Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction

Well, it appears Konami took the criticism of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards [遊☆戯☆王デュエルモンスターズ７ 決闘都市伝説] to heart as at least in terms of difficulty, this is the complete opposite of that game as this might rival dark souls in terms of being a game that's brutally and unfairly difficult to play.

Whereas sacred cards can be beaten by even the most casual of gamers, this on the other hand is a nightmare to play through thanks to how unbalanced your opponent’s decks are compared to yours. Even if you somehow beat an opponent, the game barely gives you any rewards as your stats and deck capacity barely rise up as well as your prize money being pitiful compared to the previous game. Now if you're a masochist, this game may seem up your alley given how it's possible to progress through its campaign through vigorous grinding in its early stages, to this I say you're in for a different kind of pain as there's technical issues this game has in addition to its brutal difficulty. The biggest problem is that in order to allow for permanent effects to happen, the game checks for these effects whenever ANYTHING happens in each duel. Normally this would be a minor inconvenience, however it becomes a massive pain if there is a card with a permanent effect on the field, let alone multiple cards which makes it possible for the game to crash if that's the case. It also doesn't reset your life points to 8000 upon winning a duel, meaning you have to return to your home in order to replenish your life points which is out of the question during the games multiple boss rushes where you need to face several opponents in one go in order to pass a section. I guess to combat the games difficulty, there are several side quests you can complete which of course help increase your stats to use better cards. The issue here is that you're locked into these quests should you choose to activate them, meaning you can't continue with the main campaign until you complete these quests which adds further frustration to the game. Considering everything else, it reusing assets from the previous game is small potatoes, however the fact that there's only five or six new character models as well as the new locations looking very similar to those from the first game that don't return (to say nothing of the ones that do) as well as having less cards than its predecessors despite adding new cards to this game is just extra salt in the wound.

There are positives here such as how every character prior to waking of dragons is accounted for as well as many of the (at the time) anime exclusive cards making an appearance in the card database, however these aren't enough to overlook the sheer difficulty of the game, cringe dialogue to replicate the awful 4kids dub and its technical issues which makes it unplayable.