Yu-Gi-Oh! GX Tag Force

""Get your game on!""

YU-GI-OH! GX TAG FORCE

Yu-Gi-Oh! fans get ready to spend hours and hours playing this game. Over 2400 cards with full detailed descriptions like the real life card counterparts, Konami has released an "ultimate" Yu-Gi-Oh! game for the PSP. It is almost up to date (2006) with the actual trading card game, and you are able to download updated forbidden card list. Fans of the GX series will see many familiar faces of season 1. Over 100 duelists, and each will have different decks, this game will never get old for weeks and months.

Game Play
The game play is pretty straight forward. You're a character not from the actual anime who just transferred to Duel Academy. You choose a location of an area on the map to explore and duel characters from the series. When you win, you'll earn duel points, which will allow you to buy more booster packs. You will also gain experience points, which will allow you to unlock more booster packs after you go up to a certain level. So it's kind of like an RPG. The game has its own game time, meaning there will be day, afternoon, and night. Each week days there will be a class that you can choose to attend if you want. Depending on the certain time and the day of the week, you will be able to meet more characters from the anime. Aside from all this, there is a "friendship simulation". If you want to have...let's Jaden to be your tag team partner, you must fill up his "friend meter" in order to have him join you. Only the major characters from the series will have a "friend meter". You don't have to worry about the minor characters, after you beat the game, you can just ask them and they will join you.

There are 3 chapters. The first time you play the game, you must go through the whole 90 days in the first chapter to unlock chapter 2. But in order to play chapter 2, you must earn a tag partner from chapter 1. If for some reason you didn't befriend a major character the first time you played through chapter 1, you can just quickly go back and make friends with one and then fast forward to the end of chapter 1. After chapter 2, chapter 3 will be simply unlocked for you, no other requirements are needed.

Features
This game features thousands of cards and you can unlock different variations of a certain card, such as the Blue Eyes White Dragon. Monsters animations! This is the first Yu-Gi-Oh! card game that features animations of monsters and characters. This game tries to simulate the anime, and it does it pretty well, but only "special" monsters, like Fusion Monsters will have animations. There are many search functions to look for cards now. One new way to search for a card in this game is word searching. You can word search the name of a card or a word in the descriptions. And now you can quickly use a "tag" feature called "label". This will allow you to "label" a card when you find it to be useful and would like to incorporate it in your deck(s) at a later time. For instance, let's say you bought a booster pack and it had "Monster Reborn", you can "label" it, and when you go to your card trunk, you can find it quickly under the label section instead of search through the thousands of cards you have collected. There is no limit of using the "label" feature. Another new feature, you can create as many decks if you want as long as you have space on your Memory Stick. You can also duplicate major characters' decks once you have defeated them after a certain amount of time. They will give you their deck "recipe" and you can create a new deck based on Jaden's or Chazz's as long as you have the right cards.

Overall
Tag Force should keep PSP owners entertained for a long time. So many major characters to befriend and even tag teaming with minor characters will unlock things in the game. You earn medals to keep up with characters you've befriend, and the game keeps up with all of your stats. You can view the record of how many times you've countered an opponent with trap cards, the highest attack points you've given a monster, the highest life points you've earned in a match, how many times you've fused a monster, etc. The controls are very simple, cell shaded graphics are nice, and the soundtrack is excellent. This game is great for Yu-Gi-Oh! fans.

Pros:
Great replay value
A lot of cards
Monsters and characters have animations
Simple controls
Stat keeping
Create as many decks as you like
Music is excellent
Quick duel and Ad Hoc mode
Downloadable online support

Cons:
The characters animations will get repetitive
The load time isn't long, but I think it could be shorter
Too much loading when entering and exiting areas
There has yet to be any cards for you to download in the online section
No online dueling

I gave Yu-Gi-Oh! GX Tag Force an 8 out of 10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/05/07