"Don't ignore the positive reviews, but if you wish to know more, read on..."

Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories is a very rare type of game. It is the type of game that can be very enjoyable and addicting through its general structure, yet is so truly bad that if not for carrying the name ''Yu-Gi-Oh!'', it would likely be regarded as one of the worst games ever made. Let me first say that I am not bitter about spending money on this, because a friend bought this used. Second, I have played through the game in full and beat it more than once, so my exposure is not limited. I recognize that this review is very long, but I feel it necessary to bring out many ignored aspects of the game. There is a summary at the bottom.

Storyline: 4

People seem to be willing to give this category more leeway, either because it happens to be involving Yu-Gi-Oh!, or because it is a Trading Card Game. I am following suit and giving some extra leeway, as it is admittedly a handicap trying to create a story for a bunch of people playing cards with each other. Regardless, it is still awfully weak. The game boasts an ''RPG Storyline'' mode, which is actually nothing more than a series of interactions with other characters and a few venue choices that are vital to furthering the plot. This ''epic'' storyline set in ancient Egypt could be explained in about a minute. It becomes a stereotypical power struggle in an attempt to retrieve the item for good or evil. It works, but it does nothing whatsoever to heighten the gaming experience. Perhaps it is due to my under-exposure with the Yu-Gi-Oh! series, but I also find it rather silly that some duelists sound like they will be killing you by beating you at a card game. Dramatization: ''And now it's time for you to DIE!... *draws five cards silently*''

Game Play: 1

I base this on an average of progression/flow, the battle system, and other game features. I have neglected 'Control' on purpose, as simple controls and menus are expected in games such as these, and being at least functional should not alter the score.

Progression/Flow: 0

If you were to read any other reviews, you might see remarks about how difficult this game is. The truth is, Konami did a downright awful job of making this game flow and progress.

You start the game with forty randomly assigned cards ranging from semi-weak to virtually useless. At the start, you have a few mandatory textual decisions that will affect what duelists you will be able to face, as well as which duelists you will be forced to compete against. While you can playfully duel a few people at the local card shop at first, the storyline picks up before you know it, unknowingly forcing you to fight a stronger competitor. To put this in perspective, the first opponent you could battle has a card with 2300 attack power that he often draws. Likely, the highest attack of a card in your starting deck is around 1300 attack, and some of the most of the best fusions one can create with starting cards amount to between 1800 and 2100 attack. There is a small chance you could be blessed with a few cards to make one especially strong fusion to defeat it, but if he draws this card, you would have only a few turns to fuse a strong card and equip it, or pull out your Raigeki/Dark Hole and hope not to die from the result. If you don't have the necessary cards, don't have much game experience yet, or just get a lousy draw, it is a very sudden game over. That's right, you could completely overpowered by no fault of your own on your very first match. This is rather pathetic alone.

But it gets worse, unfortunately. Say for instance, that at the very start of the game, you choose to agree stay and listen to your mentor, you will immediately be whisked away in the storyline, not having faced any opponents either as practice or to obtain better cards. You end up in a mandatory tournament in which the later competitors have cards with 3000 and higher attack. With no practice duels, or even options to get much better cards, you would be brutally defeated every time. Did I mention that one loss, no matter the circumstances, or the duelist, is an automatic 'Game Over?' Not only does it seem somewhat ridiculous to be able to get a Game Over in trading card game, but one loss regardless of opponent? Not to mention how easily and quickly you may have no choice in the matter of winning or losing. Everyone knows that one bad draw in any card game can make you lose, and the situation is worse in Forbidden Memories, when on your next mandatory opponent, suddenly the best draw can’t even save you.

Saving in the game is sometimes limited as well, which is really bad news when you can lose a card match very easily. For instance, the end of the game pits you against six very difficult opponents in succession. When one bad draw regardless of deck quality can end your game, this becomes inexcusable.

The vast majority of your game, if you expect to complete it, will be spent using an option outside of the actual RPG Campaign. It is the Free Duel option, which gives you a list of all the opponents you've already faced (plus one unknown competitor who has the same deck as you and gives rather low cards). If this were the entire game, it would honestly be a better game than the Campaign mode provided. Instead, you are forced to do several Free Duels between opponents so the next one doesn't overpower you. Leveling up in an RPG is one thing, but the concept simply does not work here, as it is like playing one game frequently to be able to progress a single step in a different story.

Battle System: 1

Unfortunately, there is not enough space in this review to go over the system in depth. The battle system is not the same as the Official Trading Card game, and instead has only regular monsters that can ''fuse'' into stronger monsters.

