Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters: Nightmare Troubadour

If the AI was not comparable to a drooling monkey, then this would probably be the best yugioh handheld. Seriously, it is incredibly insulting. Watching the Expert Cup match between Yugi and Kaiba really showcases first hand how shitty the AI is at decision making. There were multiple clear-cut ways to have game during that bout but the AI refused to take it, and instead made plays that didn't progress the game state at all. They just without AUTO-ACTIVATE cards like Pot of Greed/Graceful Charity.

Did not like how grindy the game is early on, but thankfully the story kind of cooks after 3 hours of mindless battles against pointless deck NPCs. It was interesting how you are a nameless character that self-inserts to the 3 main story arcs of 1st gen yugioh and you actually have dialog lol. Lovely art style on the characters, and I adore the broken translations for some segments of the game: "Let us already return". Gets me every time.

Other negatives: there are no 'hold A' chain windows for chainable effects, effectively rendering certain cards like Trap Dustshoot or really anything you would like to activate during the draw phase impossible. It is nice there are 3D renders of cards in this game, but most look like complete shit lol. There are points in the story where you will seemingly wander for multiple in-game days fighting against the same repetitive shitty decks until a story point triggers. I mean the story follows the anime pretty closely and it is neat to a point, but grinding for what seems like forever because the games does not really guide you in a proper direction AT ALL will turn a lot of players off. Also there are a few enemies that have decks with literally no win-con, and it feels rather insulting. I mean sure Tea/Serenity/Mokuba are supposed to be total jobbers, but what the fuck, everyone gets upgraded decks as you progress further in the story, why cant they at least get some semblance of a strategy with semi-decent cards? Also, no Chaos Sorcerer, Gravekeeper's Spy OR MONARCHS? Who the fuck made that decision to exclude those?!?

This is a game I want to give a perfect score to, however doing so means I'm ignoring how long it takes for it to take off as there's a ton of early game grinding before anything interesting happens in this game.

I'll get the negatives out of the way first, the biggest being that the ai’s decks are very limited, many of which don't even seem to have a win condition to them besides taking advantage of how crap your starting deck is. Also, this might be a me problem, but I don't like how few vanilla monsters are in the game as I always felt they gave ai desks more personality in other duel monster era games. I understand that many of them were cut due to the game needing 3d models to render whenever they're summoned, however nearly all of them had a model from earlier games such as duellist of the roses and dawn of destiny, so I don't think it would've been too much to ask for translating these models into the ds hardware. One final negative I have is that you don't have the ability to determine who your opponents are until about a third into the game, this means you'll be fighting piss weak opponents for a while with the occasional stronger opponent sprinkled in to give off the illusion that the weaker opponents will stop coming despite the fact they still do.

OK that's enough with the negatives, time for the positives because there's a ton of them. Despite being a ds game, the presentation might be among the best for duel monster era games as not only is the soundtrack decent for a change, but so too are the graphics as each of the characters and monsters look rather good for a 3d game in an otherwise 2d environment. The actual duels are also nicely paced save for when an ace monster is summoned as the game feels the need to play a special animation whenever this happens. Although the early duellist are piss weak even when they're up against your starter deck (which you can instantly upgrade by completing the duel puzzles in the card shop and using the reward money to buy booster packs) the later duellist put up a real challenge due to how creative their desks are, some of them are also player killers, meaning you'll get a game over if you lose to them which adds some much needed tension to the game as it doesn't save automatically as you progress through its campaign. The story is decent, being a hybrid of each of the three arks in the anime up until waking of dragons as every major character (barring Tristan and duke) is accounted for in this game. I also like how your self-insert insert character has interactions with the other characters in a way that doesn't feel out of place with the anime, this is particularly noticeable whenever they have their own private thoughts which prevents them from being too bland as is the case with other self-insert characters in gaming.

It’s a game that's so close to being the definitive Yu-gi-oh experience, had it trimmed the fat with the grinding and given more personality to the weaker decks, then it would be the perfect experience for newcomers of the duel monsters era of the franchise.