Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards (Part 3)

Part 1 can be read here, and Part 2 can be read here.

Hello again, and welcome back to my biggest review ever! If you think I'm done, you're sadly mistaken. If you hate Yu-Gi-Oh, you're in trouble, because I'm gonna spend this part and another one STILL talking about this. If you love to hate the series, though (or just find it very enjoyable to riff on), then you should be happy that I'm making fun of it... right?

Okay, enough chatter, I got Ghouls to kill- No? Then, beat up? No? Punch on the nose? Still not? ...Okay, alright! Defeat in a card game... Alright, I understood! God damn it! I still think everything in this series would be solved a lot faster if a weapon entered the equation.

"Oh noes! You used Lame Concept! I lost the duel and my social life!"

So... When we left off last time, we had news that Joey (the normal guy who relies way too much on luck; it's turned against him on a few occasions) and Téa (the moral support who does very little aside from being the cute token girl and talk about friendship) have gone missing. Like that was not enough, Ghouls have chased away most duelists, even most of the rather good ones. You know, just saying it out loud, I realize how utterly ridiculous this sounds: An evil organization using a children card game to achieve world domination. Eh... I'll roll with it because it's faithful to the original manga...

Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards (Part 2)

Part 1 can be read here.

Welcome back to this long, long, LONG review of a Game Boy Advance game! I gotta admit, I really wanted to write that review earlier. I'm gonna show the full extent of my geek past: I collected Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I have read almost the whole first series (the one with Yugi as the protagonist). I watched the anime until the end of the Duelist Kingdom saga, the one that happened on an island and during which the game's rules were still a "broken, exploitable mess".

Yeah, things were simpler back then.
I mean, who would throw away Duel City
for another duel through a videotape?
I would!

I knew that I couldn't just make a small review for it. This game's plot is huge, and there's so much to talk about that I wouldn't have been able to keep it to two parts. Or three. No, I have to end the Game Boy Advance era with the largest review I could possibly write for a GBA game. This is it! I've been trying to make this review my masterpiece (until a future review takes its spot as biggest, best, greatest review I've written).

So, where were we last time? Oh, right. Orange Cap Boy (which I nicknamed Nikorasu; it's got more dignity than LEGO Brick) has just defeated the lame-ass Esper Roba and Bakura. As he heads right, he sees that Bonz, the zombie wannabe, has been kicked out of his graveyard. By who, you may ask? By a Ghoul. No, not a real one, just another lame-ass character who decided that being a villain would be fun. So Nikorasu defeats the villain and makes him run away. Bonz rejoices and quickly heads back to his resting place.

Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards (Part 1)

Oh YES! This is the final Game Boy Advance game in my collection! I've kept the best – and the worst! – for last! Hell yeah, this is gonna be one awesome review, I tell ya!

First off, a little history. You all know the Yu-Gi-Oh franchise, right? It's that bunch of losers playing a card game against other losers. ...Okay, I'm a little harsh. It's the story of that guy, Yugi, who assembles the legendary Millenium Puzzle, an artifact from the Egyptian era. This puzzle contains the spirit of a Pharaoh who strangely looks like him, and that second Yugi (named Yami Yugi for the sake of having a name) takes over Yugi's body whenever his host is in danger. Did I mention that Yami enacts revenge by challenging his enemies in dangerous games? At first it was all sorts of games, but by the ninth book in the manga it became pretty much strictly a card game: “Magic and Wizards” as the manga called it, or “Duel Monsters” as the anime called it, to be precise. The card game was renamed Yu-Gi-Oh later, as an homage to the series.

BTW, gonna ruin it right now;
the second Yugi leaves at the end.
...Ha!

The first manga series had over 35 volumes, and got a cult following thanks to the card game de-fictionalized, the anime, the hammy and weird feel of the series, and of course the three sequel series that followed it (that is, GX, 5Ds and Zexal). Oh yeah, it's also the anime series that led to the creation of the Abridged parody format thanks to Matthew Billany AKA LittleKuriboh. This innovative parody format got so popular that a bajillion Abridged series appeared afterwards. Of course, for any good series, there has to be a tie-in video game. As you can guess, the Yu-Gi-Oh! series has had a lot of video game adaptations, because a card game like this really translates well to video games. Or... well... In some cases, anyway.