What it boils down to, is the fact that this battle system is extremely simplistic. This is not a good thing though, because with the general lack of magic and trap cards available, the entire battle system just boils down to which player has, or can fuse, the cards with highest attack. Boring, you ask? Extremely. Early in the game, the battling process is more interesting, because there are numerous different fusions that you can learn and experiment with. However, the game begins to become ridiculously monotonous when the opponent's monsters become so strong that only a few different fused monsters will be of any help to you at all. The problem is, the number of fused monsters in that 500 to 2400 attack range accounts for at least ninety percent of all fusion monsters. Yet unless you have several equip-magic cards and very good timing in drawing them, the only way to advance in the game is to utilize the very few remaining fusions that produce cards above 2400 attack, or the rare monster cards that start with above 2400.

Finally, there is the issue of magic and trap cards. First of all, other than the two magic cards you are given at the start of the game, unless you take the effort to earn an S TEC victory (explained later), it is unlikely that you will receive anything more than another basic field magic card. A great deal of the magic cards in the game are one of two types, field magic or equip cards. Field magic cards alter the appearance of the game field and increase or decrease the attack and defense of specific types of monsters by 500 points. Equip cards (other than a rare card Megamorph) all have the same effect, allowing a 500-point increase in statistics for one card of a specific type. There are other magic cards that are difficult to obtain, but none, other than equip cards, are actually needed to plow through your opponents.

Trap cards are depressingly limited and boring in nature. There are ten total, and six of them simply kill a monster attacking you provided their attack is at a certain level. Over half of monster cards simply kill monsters of specific attack levels, while the rest are counters to a few specific magic cards. It gets worse when you realize that the game automatically activates trap cards without giving you any say in the process. So you will not even have a choice of using a certain trap card, or waiting to use it later, the game simply decides for you and uses any of them immediately. Traps are supposed to be strategic, and you cannot even use strategy with them.

Features: 2

I will start out by explaining something that should resonate problems with anyone hoping to play this game. Upon beating your opponent, you receive one random card. No matter what, you will only get a single card from every victory against a duelist, whether in the Free Duel or Story mode. Worse yet, regardless of how well you defeat your opponent (explained later), the card you receive is still random, and the game gives you no indication of which duelists give you specific cards. That may be bad enough, but it gets worse considering you may still spend hundreds of battles against a single duelist just to get one rare or semi-rare card even when you know which duelists drop certain cards. There have been recorded cases of people winning well over eight-hundred battles against a single duelist to win a single rare card.

One important feature is the battle-ranking you receive after winning a battle. After every victory, you will receive a ranking: D, C, B, A, or S, as well as the distinction of POW for Power, or TEC for Technique, describing the way in which the battle was completed. A Power win is characterized by using powerful monster cards and fusions instead of magic or trap cards to swiftly beat the opponent. TEC wins can be simplified to saying that a TEC win involves dragging the battle on as long as possible to barely defeat an opponent at the last moment. I will not go into unneeded detail, but let me say from experience that receiving an S TEC win against many opponents is difficult, and takes up far too much time (the average single S TEC win takes 20-30 minutes).

Battle ranks serve two purposes, to determine the amount of starchips received after the battle, and to roughly determine the rarity of the card received. For starchips, a D rank nets you one starchip, C rank gives you two, following suit to the maximum of five starchips per battle for an S rank win. Winning by POW or TEC makes no difference in the amount of starchips received. Next, the higher the letter-ranking you receive for a victory, the more likely you are to receive a rare card. Please do not get your hopes up, most of the time, high rank or not, you will receive weak, borderline useless cards. There is also a generally accepted truth that you can only receive the higher quality magic and trap cards from TEC wins. While generally, you will receive more magic cards from TEC wins than POW wins, the majority of cards even high rank TEC wins will still be weak monsters.

Imagine now, spending a few hours just to completely a small amount of S TEC wins, only to receive the same lousy monsters you could receive in ten minutes of low-ranking POW wins. Speak to any hard-core player of this game, and you will hear horror stories about this very situation.

One of the biggest selling and advertising points for the game is an option to see any monster rendered in 3-D engage in battle. There are over six hundred monster cards in the games, each having two attack animations each, which is admittedly fairly impressive. However, to get to see these, the screen blacks out and you have to sit and wait for this ugly ring of purple fire to slowly encircle a ring before your monster will appear. Maybe this was for effect, but it looks ugly and takes up time for no good reason. There are more pauses as the other monster loads and the attacks commence, making he whole event takes much longer than it should. Many times seeing the attacks is not worth the time involved. Take one of the strongest monsters in the game, 'Perfectly Ultimate Great Moth', which as an attack, releases a few little spores that gently float to the enemy. It is quite disappointing to say the least. Furthermore, many monsters share the exact same attacks, and in the case of 'Crawling Dragon #2' and 'B. Dragon Jungle King,' the exact same appearance and animation! Every monster shares the same exact defense animation as well, only adding to the boredom.

