A beautifully produced, rule heavy, text heavy, story heavy, lore heavy, chess-like card battle royale that could have Y
In Yu-Gi-Oh!: Duelist of the Roses you will notice something different about the way Duel Monsters is played. The game is played on a huge grid, in which each duelist is on opposite sides of the grid. The grid comes off as being a chessboard. In fact, the whole game is played almost like chess. You and your opponent start off with a deck leader (which in a way acts like the king). The deck leader allows you to play different cards in order to protect your deck leader or attack your opponent. You can place cards at the right, left, front, or back of the deck leader. Each card can only move one space and with the objective being to get a card through your opponent’s defenses in order to wipe out the deck leader. Once an opponent’s life points have been reduced, you win the duel. After reading that you probably think this game is easy. Wrong! This game is insanely difficult even for a skilled player at Yu-Gi-Oh!. I can assure you that when you play this game for the first time you will lose. It is very hard to defeat the first opponent in this game due to the game’s high difficulty level. It appears as though the opponent always draws the card they need, and always have stronger monsters than you. However, the game does have a neat feature where you can combine cards to create stronger ones. There is a drawback to this feature and that is that if you don’t know which cards to fuse you lose both of the cards, making he game that much more difficult.
There is one really cool thing about the way the card battles are done in this game. When two opposing cards land on the same space a 3-D battle takes place. You can tell some time went into the development of the stages and monsters when you see them. The monsters actually look like how they look on the card, which is a big, plus for Yu-Gi-Oh! fans. The only bad thing I could find with 3-D battles is that they tend to get repetitive. All of the monsters only have one attack animation, which does get boring after playing an hour-long duel. That is why the option of turning them off was included, which was a good idea.
The graphics in this game are rather dull except for the 3D battle graphics. The traveling portion of this game is represented with a map and arrows. On this map you get to challenge your opponents. You then get to travel further on the map once you beat an opponent. The only problem with this map is that it could have looked better. Aside from the game’s great opening, which features the 3D models of the cards, everything else is just average. I think with one more year the game could have looked amazing.
The music in this game is neither great nor poor. It is a mix of techno and rock music, but it doesn’t really go well with this type of game. The music in the 3D battles varies depending on which type of field the characters are at. For example, if the cards are on a grass field you get nice peaceful music. Overall, the music in this game is average at best. The sound effects in this game are the usual hack and slash, nothing really special.
Duelist of the Roses has a tremendous amount of replay value. There are plenty of things you can do once you complete this game. These things range from collecting cards to making your deck stronger. The game encourages you to go back and get stronger cards, as you will need them once you get to the final duel. If you’re a big fan of Yu-Gi-Oh!, this game will keep you busy for a while.
Overall, Yu-Gi-Oh!: Duelist of the Roses is a run of the mill game. When you play this game you feel as though this game should be better than it is. I just hope the next Yu-Gi-Oh! game they come out with will be better. Despite its shortcomings, this game is still worth a rental for Yu-Gi-Oh! fans.