Topic: Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL World Duel Carnival Review

[Daan]

Let’s call it a Bu-Mm-Ur!

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/38037/yu-gi-oh-zexal-world-duel-carnival-review

Yu-Gi-Oh is one of those series I became obsessed with when I was younger. While the anime may have put a little too much focus on the card game, I still enjoyed it. Admittedly though, I was interested in learning about the card game. I participated in a few tournaments, had a couple of friends who were really into it, and went to special events. At a certain point, it all just went away. I can't really pinpoint a specific timeframe, but the interest died pretty fast locally. Luckily, there were still the games to hold me over. On the Nintendo DS, they did a great job emulating both the anime and card game. Now the series has hit the Nintendo 3DS, though it’s not as great as its predecessors.

To start on a positive note, the core concepts of the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game are here. You can participate in duels as one of 12 characters from the ZEXAL show and use their cards to your advantage. Even if you have never played Yu-Gi-Oh, the game does a very good job of teaching you. That said, you better enjoy playing the card game, as unlike some previous titles, there are no explorable environments to help add variation to the game’s pacing. However, the 12 storylines are good enough, but they are told silently with text and pictures of the characters.

This problem carries on with the unimpressive battle presentation. You have the 2D field on the touchscreen with static information on the top. You don't get anything flashy when monsters are summoned, except maybe for a generic line of dialogue that goes along with it. World Duel Carnival makes for a very lukewarm use of the 3D display, which could have benefited from an anime-esque introduction of the monsters. It keeps a good focus on the battles overall, and there is nothing wrong with that, but it is just boring to look at.

After you are done with going through stories, there’s not much left for you to do. You can build your own decks and fight against 40 different characters in Free Duel Mode, but this is a bit unfulfilling. This is mostly because all of the over 5000 cards, card sleeves, game mats and characters are already unlocked from the get go. In the other entries, you would unlock the rights to use these and this would make returning to the world rewarding. And it doesn’t help that the game is the first in a while to not support online or offline multiplayer for its players. This makes this whole aspect completely pointless and a big waste of your time.

While we are on the subject of the Japanese version, there is a huge elephant in the room that I would like to address. Konami, in all of its wisdom, removed a big chunk of content for the western version of World Duel Carnival. The original title offered 40 storylines for you to play through, which makes the 12 present here a shame. While I want to mention again that it will still require a lot of time to finish it all, the Western version goes even further than that. Aspects like items and characters for Free Duel Mode would unlock over time, which make the moves made by the localization team all the more surprising. They also removed a whole Database feature where you would be able to find the endings, special photos, a music listening option, and information on all the duelists in the game. Why Konami would do all of this is a mystery.

Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL World Duel Carnival is not a badly made game, but it misses so much from what made the previous games fun. There is no multiplayer and little to do aside from going from battle to battle. The game's concepts are there and the storylines are kind of interesting, but that’s it. With so much content removed or altered from the Japanese release, it makes this one extra hard to recommend even if you are a huge fan. This is because there are so many better games to pick up, even if the 2D artwork won't look as sharp on the Nintendo 3DS. Then again, even on a platform level, Konami could have done so much more with this one. What a shame.