Hiatus? Again? (Update on the situation)

I felt like I had to post something here today, mostly to explain the situation and why I might be going on a short hiatus.

First things first, I might not post a review on Friday. I need to build a buffer of reviews, so that I can better balance my actual job and this hobby of mine.

When I'll resume posting after the hiatus, you can expect a few Steam Packs, because they're a quick way to get rid of some clutter in my large Steam collection. I've been thinking about maybe just not write about every game that I play, but I actually prefer to do so for each game. Even if they're short.

I got a couple movie reviews coming up as well, with probably one right after the Steam Packs. I've yet to decide on the order, and whether I'll review something bigger before moving on to a film review.

My second dilemma is this: I've been struggling more and more to find themes for Top 12 articles. Outside of the usual "Top 12 episodes of X" that I could make in the future, there isn't much that I find myself able to talk about in those. I'm seriously considering dropping those.

My third dilemma is this: I've been upgrading my room so that I could move my Nintendo Wii there, hoping to no longer have to rely on the living room TV, which is always in use by one or another of the members of the family. I got a better TV, I got cable and a DVD player in order to watch movies on it rather than on my computer. More importantly, I now have a set-up that could let me transfer my Wii here, with some work.

However, that doesn't solve the next issue: Time. A lot of Wii and Nintendo 3DS games are fairly long, and I would need to spend much of my time playing them. I wcould only play on certain times in the living room. Even if I brought my console to my room I'd still need to spend much of my awake time away from work playing and writing.

I've personally asked my boss to do 32-hour weeks inatead of 40, in part so that I'd have more free time to do these reviews, and in part because working five nights a week would burn me out eventually. With four, I can get a more normal sleep schedule on the days where I don't work, However, I sleep a lot more during the week days now, which also cuts into my free time. And I'm not cutting into sleep hours!

I have no plans to stop doing Wii and Nintendo 3DS game reviews. They've become more difficult to do because I don't own capture cards, and therefore I can't record my playthrough and use them to add images to my reviews. That's why I resorted to Let's Plays. On top of that, like I said, a lot of Wii and 3DS games are prety lengthy, so grabbing enough good images from Let's Plays can be difficult.

The best solution I can see to all this is to go on a hiatus, write as many reviews as possible, and get a  buffer of articles done. I used to have a decent buffer in early 2018, but the long reviews posted this year (especially GTAV and Undertale) pretty much led to that buffer no longer existing. I need to build up one, now. So I might not post reviews for a couple weeks. Hopefully I can come back soon with more content, and hopefully better content overall.

Oh, and with Google+ ending next year, please make sure to follow me on my other official pages for the blog!

Steam Pack 14

Might as well get that one out of the way, it’s been in my plans for a while. I swear, I don’t play games nearly as fast as I buy them. Is that addiction? Maybe. Probably. What I should try to do someday is a big month with nothing but Steam Packs, in order to get some clutter out of the collection. There are games that I don’t feel I’d play for more than an hour, while others I end up playing far longer than the average playtime (as recorded on websites such as HowLongToBeat). I tend to try and beat games before reporting on them, too. Today, as usual, four more games are being reviewed! Let’s start with…

Chronology

In a Steampunk world, an old man with a watch that lets him travel between two time periods goes on a quest to save his present by changing the past.

Chronology is a game released to Steam by Bedtime Digital Games on May 12^th, 2014. This absolutely gorgeous adventure is in the purest tradition of puzzle platformers, a genre that seems extremely popular among indie developers. How many of those have I reviewed so far? I’ve lost count.

"I'm a talking snail that can stop time!"
"Not the strangest thing I've seen today."

The man, known only as the Old Inventor, thus has to travel across the wilderness in order to prevent the world-changing event of the past that has led to the grim and desperate present. His quest begins in the forest, and continues into the busy areas of town. With his watch, he can see both the past and the present, and when the path is blocked in one period he can proceed in the other. He can even change elements of the past, such as replanting a young tree to a different spot, and see it grow to be used as a platform in the present. On his journey he soon meets a big snail that talks and has time-freezing abilities of its own, though both travel in time together and can still move while time is frozen. Those two abilities, as you can imagine, become necessary together in order to get through the various traps of the partly-destroyed town of the final levels. And hey, the snail can even move around some odd corners, serve as a steed or even a platform in some situations!

