Review: Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds Decade Duels (XBLA)
At first glance many gamers might scoff at Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds Decade Duels due to the demographics of the tabletop game and of the anime skewing a relatively younger audience. However, beneath the middle school exterior is a pretty solid collectible card game that is meaty enough to keep CCG fans engaged for many hours.
The CCG genre is something pretty vacant on the Xbox. Magic the Gathering came out over a year ago and many gamers were frustrated by the lack of individual deck customization it allowed. Decade Duels remedies that complaint by allowing the player to completely empty their deck and build it with unlocked cards from the ground up. As a CCG fan, that alone kept me playing the game for far more hours than it should have been due because it continually evoked the classic Civilization “just one more turn” feeling as I unlocked a new card I just had to try out.
Games like these are extremely difficult to recommend because it depends entirely on what kind of background with the genre someone has. So, in order to simplify:
Are you new to the Yu-Gi-Oh CCG?
There is a tutorial. Actually there is a big tutorial with a decent amount of text to read (and a little interaction when it asks you to pick cards or do take the step it is modeling) broken into 17 different chapters. All in all, the tutorial took perhaps 30 minutes to go through all the chapters.
Then you must know is that it is punishingly hard in the beginning. So difficult that it took probably 2.5 or 3 hours of solid playing against the computer before I won a single round. Typical to the genre the player is given a starter assortment of cards that really don’t interact in any meaningful way while you are playing against finely tuned decks that will demolish you with hardly a glance. In one of the earliest games the AI pulled out a combo on the first turn that allowed them to kill me in three turns. Absolutely nothing in the starter deck had even the slightest chance against their first turn.
The game expects you to lose though and, even after a loss, it rewards you with a handful of random cards that you can then integrate into your deck to slowly improve, streamline, and perfect something competitive. Be aware though, the cards are completely random so you might have one part of a brilliant combo and have to play hundreds of games to get the one single other card you need for the combo. This is dramatically different from previous YGO games on the Nintendo DS that allowed you to choose packs of cards from specific runs (and therefore increase the odds of getting the specific cards you wanted).
Are you a Yu-Gi-Oh CCG veteran?
The game offers online play, Tag mode, and basically one huge tournament in the single player mode. That may not sound like a huge amount of game but none of it will be done quickly. For example I have put approximately 10 hours into the single player tournament and have yet to win the tournament even once. There is a qualifier tournament that requires you to win three matches (or two depending on how the AI fares) to then enter the main knockout tournament. The main knockout tournament has significantly beefed up AI decks so right around the time a player begins regularly beating the qualifier tournament they will enter the knockout tournament and get kicked around some more.
Unlike the DS versions of the series there is no in-game currency. In previous iterations you unlocked expansions and then bought individual packs of whichever expansion you wanted. In this version the game gives you a bunch of cards after a win and you simply deal with it. As of now there is no DLC available but it is obvious from the setup that expansion packs will be sold for MS points down the road. Prepare to pay.
Should you get it?
If you are a CCG junkie it is a pretty easy recommendation. The game is 800 points and has a huge number of cards to integrate into whatever cunning plans for domination you might have. The lack of in-game currency and the method it has for gaining cards is a complete kick in the teeth, but those gamers cursed with the crave to collect cards, organize them by abilities, and then dream up new ways to use and abuse their abilities will be able to push past that glaring omission. The average gamer out there though will probably find the game relatively convoluted and pretty frustrating. Giving the demo a shot is necessary for this one. But if the tutorial annoys you then you know the game isn’t for you.
This game is hard as f…. I destroyed the computer with the starter deck, got to the semifinal round and the computer just so happens to always get the one card they need to effectively stop my advances to win the round, match, game. It is irritatingly frustrating I wish it was a disk just so that I could take a nice, long, runny, sht all over it…
It is basically the CCG equivalent of rubberbanding in racing games. Frustrating, but it does make the game hard enough to provide pretty taut competition. Possibly to balance a not super-thorough AI? Who knows, but all the TGO video games have been like this.