There's little doubt that Yu-Gi-Oh! is the new Pokemon. All the symptoms are there: A television show that's addictive as crack, a collectible card game, and video games based on the former. Granted, these elements have arrived in a slightly different order (Pokemon began life as a video game based on an anime comic book series, which then begat the cartoon and card game, and Yu-Gi-Oh! began as a card game based on an anime comic book series, which then begat the TV show and subsequent video games), but the end result is the same. Yu-Gi-Oh! is not going away any time soon, and I, much as I was (and still am) with Pokemon, happen to be just as addicted as any crazed, hyperventilating nine-year-old. I've accepted it, honestly; I filed both under the category of "guilty pleasures" and gone on about my business. (As far as I see it, they're no worse than soap operas, bubblegum pop, or slasher flicks. But I digress.)

As such, I recently found myself needing to quench my Yu-Gi-Oh! thirst that can't simply be satisfied by the Saturday morning fix. The cards have called my name in the store on several occasions, but I've resisted that particular urge, mainly because I remember how much money Magic: The Gathering sucked from my meager high-school earnings several years ago, and I frankly do not relish the idea of repeating that particular experience. I had tried a video game substitute for the card game a few months ago, in the form of Yu-Gi-Oh!: Forbidden Memories a few months earlier, but that particular game left a sour taste in my mouth, mainly because the rules had been dumbed down significantly, and the system by which you earned cards was so anemic that it was nigh-impossible to build a decent deck. Then I came across Yu-Gi-Oh! The Eternal Duelist Soul, and it taunted me with its promises of a pure representation of the card game and its portability on my under-used Game Boy Advance. Finally, my lovely and patient wife purchased it for me as an early birthday present. I met it half with anticipation, half with caution after the disappointment that was met with Forbidden Memories. However, my worries were unfounded. The Eternal Duelist Soul is everything that Forbidden Memories was not; that is to say, it is an excellent simulation of the card game.

It should be noted, up front, that when I say that The Eternal Duelist Soul (EDS) is a simulation of the card game, I mean exactly that. EDS strives to do this one thing and do it well, to the exclusion of all else. What this means is that there is no real story to speak of (unless you consider a calendar function that occasionally provides you with free cards or a tournament to compete in), and no bells and whistles outside of the confines of the card game. You pick an opponent and you duel. If you win, you pick a booster of five cards. You then go back to the menu screen to do it all over again. In other words, if you're expecting anything from EDS other than the card game, then these aren't the droids you're looking for.

That said, EDS is an extremely well-done simulation of the card game, and while it may lack the meager story components of Forbidden Memories, it more than makes up for it by filling in all the gaps in gameplay that the former title left. EDS follows the rules of the card game to the letter (though it includes a disclaimer in the manual that the rules are only accurate as of the game's publishing, which is all one can ask from a non-PC game), and this means that winning will be more dependant on strategy than solely on who can bring out the biggest creature.

For those unfamiliar with the card game, each player begins with 8000 life points, and the goal is to reduce your opponent's life points to zero. You accomplish this by summoning creatures to attack your opponent or his/her creatures; if your creature's attack is higher than the defending creature's attack, then the overage spills over to your opponent's life points. In order to turn the tide of battle, there are also magic cards and trap cards that can be played. Magic cards are usually played on your turn to achieve a specific effect, like destroying all creatures on the board or drawing extra cards. Trap cards are played face down on the field and can be activated when a certain condition occurs (usually on your opponent's turn); for example, Trap Hole will allow you to destroy a creature as it is summoned if its attack is greater than 1000. Though the actual rules are more complicated than this single paragraph would suggest, and I'm sure I'm leaving a lot out of this simple explanation, it is enough to give the basic idea of the game.

EDS takes a rather spartan approach to making all of this come alive on a video screen. A fairly simple interface provides access to everything you will need to do in a game. Control, therefore, is fairly intuitive; A selects cards and menu options, and B cancels, as well as ending the current phase of a turn. When more than one option is available for a card (for example: view, play face down, or activate) these are shown below the selected card to allow you to pick one. Once you have the actual rules of the game down (which are fairly easy to pick up after a couple of games), maneuvering around the game is a cinch.