On our way to save... er... the past? The present? The future?

An old man and a snail? It’s like the synopsis to a Pixar movie.

And so this adventure takes them to the heart of the city, where the Old Inventor and his slightly less sane acolyte harnessed the energy of a new and magical power source, only for it to go horribly wrong… and perhaps he can undo the bad present…

Hop! I'm no fan of snails, but this one's very useful.

Setting aside any nitpicks I would have about the time-travel elements of the story (because I’m that kind of sci-fi nerd), I would say this is a very good game! The puzzles aren’t extremely difficult for the most part, though as you progress more and more of them use a combination of the time-based mechanics. The banter between the childlike snail and the old inventor is pretty fun, and the story remains simple. Most of the tale is told through the environment, in a way. Seeing the lush, green past and the broken, decrepit present says more than words would. To top it off, the game is drop-dead gorgeous. I am left in awe at the beauty and detail of the environments visited.

How to open a door, puzzle platform style:
-Find key.
-Blast door, set it on fire, douse it, travel time, walk through.

The controls are pretty simple, and there are features to prevent frustration, such as the snail which cannot cross certain types of areas - in which case the Old Inventor can call for it and it’ll teleport near the man. Don’t ask how that works, that one stays unexplained.

I haven’t run into a lot of roadblocks here, aside from a few tricky puzzles here or there, especially at the end - which is normal, the tougher puzzles at the end of the puzzle-platform game, duh. Though I also ran into a glitch once where the old inventor got stuck into a floating piece of land, but it’s the only case I encountered. Also, to reach his goals, the inventor often does morally-questionable things. Needs of the many yadda yadda, I guess.

"I'm stuck in the walls!" Ah, the hazards of time travel.

Overall, a very fun experience, perhaps on the short side (it can be beaten in about two hours), but enjoyable nonetheless. Get it for 4.99$ on the Steam Store.

Dyna Bomb

I think I both get this one and don’t get it. The concept is simple enough, though: You control a little jetpack-wearing hero and must find your way to the exit of each level, collecting as many jewels as possible on the way.

You gotta do this quick, or you're gonna lose!

Made and published by 7 Raven Studios, and released on May 13^th, 2016, Dyna Bomb is a free-to-play title with plenty of platforming levels, with puzzles sprinkled in. Finding keys to open doors, traveling around in portals, fairly common video game fixtures. More than 64 levels split across 8 worlds, that’s not half-bad.

You can just look for the end, or you can go around killing enemies using bombs found inside the level. Be careful, though. Dyna dies instantly from being touched by an enemy, a laser, a blast… Get ready to die and restart levels a lot in here. And I do mean a LOT, because even the lightest touch of something deadly will kill. Sometimes you won’t even notice something is deadly until the character hits it. And if the enemies and hazards don’t kill you, maybe the time limit will, so you should hurry! Can you get three stars on every level?

I swear that last sentence sounded like I was shilling Angry Birds… If Dyna Bomb so far sounds in this review like it’s a mobile game put up on Steam, don’t worry, you’ll get that exact feeling while playing it, too.

The controls are bothersome, with the playable character rising faster than they move whenever they’re flying left or right, meaning it’s easy to hit one of the electrified spheres of an intermittent electric zapper blocking your way. Or, well, literally anything deadly on the screen. It’s like some messed-up cheap Mega Man with the controls as fickle as Flappy Bird. Oh, but don’t worry, you can continue where you are if you pay diamonds, the in-game currency that you collect as you complete levels.

...Eh. My luck's terrible. I doubt I'll be
around this slot machine much.

You can also spend the diamonds gathered on a slot machine to get items at random, or purchase proper power-ups before a level in order to beat it more easily. The entire thing feels as though 7 Raven Studios wanted really really badly to add microtransactions to it (pay real cash for diamonds to spend!), but had to take those away.

This game is alright, but I’m not a fan. It plays well and has a wide range of options, including two playable characters (not that they make much of a difference), but I was eventually turned off by the great difficulty as well as the labyrinthine design and length of the levels. That game feels designed to nickel-and-dime you… or, well, make you buy more microtransactions. It’s not bad, and I guess it’s a nice challenge if you feel like having a free game to play once in a while… but it’s not for me.

