Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction [GBA] Review

Developer	Konami
Publisher	Konami
Genre	Role-Playing

I guess with a license as lucrative as Yu-Gi-Oh, a smart developer would pump out as many titles as possible while the license is still hot. Clearly, that’s what Konami is doing here - it seems like every month or so Yugi and the gang get lumped into some video game adventure or another. Unfortunately, the quality of these releases has been hit or miss. Reshef of Destruction, Konami’s second attempt at a Yu-Gi-Oh card-based RPG, is better than last year’s The Sacred Cards, but there are still some basic game design flaws that will annoy even the biggest Yu-Gi-Oh fans.

Yugi’s treasured Millennium Puzzle has vanished and, predictably, it’s up the player to recover it - and other magic items - in order to save the world. This is done, of course, by playing a card game. As a friend of Yugi’s, the nameless player character will spend most of the game card-dueling and tweaking his deck, but there’s a fair amount of exploration and talking with NPCs, as in most other RPGs. The story itself won’t thrill the average gamer, but Yu-Gi-Oh fans should enjoy it.

For those unfamiliar with the Yu-Gi-Oh card game, it’s a fairly simplistic, but still enjoyable, collectable card game along the same lines as Magic: The Gathering or the Pokemon Trading Card Game. Players summon monsters, each with an Attack and Defense stat, and use them to attack each other and defend themselves. When attacking, monsters use the attack stat - and do that much damage to the opponent - unless there’s a defending monster, in which case that monster’s defense stat is compared to the attacking creature’s attack stat to determine a victor. High-level creatures can only be summoned by sacrificing other creatures - so a good deck will have a mix of high and low level creatures.

In this version of the Yu-Gi-Oh game, each creature also has an element assigned to it, and each element is superior to one other element and inferior to one other. It’s basically a game of rock-paper-scissors with 11 different objects. There is one type that is unaffected by other elements, but for all the others, even the weakest creatures can destroy the most powerful ones, as long as the elements match favorably for the weak creature. It’s incredibly frustrating to sacrifice one or two creatures in order to bring out a high-level monster, only to have it killed by a pathetically weak one.

Decks also contain spell and trap cards, which have a wide variety of effects. Spell cards can do all sorts of things, from revealing your opponent’s hand or recovering life points to destroying all creatures in play or preventing your opponent from attacking you. Trap cards, on the other hand, are activated when the enemy attacks you; they usually destroy the attacking monster - but some have more interesting effects.

The duels are fast and fun, but here’s the problem: as in The Sacred Cards, this version of Yu-Gi-Oh uses an experience system that prohibits how powerful of a deck you can use. Initially, only the weakest cards are at your disposal, and you’ll have to play for a very long time until the better cards become even usable to you. Then, you’ll have to acquire them, which is a whole other problem. Each duel you win earns you one new card, the value of which is based on the value of the card you anted up at the beginning of the match. You can’t ante up a card if you only have one of it, so you’ll be using some pretty lousy ante cards initially; it makes it hard to get a powerful deck together. You can buy and sell cards at a shop, but good cards are extremely expensive.

It seems like the card-acquiring system in place here reduces a fair amount of the challenge and strategy to a simple matter of who has the better cards. Rather than crafting a clever deck in which the cards complement each other well, with a good balance of elements, it’s also largely about how many duels you’ve won and how powerful your cards are.

Graphically, the game hasn’t changed at all from the Sacred Cards. It’s pretty much the same set of character sprites, but the card art is about as nice as possible on the GBA. While most of the detail is obscured when dueling, examining an individual card provides a nice shot of the original artwork. The game’s soundtrack is utterly forgettable, and pretty much on par for the genre. It’s a card game, afterall.

Bottom Line - Reshef of Destruction, like most sequels, is better than the original. Too bad it’s not a huge leap over it. It’s still a mediocre card-based RPG, and there are a few annoying gameplay elements whose inclusion leaves me puzzled. For the patient, there is certainly a lot of gameplay to be had here. It’s just that much of it will be spent gaining experience to wield more powerful cards. For Yu-Gi-Oh fans, though, this is probably worth picking up, despite its problems.

Review by Joe Mackie