I do have a couple of complaints about the interface that are fairly big and surprising that they weren't addressed in playtesting. One is that it is impossible to take back a move. Granted, were this a real card tournament I would expect that would be the case, but there have been a number of situations in which I just accidentally pressed the wrong button and ended up screwing up a turn. This is especially vexing when accidentally moving a monster from attack to defense mode or vice versa (an act that is accomplished by rotating the card 90 degrees), and should be fairly routine to adjust; alas, once you turn that card, you can't turn it back until the next turn, which can be extremely frustrating.

My other main complaint about the interface is in regard to viewing cards. That is to say that, when you need to, you often can't. There are several hundred cards available in the game, and it would take either an extraordinary mind (or a photographic memory) to remember the full text of all of them. However, when any given card is played, and you're asked if you want to react to it, you're not given the option to view the card before making a decision. There have been a number of times when I've had to go to the opponent's graveyard (aka discard pile) to look at a card and see what it did. This puts the human player, especially one encountering cards he/she has never seen before, at a disadvantage unnecessarily.

One other minor complaint I have regarding the presentation is the game speed. This game really crawls along, with some minor animations that one wouldn't mind skipping and long pauses between computer actions. You can hold down B to speed these moments up, but that gets tiresome after a while. A simple menu option to adjust the game speed would have been a great solution to this problem, and I'm surprised that none was included.

As far as the actual gameplay is concerned, the computer opponents, once past the first batch who are complete pushovers, provide a decent amount of challenge. Other than games I've won in the first few turns as a result of just sheer luck, most victories won against the computer opponent in EDS are hard-fought. That's not to say that the AI is perfect, of course; it does have some peculiar habits and grievous errors of judgement. In particular, it makes no effort to protect its cards or its life points at times. On several occasions, it has had a card with low attack and high defense that it left in attack mode simply because it had attacked with it once and was apparently too lazy to shift it back to defense mode, despite the fact that that one card would hold back all my monsters single-handedly. On another, with 1000 life points left, the computer attacked with a monster that required that it pay 1000 life points to attack, thereby losing the game before the monster even got a chance to come after me. All in all, though, the computer puts up a fight, and even after a number of games, it doesn't really get too boring playing against it.

The one major flaw that Forbidden Memories had that I feared would be replicated in EDS, however, was deck building; Forbidden Memories yielded one card per victory, making deck building extremely slow going and made putting together a solid strategy nearly impossible. EDS solves this issue by allowing you to choose a booster of five cards after each victory, so you can have a decent pool of cards to pick from very quickly. Plus, even if you really suck and can't win a duel, after every seventh match you'll automatically get the "Weekly Yu-Gi-Oh" with five free cards in it for you, win or lose. The password feature, which I thought was interesting but poorly implemented in Forbidden Memories, is also included here. Basically, if you own a Yu-Gi-Oh card, it comes with a number in the corner which can be inputted into EDS so you can obtain that card in the game. Unlike Forbidden Memories, there are no constraints on the password system in EDS, other than that you can only obtain one of any given card via a password, which is more than reasonable. It would be nice if the game allowed you to build multiple deck configurations, as it only allows you one play deck at a time, but this is really a minor quibble more than anything else.

As far as graphics and sound are concerned, as one would expect with a game such as this, the audiovisuals are extremely utilitarian. The board is laid out very nicely, taking up the entire screen, with the background denoting any sort of a field advantage. Cards are represented as small colored rectangles on the board, but can be enlarged to their full size upon closer inspection. In that view, all the card art looks as though it would on the card, as one would expect. There are no 3D animated battles like there were in Forbidden Memories; what is presented is essentially no-frills. Sound effects are extremely basic and really add very little to the game; music is similarly bland and repetitive, but you really lose nothing by playing this game with the sound off, because there is very little that any sound could do to enhance the playing experience of a card game.

Overall, Yu-Gi-Oh: The Eternal Duelist Soul is a fine video representation of the card game proper. If you or your children are interested in the card game, but you don't want to get sucked into the vortex of debt that inevitably results from involvement with a collectible card game, then EDS is certainly worth your attention. While it won't do much for you if you need more than the card game to be entertained, or if you're expecting something that follows the TV series more closely than the card game, it does give you the closest thing you can get to playing the card game without sucking your bank account dry, and the card game really doesn't need much added to it in order to be fun. It may have taken three tries, but it seems that, with The Eternal Duelist Soul, Konami has finally found the Heart of the Cards.




Recommended: Yes