A Whole New Look on Portable Card Games... - 7/10
As a player of the GBA game 'Yu-Gi-Oh! Ultimate Masters: World Championship Tournament 2006', I was itching to get this game as soon as I could, then the evident lack of copies in Australia (two stores in NSW had it, every other one was Sold Out), brought me to realize that I was going to have to do something different to get this game, namely ship it from Hong Kong.
As soon as it hit my doorstep I had it in my DS. First impression wasn't good, with the basic looking menus reminding me of '06 too much, but then once I hit deeper parts I gained a lot more interest.
One of the things that sparked my attention was the ability to customize and pretty much decorate your character, with the ability to change hair style and color, give your character different forms of apparel and switch what disk you have (you start off with nothing but a Brown Jacket and an Academy Disk).
The next, and most prominent, feature that caught my eye was the double screened layout. The developers have used the game layout from the GBA games, nothing much new there, of course apart from touch-screen ability and improved thumbnails of your cards. The top screen however, is tuned very nicely. As you play your game you can see a graphical representation of your duel being played out in the top screen, with such useful information as character quotes (will get to that soon), character thumbnails and overall HP. This piece of work had me by a leash it intrigued me that much, and I sat there for about 4-6 hours playing nothing but that, only sparing time for the bathroom, and the occasional durry and coffee. Truly, I was hooked.
Here's a fun little extra that you should love playing around with. The characters say things that summarize what just happened. Such as, they say a line if you have 2500+ HP taken off in one hit, and they say something different from that if the damage is only say, 2000HP. You can tweak with these lines, being able to change what your character says. Unfortunately though, you have to choose a line for each subject from the game's list of quotes, meaning you can't use your own warped logic to make the game interesting and confusing. That's fun, but it's no fun as well.
Once I'd put it down, I was satisfied with the game. However, when I started playing later that night, I realized how little the game changes between 0% and 100% completion (which can take quite a phenomenal time to achieve), with the same mechanics running the game from start to finish.
Graphics - 7/10 - Run off the mill DS graphics, but the synchronization between the two screens during a duel is stunning.
Sound - 6/10 - Once again, repetitive tunes that you hate but can't get out of your head.
Gameplay - 8/10 - It is definitely still Yu-Gi-Oh!. That much is obvious, but new features lightly enhance gameplay.
Replay Value - 5/10 - If you could play this game from start to finish, then decide you were going to do it all again, you'd be insane.
Overall - 7/10 - This game is a lovely DS port of the GBA games pretty much, it just has touch-screen and character customization, nothing much else.
Submitted by Brannigan
12/11/2007
18
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Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship 2007
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