Many moons ago, my friend Jeremy bought me this, along with Yu-Gi-Oh! Destiny Board Traveler, for my birthday. At the time, I just kinda took these... "games" and thanked him for the gesture. The thought that crossed my mind was that of the old episode of The Simpsons where Homer bought Marge a bowling ball for her birthday. What the Hell was I going to do with these two? I didn't know anything about the card game. Yeah, I watched a bit of the anime, but that's like watching Pokemon to get an idea of how to become a great trainer. The heart of the cards, just like the bond shared between Ash and his team of unevolved failures, isn't going to do me any good when I've got Tristan beating me silly with a weapon-equipped Goblin Attack Force while I am trying to figure out why it hasn't died from having a defense of zero. Any logic I picked up through Magic: The Gathering only made matters worse when I sent three creatures to their doom and killed myself in the process thanks to the damage I took from each of them being destroyed. As a result, I became frustrated and set this present aside to try out the other game I was given.
Destiny Board Traveler is like some cheap-ass knock off of a Mario Party title featuring the main characters (and Rebecca Hawkins) of the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise. It lacked any sort of tutorial for understanding how to play, so I was clueless as to what I should have been doing. I guess Konami believes I'm supposed to just know this stuff, as I am with the card game variation I had tossed back into my dresser. I admit, this isn't entirely true, since lengthy explanations can be found within the instruction manuals of both games. It's a nice chunk of reading, but I found it to be an added pain trying to go back and forth between the game and manual to help understand what was going on. Destiny Board Traveler gave me plenty of time to practice, since each match takes over an hour to finish! The special powers the characters have are worthless, and the computer-controlled players are so fucking slow to do anything that my mistakes made little difference. I'm suppose to endure this to the end, actually win the games, and do so repeatedly with specific characters to unlock things?! I could understand if this was something made by Natsume Inc. Their "serious fun" approach to gameplay is one of the most excruciating forms of S&M I have ever had the painful pleasure to experience. When I demanded more flogging and hot candle wax on Farmville, Natsume came along and released another installment of Harvest Moon. I got to hoe, seed, and water 1000 small squares of soil on my touch screen while Witch Princess would periodically stomp on my back with her high heels, strangle me with her whip, and call me a filthy pig.
If you're allergic to latex, a bowl of rainbow curry will also make her happy.
DBT, on the other hand, managed to make me miserable (and flaccid) by omitting any sort of save feature during play. My only options were to either stick it out for hours at a time, or turn the game off and restart the stage later. I decided to turn it off, put it back in its box, and let it sit in my shoe box for another five or more years.
"It's time to d-d-d-d-durr!"
Yu-Gi-Oh! 7 Trials to Glory: World Championship Tournament 2005 is not a great game by any stretch of the mind, unless, of course, you compare it to Destiny Board Traveler or anything made by LJN .
LJN: 1970 - 1994 Good riddance!
You are a new duelist in Battle City (great fucking name, btw!) who is given enough duelist points (DP) to buy a starter deck at Grandpa Muto's card shop/nudie bar. After a lap dance or two, you then go out into the world and have matches with every person and animal that you come across. The world, however, is only twelve screens shared within five locations and not all that interactive. Each spot has opponents shuffling back and forth outside of buildings and arenas, while some are just standing around in the middle of the street. It's about the same with nearly every other video game featuring NPCs, but because of the lack of space, everywhere seems a little crowded. About half of them are generic players, like an elderly couple, a business man, and a little girl, while the others are characters from the series. I was really hoping there would be more named duelists, like Pegasus or Bandit "I'm an American!" Keith, but 7 Trials compensates for this by granting the cast with advanced versions of their decks once you've finished the first half of the game and includes two decks per person once you unlock the shadow world, which is simply called "???" on the map. While Battle City bans certain cards and limits the use of others, the shadow world has no such regulations, and it's with this concession that a player must create a few new decks to be able to hold his own. It's also because of this that opponents you face in both areas will have different, but similar, decks. Be prepared to see the same cards used over and over again. Fissure, trap hole, man-eater bug, hane-hane, and penguin soldier are all common sights in Battle City, while residents of the shadow realm will always have their hands filled with banned cards, such as raigeki, mirror force, monster reborn, and change of heart. Granted, it was naive of me to hope for this, but I really wanted to see a better mixture of cards. Pot of Greed is all well and good, but I don't need to put three of them in every deck. One particular flaw I discovered in the CPU involved the card Stumbling. Since every face-up monster entered play being tapped, one would have to wait a turn to be able to attack. Unfortunately, the computer will never bother to put his creature back into the attack position, so just playing that spell card is usually an automatic win for you. The exceptions to this are Tea, who has no real offense to begin with, and the Rare Hunter, who utilizes one of the cheapest strategies in the game. The R. Hunter spends the entire match drawing cards until he gets all five pieces of Exodia, which will allow him to win instantly. I had to create a deck specifically designed to counter his, because the concept of the Exodia deck, similar to Magic: The Gathering's commonly seen Burn or Counterspell decks, is just that powerful. It certainly isn't something to be proud of, though I'm sure in casual play there were many elitist tweens challenging their friends with one and bragging about their success because of it.
"Oh I say! Exodia! You gents lose again!"
I like how I can hold up to twenty decks, and building one just for the rare hunter isn't really an issue, but playing against him in the dark survival tournament and having to use it against everyone else just for the sake of beating him ruins any sort of personality I may have wanted to incorporate into my game-winning creation.
Boring credits roll by, I collect a nice chunk of DP for my victory, and now I can go back to unlock the rest of the 1000 cards to... awww, fuck it. There is very little replay value in this. I didn't care if I had them all or not. Once I grabbed the final trophy, I turned it off and put it right back in the shoe box with my other Game Boy games. To this day, I can still enjoy Contra or Gradius on my NES, but I very much doubt I'll ever have an urge to pick up this Konami title again. It is what it is. Like the Pokemon or Mega Man series, 7 Trials is just another bland sequel offering little more than what was found in the previous one. Then again, I guess I can't fault the game too much, since MTG's Shandalar didn't come out until 1997, and Pokemon Trading Card Game didn't arrive in America until April of 2000. Both are superior card battle video games, but they also had a few more years of technology to support their development.
At least Yu-Gi-Oh! didn't get any worse...
Sign spinners are killing enough motorists nowadays! We don't need the added distraction of dueling!
2 comments:
That last part is a joke right?
No, because jokes are suppose to be funny.
Post a Comment