Rabbit Hole 3D

Reading has never been more dangerous!

How to go through an R.

Developed by Somi, published by Zero Rock Entertainment and released on April 25^th, 2014, Rabbit Hole 3D: Steam Edition is equal parts an arcade game and a short audiobook. Words will fly towards you very fast and you must pass through the holes between letters. That already sounds tricky. The levels are created from excerpts of the book Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, in particular the moment where Alice sees the white rabbit and follow him down, well… you can figure that one out.

The game features eight levels, which you can play one after the other in Ranked Mode, with no pauses between levels. Survive as long as possible and your final time will be recorded. Then there’s a solo mode in which you can play every level, one at a time, as preparation for the full game. Your puny little cube has only two Hit Points (or, rather, "lives") total, so it can hit a letter's solid blocks once and the next time it’s Game Over.

Gotta catch 'em all - the letters, I mean!

But don’t worry! Each letter forms a 5X5 square, and obviously your cube will have to pass through the word in an open hole among the letters. Some letters are red, others are blue: You’ll notice that all the blue letters are part of the word “RABBIT HOLE”. Pass through the word, close to a blue letter, and the corresponding letter will be darkened at the bottom of the screen in the expression "RABBIT HOLE". Collect all the letters of the words “RABBIT HOLE”, and you get an extra life! Not that collecting those letters will be easy, mind you.

BuT THEn AgAIn, cOLLEcTIng LETTERs Of THAT wORd Is AcTuALLy nOT sO dIffIcuLT, cOnsIdERIng HOw fREquEnT THEy TEnd TO BE In THE EngLIsH lAnguAgE. THE HARdEsT TO cOLLECT mAy BE THE LETTER B, sIncE yOu nEEd TwO Of THOsE, sO LOOk OuT fOR THAT OnE. ALsO THE wORds mOvE By cRAzy fAsT…

Almost there, my Dictionary Dex is almost complete! 

I can excuse the game’s difficulty since it’s meant to be played as a challenge, an arcade of sorts and the best times are recorded in the game’s high scores. I never made it past Level 4. It’s truly difficult and you need to learn the text in order to know what’s coming and plan your letter quest accordingly. Since the words move so fast, you will need to collect as many lives as possible in the early portions, so that you can face the later ones. It does reward your memory and reaction speed. It helps that the excerpt is read in portions as the level progresses, so you know what to expect soon.

But hey, I’ll always appreciate a game that is challenging, has an interesting concept, and promotes literature. That’s a plus in my book. Cool stuff, if you’ve got three dollars on the side.

Viridi

Let’s end this on a relaxing title. Calming, soothing… It’s just about taking care of plants.

Plant pot. Snail is mandatory. You must have one.

This simple game was made by Zoe Vartanian, Badru, Isa Hutchinson and Michael Bell, published by Ice Water Games and released on August 20^th, 2015. You get a pot for your plants, then a couple starting plants. You even get your own mandatory pet snail! Geez, start this review with a snail, end it with a snail. That’s funny. You can spray water on the plants whenever they need it, but remember that plants take time to grow. Not exactly real-time, mind you, but a couple weeks here at least. Keep your little world alive, spray only when necessary, don’t kill any plants, and you’re good to go! Plants can live a couple days without you watering them, so this really is a game you’ll play only for a few minutes at a time, since any action you can do will take, at best, a couple seconds.

There are achievements for this game, encouraging you to grow to full maturity at least one of every single plant in the game, and then keep on raising more and more. Eventually you can free up space by uprooting mature plants and getting them in the garden, a mystical place I’ve never witnessed. In the game, I mean, in real life I have seen the outside world… yeah… we do have a garden… I mean, right now it’s covered in snow. This is Canada in November after all…

5$ upfront, no rent, make sure to keep it tidy.
Curfew at 5 PM.

