the result, after a few updates, brought it up close enough to the latest Master Rules to no longer be a bother.)

...I'm still salty about that one.

To learn the card game, I do believe LotD:LE is great. If you go through the Story Mode one campaign at a time, duels get progressively tougher as new card types are thrown in. You are subjected to the whims of luck and some decks are much, much better than others. It’s especially infuriating to lose solely because you couldn’t draw the right cards to pull off the combos you’re practically required to do to win a specific duel. Thankfully, you can still use a custom deck whenever you encounter a roadblock – though this would mean gathering enough cards from the shop to build something that can put up a fight. Not that that takes very long.

Due to the inherent reliance on luck in these games, difficulty is not a clean curve; it felt to me as though each anime campaign is tougher than the last, if only because you need to learn to use the cards put in front of you at each duel, and the range of options you have gets greater over time. And if you wish to test your deck-building skills, the 150+ Challenge Duels unlocked across the six campaigns can prove to be quite the test. That said, the game did come out five years ago, so the selection of cards is already outdated.

Most Decks replicating duel from the anime are workable and
could prove to be decent. Though, considering there are 500+
duels to play here, I'd rather not duel every opponent with
every single deck. I don't have time to play 250,000 duels!

I’m still not sure why the game automatically pauses when you move away from the window, even if there’s nothing you can do at that moment; or why the summon animations for significant cards cannot be skipped whatsoever. Though it’s not frequent, the game has crashed on me a few times when it tried playing one of those animations. It also frequently freezes instead of shutting down when pressing the Exit Game button in the main menu. There is no quick-buy option for card packs, which is annoying since you’ll be buying a lot of those (on the plus side, their algorithm was reworked to make it a little easier to get cards you’re missing).

Props to this game for letting me finally understand,
through practice, the damn Pendulums and the Links.
...of the Master Rules 5 era, anyway...

So, it’s fun for the Arc-V and VRAINS content added to it, but if you’ve already played its predecessor, you end up with a ton of stuff that has barely changed, if at all – so yep, like I saaid, you’re better off skipping this one if you already own the original Legacy of the Duelist. See Link Evolution as an updated re-release, at best. However, if Link Evolution is your first non-free Yu-Gi-Oh! game, it’s an excellent way to discover the franchise, and its relation to the anime series can give one a basis to learn the game and its mechanics.

Link Evolution's regular price is 39.99$ USD, but at the moment of posting this article, it's got 75% off at 9.99$ USD!

If you do want a game that’s far more up to date with new cards, well… I’ve got another review coming up this Friday for that.