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Yu-Gi-Oh! Dungeon Dice Monsters (GBA)
by Siibillam-Law
Dungeon Dice Monsters is yet another game in the ever-expanding series of Yu Gi Oh video games. This time, however, it's not about duel monsters and trading cards but more about the short-lived game that was introduced for a few episodes back in the first series as an escape from the constant dueling. It was called Dungeon Dice Monsters ... and, like the title suggests, was played using dice instead of cards.
While the premise is pretty similar to the card game - the point of the game being to summon monsters and attack your enemies' life with it - there are some pretty interesting differences. Unlike the trading card game, you have to construct a path from your side of the field to your opponent where your monsters can travel.
The gameplay works something like this: you throw dice and if you come up with two "summon" crests of the same level (there are various crests on each side of the dice) you can summon a monster. If you don't you can keep the other crests you get (like movement, attack, magic) and store them for later. Once you summon a monster you use the movement crests to advance through the field you're building, use attack crests to attack, defense ones to block and magic and trap crests to activate special abilities. There's a small amount of rules to learn at the beginning but it's simple enough to get the hang of pretty fast.
The game offers various tournaments to play against. In fact, it offers a hell of a lot of tournaments - there are, I think 4 tiers, which each tier having about ten different competitions. You advance through the bracket like any ordinary tournament, and win a dice each time you complete a duel. There are a lot of players to unlock, and you fight the ones you're up against in the tournament. Once you beat them once, they're unlocked and you can play against them in free mode. If you're a perfectionist like me though you like to unlock every character and you'll find that to be quite hard as you can't choose who you're up against in the tournaments.
You then win and can buy dice (but they are expensive so you're usually playing with the same dice for quite some time before something amazing comes along) and although there's quite a lot of dice on offer, I kind of feel like there aren't enough, like after a while you're just playing the same duels.
Aside from that, the game is quite original and at times a bit addictive. I found you don't even have to really like Yu Gi Oh all that much as it's not incredibly relevant to the series. It's a fun little game, and worth it if you're bored of the usual games.
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Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship Tournament 2004 (GBA)
by Siibillam-Law
Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship Tournament 2004 is another one of the many, many video games based around the manga of Yu Gi Oh! or the popular card game. Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship Tournament 2004 (or YWC as I'll shorten it) is, like many other versions, a simple real-to-virtual adaptation of the strategy card game, and like all the ... others it features the characters from the manga and television show to duel against, starting with some of the more basic duelists (like Tristan, Tea, and Bakura) to start off with, with more advanced characters joining the tournament as you fulfill the requirements needed.
That's my first problem with this game. Unlocking characters, at first, is a pretty simple thing. Beat certain characters x times to unlock the next level of characters sounds easy enough, but as you get to some higher level CPUs the conditions become a bit more obscure, like having to remove every magic and trap card from your deck for so many duels (and win), and it becomes impossible to figure it out without consulting the internet.
However, each character unlocked has its own level of skill and intelligence, and it's something that I've always admired in the Yu Gi Oh! games - the AI. Having to input all card rulings and strategies must have been complicated.
Unlike other YuGiOh games, though, there's less interaction. In other titles you could travel around a map, or through a city, winning duels and entering mini competitions and so on (read my review on Worldwide Edition) but in this one you simply get given a panel o f duelists to choose from, making it less like a real tournament and more like some kind of vending machine for duels. It misses a bit of the RPG-feel the others had.
There are, however, more cards to choose from, and more cards to win. It lacks the "input code" method used in some other games, to be able to put in the number of your real cards into the game, thus unlocking it for you. Maybe they thought it would make the game too easy.
YWC also features more modern and up-to-date card rulings, limiting certain cards, and banning others. Once you completed the game, though, you can choose to turn these restrictions off.
Yu-Gi-Oh World Championship isn't anything really original, and it differs only from the others in cards featured and AI of players - making characters like Yami Yugi and Kaiba incredibly hard sometimes, but altogether the game plays and looks just like any other YuGiOh game.
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