Next there is the option to ''Import cards from the Official Card Game to create more powerful decks'' quoted directly from the game case. This is misleading on a few levels. Those starchips mentioned earlier are required to purchase cards you import via the passwords listed on Official Cards. While this may sound workable, Konami decided to make numerous cards impossible to receive this way by making the cost 999999 starchips, including: every trap card, the bulk of magic cards, very strong monsters, and a fair amount of seemingly random monsters. What is ridiculous is the fact that there are a number of pathetically weak monster cards that cost 999999 starchips, like Kattapillar with 250 attack and 300 defense... is this some unusual joke by Konami? Even worse, most cards that are stronger than the basic fusions you utilize at the beginning will cost at least 700 starchips, and the card most experts recommend that players purchase costs 1700 starchips. Further restrictions: cards may only be redeemed once on a save file, and hundreds of Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Cards do not exist in this game.

The two-player option was inevitable in this game, and if you happen to have a friend who plays, it will likely cater to your battle-lust. Konami added an option to show only a set of assigned numbers for your cards on screen instead of the name and picture, which is a good feature. There is little to say about this honestly, it works despite a lack of originality. However, two-player battles will likely become tiresome in this game, as powerful decks will likely contain many of the exact same cards due to the game's lack of strategy.

Finally, there is absolutely no training mode inside the game. There complete dependence on the system of fusions in battle, and a player with no exposure to Yu-Gi-Oh! will likely be baffled by the process. I realize that the instruction booklet covers this, but any game of this genre should include an in-game tutorial.

Graphics: 3

Completely static environments fill the entire campaign mode, while character interactions are no more than a person's face sliding on screen to talk to you. The few cut-scenes are again just static pictures, offering no animation whatsoever. The anime feel and appearance to the game gives it a bright, colorful and enjoyable feel at first, but the effect quickly wears off. When not interacting, you will have outside choices of where to go, but again, there's little, or no animation. Even worse, the environments outside lose the anime feel, and oddly enough, look drab and pixellated. Monsters animated in the 3-D battles look anywhere from hideous to decent, never to the point of being impressive.

The card battlefield looks passable at best, appearing as a bright, yellow and brown colored wooden playing board. The board spins around and zooms in and out as the players' turns switch, which is nice to see at first, though it grows to be unimpressive quickly. Oddly enough, when placing a monster card and choosing the guardian star, as you select between the two stars, the side of the board will twitch in and out, in what is obviously a graphical glitch. It looks rather silly, given that 99% of your game time will be spent placing monsters and selecting the guardian stars. During the battle, attacking with a card will bring up a simple white slash that goes across the card, and if defeated, the card will shake violently and burn away quickly. The burning animation is ugly, the slash animation is dull, and these are the only animations of this nature that you will ever see in the game.

Some of the magic cards have nice effects, but magic cards are not in high enough quantity to make this a real positive point. Also, after the unattractive animation of certain cards like Dragon Capture Jar, there is a pointlessly long loading time before the game resumes. As an aside, you can easily hear the game disc having difficulty loading after the Dragon Capture Jar animation, which certainly can cause lock-ups.

Sound: 2

No, the sounds and music are not terrible, but when a game gives you such little variety, it deserves a low score. There are a few tinny sounds during card battles of moving the cursor and selecting, the sound of cards being drawn or flipped, as well as a sound for an attacking card, and a card burning away. These are standard fare and may or may not grow to annoy the average player. 3-D battles have an annoying sound of the circle of flames appearing, plus, numerous monsters and attacks will use the same sounds, simply recycling ones that could theoretically sound alike.

Here I will offer important advice to Konami: If you are going to require players to do hundreds of battles to complete your game, do not force them to listen to the exact same song every time! The song that plays through battles is always exactly the same, completely unchanging throughout battles and regardless of what opponent you might be facing. There may be a slightly different tune during an important boss battle, but those only occur once per game, and will not carry over to the Free Duels where most of the time is spent. After a few battles, those of us who are not deaf will be wise to seek out alternative sources of music.

Difficulty: 3

I think it is common practice to give higher points in this category depending on how difficult a game is, and if this were the case, this game would be a solid 10. I do think there is some credit due to Konami for making a game this difficult. The laud will end there though, because the difficulty has nothing to do with card strategy, or building a good deck, both of which should be the reason for difficulty. Instead, as alluded to before, the game is difficult because opponents have extremely powerful monsters before you can even hope to obtain them. Worse yet, the opponents cheat in two different ways.

First, they can place extremely powerful ritual monsters on the field without using the ritual magic cards and tribute monsters required. There has been no documented case of a player in the game ever receiving a ritual monster card to use in this fashion. It is ridiculous that your opponent should be allowed to place multiple cards with 4500 and 3750 attack at the start of the battle, when the strongest card you can get from battle has 3500 attack. Your only chance is to have received or fused a rare, strong monster card, and equip it multiple times to win, or get lucky enough to draw a specific magic or trap card. Thankfully, the opponents will always pick the first of the two available guardian stars, and I thank Konami for this, because otherwise many opponents would have an even greater unfair advantage.