One major arc of the series was Duel City, which spawned from Books 17 to 31 of the manga, had one of the most awesome villains in the entire franchise, and was overall a lot of fun. Yugi's rival Kaiba settled a whole card game tournament in Domino City, where most main characters live. Kaiba's plan is to get his hands on three God cards that would make him the King of Games. However, two of those are in the hands of an evil organization called the Ghouls, who... do their terrorism... through card games. Hey, I said it was hammy and weird, you knew what to expect! Of course, Yugi and his Yami join the tournament, along with their friend Joey, not a half-bad player himself. In this arc, Yugi deals with the evil Ghouls, which are cheating bastards, while Joey meets many previously-seen duelists who aren't half-bad either. Guess what? Both make it to the final 8. Also guess who defeats the leader of the Ghouls in the tournament's finale? Why, Yami Yugi of course! 

Phew, that was a long story recap. Can't wait to see it made into a game.

Who do we get to play? Yugi? Joey?

Sprites from The Spriters Resource.

...A nobody wearing an orange cap and shirt. What the Hell, really?

Ready to see me make a complete geek of myself in front of all of you? Well, wait no more, here it is! This is Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards, a game so great it's awesome in some aspects, and so bad it's good in other aspects!

New Updated List of Games

It's that time of the year again! Since the last list, in November 2013, my collection has grown quite a lot. Not to mention the amount of reviews that I've released since. Therefore, I think it would be better if I made the list of games that I own, those that I have reviewed so far and those that are to be reviewed.

By the way, with Planned All Along's first anniversary coming soon, don't forget to answer to the poll on the rigth side of the screen! Tell me which game or which theme month I should do in July 2014, amd what I should add to the blog for its first anniversary.

Top 12 Heartwarming Nintendo Moments

After last week, I needed some happiness. And though Nintendo does a lot of comedy (I'd need a Top 100 to list the best moments of comedy in the Nintendo franchises), it's also very strong when it comes to emotions. Nintendo makes you feel good. Okay, you could say that for almost any video game series. But Nintendo always finds ways to insert heartwarming moments in its video games. If you're really sensitive, those moments could bring a tear of joy to your eye. Here are 12 of those moments.

Please, keep in mind: Those are MY Top 12 heartwarming moments. Most of those moments, I have seen them in their respective games or I know they were touching to a lot of people. As a result, if there is something missing on this list, a moment that you really liked and that you wished you had seen here, well... Not only I need to keep it to 12, but I also had to pick among the many moments I remembered or those that seemed to bring the most emotions to me or others. If you don't see your favorite moment here, tell it in the comments! I'll be very happy to read about it. Also, be warned: Many of those moments refer to the endings of the games, so read at your own risk if you don't want to get spoilers.

Let's get this happiness party started!

(Out-of-character note: I really, really need this. As I was writing this review, I was playing Pokémon HeartGold, as I was about 90 species away from completing the Pokédex. However, I found out that my save file had been corrupted and, therefore, erased. Nearly three hundred hours of fun were taken out of my lifetime along with some of my real-life friend Laura's favorite Pokémon that she traded to me, some exclusives she got who knows when. As a result, as I wrote this Top 12, I felt extremely saddened. Therefore, excuse me in advance if this article is not the funniest. Even though it had been planned for a while before this happened, it's still a very heartbreaking thing to see all your efforts amount to nothing because of a glitch. That was April 11^th. Even at the time this article is posted, I might still be very bitter about it. Please don't mind it too much, but... Yeah, I need something to make me happier again and make me forget that I lost over two hundred fucking hours to a game that glitched on me. Wouldn't be so bad if I hadn't spent so long playing it, spent so long trying to get everything... and I had nigh everything I could catch in it, I was one - catchable - Pokémon away from succeeding! But... Damn. Look, please enjoy this list, I worked on it as much as I worked on my other Top 12s, so... to fully enjoy the moments listed here, please try to forget this lengthy paragraph and just be happy that Nintendo is really able to get emotions out of you with the stories in their games.)