When I turned on Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist on my Xbox One, I found myself not remembering anything about the animated series other than the main character has crazier than Cloud Strife hair and something about Blue Eyes White Dragon. As a preteen in the early 2000’s, I recall seeing very few episodes of the show. It was something I flipped to when nothing else was on. I gave this game a chance because frankly, I really couldn’t recall much about it and never even played the card game, in person or electronically.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist is a compilation of old games that recalls the events of the 17+ year old series. There’s no voice acting in the campaign mode, so I found myself reading the voices outloud like a lunatic. The text felt like I was reading a high school creative writing assignment. There was nothing redeeming nor interesting about what they said. Luckily, you can skip through all the cut scenes and go straight to the game.
6,000+ cards are featured and you don’t need to purchase any DLC to get them. All cards are included in the game and you can copy other people’s decks after you defeat them in battle then modify it however you’d like.
I streamed the game on Twitch for about three hours and asked my viewers, who knew more about the series than I did, why certain things happened. It turns out, no one knew what was going on at all.
The text on the cards is illegible, so there’s a small side area on the right and left of the screen that shows the Attack, Defense, and information below it. There’s also a ton of symbols listed but since they never explain what they are, you have to click to view more information on the card to know.
When Yugi’s grandpa holds up Blue Eyes White Dragon, it had no text on it and the picture of Blue Eyes had the game’s logo plastered on the bottom left hand corner. What?
For those of you who are achievement hunters, when you fight Kaiba, you can put together Exodius and get that mega 100 point achievement in no time.
So far, the only CGI animation I encountered is when someone played Blue Eyes White Dragon. Other than that, the most interesting animation is the card mat on the bottom that you play on.
These games haven’t aged well at all. After Yugi fights Kaiba for the first time, Maximillian Pegasus, the creator of the Duel Monsters card game, sends Yugi a package. Inside the package is a VHS cassette tape. Let’s stop here. A lot of kids under the age of 12, otherwise known as the main demographic of this game, probably have never used a VCR in their lives. I asked my cousin who just turned 12 last week to clarify this. He asked if VHS was a file extension on the computer like a .JPG. I rest my case.
Legacy of the Duelist is a game that should’ve been on the Wii U but for some strange reason, isn’t. I think of how much more fun and legible the game could be if there was an additional screen that could be utilized. I found myself squinting and having to get up to read the text. Mind you, I don’t have a small TV in the slightest but the game just
