Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dawn of Destiny

This is a decent battle simulator, although it's one that you can only spend so much time with before it bores you to death due to simplistic gameplay and bad presentation.

I'll get the gameplay out of the way first, it's very basic as you're just duelling the Ai to collect cards from their decks in a competently made simulator. There's no real end goal here as you can clear all of the tiers within 30 minutes and unlock all of the characters within an hour, the real progression is collecting all the cards in the game which can only be done upon winning a duel or match and choosing a statue of the Egyptian God cards which gives you your reward. The problem is the game is reliant on randomly generated numbers, meaning that you can spend months duelling the same character for a specific card and for them not to give it to you despite knowing they're the ones who'll give you the card you want. It's especially frustrating when you receive three copies of a card you already have three copies of or worse yet, three copies of a card you can only have one copy of such as Sangan which the Ai loves to do to you. From what I can gather, this is a console port of the infamous world championship 2004, meaning that it retains the same Ai intelligence and bugs and glitches that game has. It's nothing too major as the decks have thankfully been updated to be far more interesting here than they were there, but having someone use man eater bug against me and then flip it into defence mode the same turn it used its effect is very frustrating as is watching the Ai use mystical space typhoon on itself which is an illegal move. The one downside is that the card pool is much smaller here, presumably due to the developers running out of time in rendering each of the monster into 3d models as that's the main gimmick of this simulator over the handheld games as the models do admittedly look really good in this game. This leads me to the presentation as aside from how good the game looks both with its 3d models and field spell backgrounds, the presentation is abysmal. As usual, there’s no voice acting here which is bizarre as surely you could get the actors from 4kids to do a few line reads for each of the characters. That's small potatoes compared to the soundtrack, playing this game will make you want to write a sincere apology to Kenny g as this is the type of elevator music that makes his albums seem like a rock symphony with how boring the arrangements are and how they all fail to hype up the player in these duels. I also don't think they did a good job with the monster battles as all they do is have the two monsters facing each other with the winning monster zapping the losing monster out of existence or failing to do so if it’s attacking a high defence monster. This is made worse by the Ai making one of only two faces depending on if something positive or negative happens to them, namely if you lose points and they lose points respectively.

It’s a decent battle simulator and a good way of familiarising yourself with the earliest cards in the franchise, I just recommend having Spotify on standby as the sound effects and in game music here is atrocious.