The second problem is that after the beginning duelists, many of the opponents will know exactly what your face-down monster cards are, and will never attack during situations where they would lose. So if you have several face down cards and only one could be destroyed by an opponent's card, guess which one will be attacked!

So yes, as many reviews will tell you, this game is very difficult. It is completely possible to make a difficult game that does not involve cheating opponents who can get cards you never can. Konami failed to figure this out or utilize said knowledge in time for the game's first release in Japan, or later when this was brought to North America and beyond.

Replay Value: 5

If you really want to collect all the strong cards, this game will offer you hundreds of hours of replay value. There is no real reason to replay the campaign mode other than to unlock any duelists you may have missed. Trying to receive every card is a pointless pursuit, and even trying to receive one of some of the stronger, rare monster cards in the game like Blue-Eyes White Dragon and Metalzoa could easily take you over one-thousand wins. To put something else in perspective, couple the average S TEC win time of 20-30 minutes with the fact that many people cannot receive the card they want after even one-hundred S TEC wins. It is a rare quality that a game could have you work over fifty hours for one of several very rare cards. I have thus streamlined the replay value to 5, as it has limitless replay value, yet nothing new to work for.

Reviewer's Tilt: 1

The actual Yu-Gi-Oh! card game is very in-depth, and has potential for countless different strategies. The Yu-Gi-Oh! anime has become wildly popular in the North America thanks to an engaging story and fairly engaging animated battles. Yu-Gi-Oh!: Forbidden Memories is like the result of taking all the potential good from a series and throwing it into the weakest of scenarios. This game shows a severe lack of development, inspired design, or care for the loyal fans and casual players of Yu-Gi-Oh!. It is simply a weak game that was translated and ported over to North America to suck the money out of fans' pockets. Despite the few positive points this game possesses, I refuse to give any extra credit to this game.

Overall: 2

As of now, Yu-Gi-Oh!: Forbidden Memories is the top selling Playstation game, which I suppose is not incredibly difficult due to the phase-out of Playstation games. Despite this, I am fairly confident to say that if this game did not have the Yu-Gi-Oh! license, it would be reviled as the worst trading card game ever. I truly wish that were an exaggeration, but having played this game in and out, I know it is not.

Rent/Buy:

I doubt that many video stores will carry this, so rentals will probably be out of the question. If you can rent, a rental might be worth the money, because the beginning of the game offers some addictive game play. But please, do a service to the gaming industry and do not buy this game. The mass purchase of this game only reinforces the fact that companies can produce sub-mediocre games with a popular license and still make millions in profit.

If you are a fan of Yu-Gi-Oh!, avoid this, as it has only the basic elements of the card game, presented in a terrible fashion that is completely devoid of any strategy. If you are simply interested in learning about Yu-Gi-Oh!, I recommend you purchase Yu-Gi-Oh! The Eternal Duelist Soul for the Game Boy Advance, which is a very reliable representation of the Trading Card game. If you simply want to play a good TCG on the Playstation, try to find Monster Rancher Battle Cards: Episode II, which is unique and far better overall.

Summary:

Storyline: Dull and short, very poor by RPG standards, but functional as a backdrop to the card game itself.
Game Play: Terrible progression mars the campaign mode horribly. Very weak battle system is little more than seeing who can bring out the strongest monster. Several interesting features are present, but all have glaring flaws. Requires far too much time to receive good cards.
Graphics: Nice looking anime feel to characters, but no animation outside of battle, and numerous rather ugly graphical effects present throughout.
Sound: Repetitive sounds, and the same battle music the entire game is enough to drive anyone insane.
Difficulty: Extremely challenging for the wrong reasons.
Replay Value: Hundreds of cards in the game and plenty of rare and highly difficult cards to obtain, but no real benefit for replaying Campaign mode.

Conclusion: This is not the worst game ever, but I believe it to be the worst game I have ever seen to receive such high ratings and laud from owners. I believe many have overlooked especially the fundamental inadequacies of this game, and I hope this review has illuminated these to those of you considering a purchase. And please, do not take my low review as the ultimate indication of the game's quality. I will be the first to admit that this game can be addictive and enjoyable for many. That fact does not make this a good game, but ultimately you are your own best critic.

Addendum: Recently a player e-mailed Konami about obtaining certain rare cards that are used by the opponent, yet have not been obtained by players. The question was simply if a few specific cards were even available, and the only response to his question was that they ''did not have that information.'' Please do not buy this game and encourage the strength of licenses alone, or allow for Konami's clear lack of concern for gamers.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 03/15/03, Updated 04/10/03