Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction

"A harder and more original game than the last, definitely worth it."

This game is really good, and much harder in my opinion (though I'm sure there are people saying it's a breeze). With largely the same structure as Duel Monsters 7, it's different with a new storyline. Even having breezed through DM7 a few times this game is still pretty hard for me (a good thing).

Story/Game: 10 Maybe this is shooting a little high, but I definitely think the storyline is involving and not something that people have already had enough of (like the Battle City arc - they messed around with that in DM7) Dealing with the Reshef of Destruction, you are trying to collect the Sen Nen Items...

Control: 5 It's not that hard to control but it's not easy to organize decks or to have quick duels (since they added this annoying thing which dashes around the screen after putting down a card) Decks are still that hard to organize...

Graphics: 8 The graphics are good, really sharp and making full use of the GBA. It's not much of an improvement over DM7, as the character's faces have become smaller, but now they have facial expressions. The cards are clear but not different (though there's some new art, like for the Black Magician !!)

Sound/Music: 8 The music is good, though I have to say I was disappointed when I saw it was pretty much the same as DM7. There are more seiyuu lines in duels though, that was interesting.

Difficulty: 7 It's really really easy at first, and then it suddenly gets hard as the duelists suddenly have much better cards than you. The raising of deck capacity and duelist level is much slower in this game (so that means you can't use as many good cards or you can't use them at all). By the end it is insanely difficult... The cards are accessible but most times you're not at a high enough level to use the best ones, though about that, Sugoroku sells the cards now so his character has pretty much vanished (he didn't do much in the first place)

Replay Value: 7 Even if you know what will happen it might be fun to make a new deck and try to take all of them down again. The thing is this time there's actually a reward for finishing the game so you might want to play with that a while. Restarting will be a big choice though because it takes a real long time to get up to the top level at last.

Buy or rent? I'd say buy, just because it's a pretty long game and you wouldn't want to give up all those troubles you took to make a good deck.

Overall: 9 Definitely better than DM7 (though I loved that game) The only problem is that someone who couldn't read Japanese couldn't really enjoy the story (because the duels are really tedious).

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/26/03, Updated 05/26/03