Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards

"The Sacred Cards reveals itself to be worthy of a rent."

I'll just cut to the case...

Graphics: 7/10
Nothing spectacular here. All the cards are fully colored, the areas have a good amount of detail to it. Card battles have little animation, which includes the slashing and burning of the cards in battle...And that's basically it. Graphics outside of the card battle include characters walking around, being knocked out, and having monsters knocking out the human players in cut-scenes in a slightly humorous fashion.

Sound: 6/10
You got music depending on the area you are in, noise for when a monster does something in battle, and a few different battle music themes. Forgettable, mostly...

Story: 5/10
Basically, You go through the Battle City tournament, going through events, getting locater cards, ect. Nothing really out of the ordinary happens if you watched the show...Until near the end, which it really begins to drift off from the show's story...

Gameplay: 8/10
Now, this is where the game really counts, since you spend most of your game battling. If you don't know the rules of Yu-Gi-Oh, I suggest you find out otherwise, it would be too long here. Anyways, the duel system is like Yu-gi-oh as a base, with a lot stripped away. A lot of the magic and trap cards are gone, and so have many monster's effects. There is an elemental system that comes into play, but it's not really that important unless you need to resort to type advantage to win duels. Any battle resulting between a type that is weak(Fire, for example) vs. a type that is strong(Water, in this case) will result in the weak type getting killed, with no damage to the owner of the strong type. It's an interesting idea, but it adds little strategy to this game.
Deck Capacity Points are present in this game, as they limit the amount of good cards in your deck. This prevents you from putting really good cards in your deck early in the game, so you still have a challenge. However, sometimes you need a lot more of them to get past a duel, so you might have to do some battling with some of your previous opponents. To get maximum capacity is to duel over 400 times, so you won't get anywhere near there unless you have a lot of free time or, of course, a cheat device.
Duelist level also plays a similar role, it prevents you from saving up a ton of points just to get a great card in your deck. Every card has a cost. If this cost exceeds your duelist level, you can't use it. The level goes up every single duel.
Some of the things that tick me off is that you never use the stronger monsters in the game unless you spend tons of time battling opponents to increase your Deck Capacity Points. Another thing is that all the fusion and ritual monsters can be summoned normally. They fixed this a bit by requiring all 9 star and above monsters to require 3 tributes, but some 8 star and 6 star monsters are now particularly more powerful. Also, the game reduces strategy to the point where all the great decks are now beatdown. Speaking of which, most of the 4 star monsters had their negative effects removed, so the best deck revolves around 2000 attack power monsters.

Replayability: 4/10
After you beat the game, you can either play through it again or duel a lot to make the ultimate deck...Otherwise, there isn't much to do.

Overall(Not an average):7

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/10/03