Yu-Gi-Oh! The Duelists of the Roses

"Not for every one."

GAME-PLAY: Like any other YU GI OH! Game, you start the duel with 40 cards, each player take turn to make his/her move, you can summon monsters to the field, and using magic/trap cards. You win the duel by reducing your enemy's life points to zero. The big change in the game play is the new “leader card”, the leader card has all of your life points, if it destroyed you lose the duel, each leader card have special ability too.

Basically the rules are the same, but the leader card add a new strategies, like defending your leader card is something you will be doing more often. At the beginning of the game, you will be given the choice to pick one of three decks, anyway it does not matter which one you choose, because they're nothing but crap.

The game is very challenging, you will lose many duels, specialty with the first deck you will be given, but as you advance you will win more, better cards, then you can customize your deck with more powerful cards.

There is a multi player mode, it does not plays like real life dueling, with all these leader cards and other changes, but it does offer some fun.

Controls are pretty easy and simple, this is not a fighting game you don't have to do combos, just your basic buttons, like X to attack, and O to skip battle animations.

And there is the grave yard slot thing, each time you win a duel you can play the slots, if you match three of the same card, then you will take that card, and win another rare card. It is a good way to collect cards, but very hard to do and annoying after a while.

STORY: The single player story mode is kind of confusing, you will be playing as a legendary duelist, who came from the past to help Henry Tudor, there are many recognizable characters from the TV show, like Yugi, Seto Kaiba. The story is not that boring, its good for a card game.

GRAPHICS: the graphics are okay, some of the battle animations are great looking, the fields are 3D, monsters are well detailed. Anyway, if you find the battles animations dull and boring, you can just skip it by pressing one button.

SOUND: This is a weak point in the game, since there is no real dialog, yes all dialogs are done using texts only, the music is pretty much the same, sound are okay in the battles, you will hear some noises.

PLAYING TIME/RE-PLAY: The game fairly long, beating the story mode will take you sometime. Of course a YU GI OH! Game, means you have good amount of cards to collect, and there is the multi player mode, all in all you won't stop playing the game for a while.

So, as a YU GI OH! Huge fan, I liked the game and I found it very fun and addictive, but the huge difficulty level in the game may cause you a lot of frustration, specialty if you have never played a YU GI OH game before.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/12/05