But that’s not all. There’s a shop in this game, and as you can guess there’s no in-game currency. Bring in your real money, and buy a map to a grove, or 5$ for a key to an apartment - wow, rent is cheap in that world. Maybe a decoration for cats? That’s 3$. Yeah, I had two of those at home, I just pawned them off to buy myself a key to a nice and cozy apartment. Then you can buy seedlings of any plant in the game, each with their scientific name (from Cheiridopsis Denticulata to Senecio Rowleyanus, passing by Kalanchoe Thrysiflora and Fenestraria Aurantiaca, and yes I repeatedly made sure that I spelled all of those correctly), and prices ranging from 9 to 39 cents. You do get one random seedling per week for free, though - among all the plants in the game, even the ones you already have. Want that completion? Be super-lucky for a minimum of 23 weeks, or pay about… hm. My calculations get to 4.07$ USD. For one seed of every plant? Not that bad, actually.

Still not a fan of snails... but it's a good tie-in to close the review.

Though it’s mostly a free game meant to be enjoyed at your own pace, so it’s not like you need to rush to get everything done in here. Play it for a few minutes at a time, or leave it running with its soothing music and calming visuals while you do anything else. There’s no hurry, right?

Stick around for Watching Paint Dry: The Game... What do you mean, someone actually tried to make that a real game on Steam? 

..............................................Urgh.

And that covers today’s four games. Maybe something in there interests you, maybe nothing does. It’s alright. Part of my goal with these Steam Packs is to play through my backlog and talk about all those games for this blog, yes. However, I would be very happy to hear that any of my articles and quick reviews have directed someone towards any of these games. Made you discover something. Made you play and enjoy a game you may have never heard of before. That makes what I do actually worth it.

I think I’ll work on a few more Steam Packs. I might try to review a Nintendo 3DS game before the end of the year…

Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows

I thought I wanted to play a quick game? This one could be longer than both games I reviewed before it… combined! But it’s a lot simpler to discuss. Sorry, there’s no Halloween review this year, I didn’t plan for anything along those lines. Could’ve done some more FNAF, but… nah, it can wait.

I’ve always loved tower defense games. The combination of puzzle, strategy and space management… ah, I love that. The very third game I reviewed on this blog was a tower defense game for the Nintendo DS, too: Desktop Tower Defense. There have been dozens of versions and variations, often with different mechanics; some with unchangeable paths, others where you can build the path yourself or modify it partway into a level.

Ah yes, Desktop Tower Defense. A game I
haven't touched in roughly five years...

Of all of Game In A Bottle's latest games, only one
isn't GemCraft. Dedication, right there!

Game in a Bottle brings to us Gemcraft, a series of tower defense games that were unique in execution. The towers of this strategy game wore colors, each color had an ability of its own, and you could in theory upgrade towers almost endlessly. Your sole limit was your bank of mana, which was used to build anything - towers, traps, walls, amplifiers and so on - and survive whenever monsters reached your Orb, the source of your power. Monsters reaching the Orb are respawned back at the entrance, shaving an amount of mana off your pool (an amount that gets bigger as you progress through a level’s waves, increasing difficulty), and go through the path again. The waves of monsters usually follow precise paths, but later games feature levels where you need to build a long path with walls in order to slow the monsters down - and, with some leeway, you can create an inescapable death trap where, by demolishing one wall and building another, you can capture most monsters in a loop, while leaving them vulnerable from the blast of your gem-powered towers. The left-side bar shows the progression of waves, while the right side is your gem workshop, allowing construction of gems up to Level 12 (though it’s possible to go far beyond). Some games also experiment with additional abilities such as Spells or gem enhancements. As you gain levels, you get points to use on skills that reduce the cost of towers or gems, improve the abilities of gems or have other kinds of impacts on the field.

The series has had only four main games:

-GemCraft (AKA Chapter One), which was fairly basic and in which you could only build Gems at random among the colors available in a level, adding so much unnecessary fake difficulty to the game;

-GemCraft Chapter Zero (AKA “Gem of Eternity”), which added the extra modes to every level, with now the possibility to replay early levels with some added difficulty and more Experience at the key;

-Gemcraft Labyrinth, a massive game that had 169 levels around a square map, starting at the bottom center and leading to the very center, after going around the map. It’s also where, FINALLY, you could create exactly the Gems you wanted;

-Today’s game, Chasing Shadows, also known as Chapter 2;

-And another game is in development!

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.

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!