YU-GI-OH! LEGACY OF THE DUELIST: LINK EVOLUTION
There’s still heart in these cards
Over time card games have to evolve. Yu-Gi-Oh, for better or worse, fully embraces the allure of the gimmick. 1 New and progressively harder to understand key abilities, such as pendulum summons and link summons, make each generation feel almost like an entirely new card game.
This game contains a massive amount of content, split into five chunks that represent each of the five most recent anime series, 2 with the framing device of being taught the history of duelling by INF-N8. Each campaign gives an overview of the plot told though basic visual novel sections. However, almost every duel in the series is represented and playable. You can bring your own deck of cards to the fight (spend in-game duelist points to buy virtual booster packs), but what’s most fun is playing with the ‘historic’ deck used by the protagonist in the show.
Beating characters earns loot like cards and deck recipes, but it also unlocks a reverse duel, allowing you to play as the opponent in that story section instead of the usual hero, doubling the already massive number of duels recreated here. On top of that there are modes for draft play, sealed play, and both ranked and casual online multiplayer matches.
The digitised card system gets the job done, building on other versions we’ve seen in the past, but still has irritants. For instance, instead of getting a window of time to activate a quickplay card, it gives you a dialogue prompt after every action asking if you want to use it. That said, with so much content, it’s hard to complain. Oscar Taylor-Kent