IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.
Thus it's with a heavy heart that I have to report that the new Yu-Gi-Oh! Decade Duels Plus game isn't actually very good.
Where O where do I begin? They've been making Yu-Gi-Oh games pretty much as long as they've been making Yu-Gi-Oh. You'd think that they'd have learnt what works and what doesn't by now. But apparently not. Now the interface and mechanics is pretty much the same as you've seen in almost any version. Apart from all the times when cards don't actually work. Which you'd think would be the sort of thing they'd check before shipping the game, but I've had at least 3 instances of utter WTF.
If you want to get technical then Convulsion Of Nature doesn't work at all, one time I wasn't able to activate the effect of Brionac, Dragon Of The Ice Barrier for no readily apparent reason, and one time the opponent summoned Airknight Parshath and I wasn't even given the option of using the Bottomless Trap Hole I had down.
This of course is as nothing to the bugs in the multiplayer matchmaking. When I tried it it was next to impossible to actually connect to a game. Assuming that the lobby even managed to list any at all. Or that it wasn't just full of 4 different matches with the same player. Which it almost always was, bizarrely. Maybe they'd played Multiply?
So, yes. The game is technically flawed. But that's not even the major issue with this particular version. Hell, even Duel Transer (AKA Master Of The Cards) had a couple of weird bugs, and I played the ever loving SHIT out of that. No, to really get into what makes this game so painful to play we need to talk about the concept of Reward Vs Punishment.
No, not like that.
Now this is something that most games struggle with. And Yu-Gi-Oh games in particular seem to have tremendous difficulty with. The concept is fairly straightfoward. In any game you need to reward success, but you shouldn't punish failure. Failure is it's own punishment, you don't really need to take anything else away or make things even harder for those that are already having difficulty. And no, I'm not talking about infinite lives or press to win gameplay here. It's a bit more subtle than that.
Collectable card games actually provide the best example of what I'm talking about here, at least in a videogame context. Put simply you get more cards by winning, but in order to win you need to improve your deck by getting more cards. So if you're able to win chances are you'll keep winning. And if you're doing badly then you'll keep doing badly for a long time.
A factor that is compounded in Yu-Gi-Oh by most of the cards you get being mediocre to awful monsters and support cards for archetypes you don't actually have anything for.
Now, before anyone starts ranting about challenge, difficulty and skill here, let's make something clear. Challenge is RELATIVE. What's easy for one person is challenging for another. And again, this is particularly true in Yu-Gi-Oh. It's never been what anyone could describe as an exactly balanced game. Power creep is so firmly entrenched in the mechanics they may as well give it a value and print it one the cards. But largely this isn't really a bad thing. The form of these sort of games is that you start out with a shitty starter deck full of shitty cards. Then you go and fight a bunch of shitty guys with equally shitty decks. As you earn better cards you move on to better opponents. It's like levelling up. And this is the part that shows a true test of skill, having evenly matched games. A game where you annihilate your opponent is boring. A game where your opponent annihilates you is boring and frustrating. A game that could go either way is exciting. If you can't compete on a fairly even level then you're not really competing at all.
So when I complain about the uncompromising brutality of Decade Duels it's not really a question of skill or any lack thereof. You're instantly thrown into a tournament setting, where all the opponents have "proper" decks. Not the hodge podge of thrown together mish mash the player will be using. And whilst you can scrape the occasional win you will be mostly losing. And losing HARD. The sad fact is that at this stage you don't actually have the cards to even find out how your skills match up.
And this is where the punishment vs reward stuff I was talking about really kicks in. You earn cards for points. You score points for doing stuff in duels, with a hefty bonus for winning. But when you're losing it's because there's very little you CAN do. And thus you enter a death spiral of frustration, which I guess the publishers hope will result in you buying extra card packs with real money. We'll get to those in a bit. The point here is there's a lot more to a learning curve than just throwing a tutorial at the player. You need to give the players a chance to engage with the game and enjoy it, particularly if you want them to pay for extra content. But Decade Duels is possibly the single worst introduction to the game a new player could have. After sitting there for half an hour being insta-gibbed by a variety of broken decks do you really think they'll be thinking "Well, I just need to spend more money on this"? No. They'll switch it off and do something else.
This is of course all easily fixed by simply weighting the scoring a bit more heavily on actions rather than victory, and throwing players the occasional bone when they lose. I mean, really. How hard would it be to implement something where if the difference in scores is X then the winning character will give the user Y cards and challenge them to try again later? This sort of shit happens all the time in the series. Or of course the more obvious solution is to have a wider variety of NPC decks to fight, and different tiers of tournaments. A beginners tournament with okay prize cards to get you started ranging all the way up to expert tournament with hideously broken decks and hideously broken prizes. Simple.
Of course this does lead me to what is possibly the 2 most shocking problems that exist in the game. I'd like to call them bugs, but they're far too obvious for that. These are apparently deliberate design decisions.
Firstly the fact that, when playing a best of three match you only earn cards for the final round played. SERIOUSLY. Spend a full 3 rounds locked in titanic struggle? Tough shit. Two thirds of your time and effort doesn't count. You score points, but no rewards are received. And it's not that they save all the cards up until your finished. I sat there and did the maths. What this means in real terms is that a match duel is largely a waste of time and something to be avoided. I find this particular decision to be utterly baffling. I mean, shouldn't the match duels offer up greater rewards? Seeing as how they take up to 3 times as long?
But even that pales in comparison with the other problem. You don't earn cards in multiplayer. AT ALL. This is a design decision that trancends the realms of utterly baffling and becomes.....
8000 points of direct damage to your sanity.
I mean, really. The haircuts in Yu-Gi-Oh make more sense than this. Rather than being able to nip online and have a fun duel with people of your level, earn a few cards and maybe improve your deck the online experience consists almost exclusively of those players who have already perfected their decks, either through grinding the single player in the previous version of the game or maybe buying all the card packs three times over. Now, there's nothing wrong with buying some extra cards if you fancy it. And anyone who's managed to earn all the cards for their ideal deck is certainly deserving of respect. But if your not getting any cards then the only reason to show up is for the e-peen. And that means playing the most brokenly overpowered deck you can muster. Which as I've said is all well and good IF you also have a brokenly overpowered deck. But if you just want to play for fun? Try out something a bit different or just generally not be there for the highest level of play? You are shit out of luck. Before I found this out I was recommending the game to my friends based on the assumption we could at least play each other for extra cards. But as soon as I found out you couldn't actually do that I had to go and tell them to not get it under any circumstances. Because there's very little point. You can't even trade cards.
Of course, as mentioned above this all designed to try and force you into buying some of the extra card packs that are available. The problem with this strategy of course is that trying force someone into something is far less effective than... Well, almost anything else. This is the problem you see with so called free to play games. Unless the game is fun and engaging to start with why would I ever spend any money on it?
And Decade Duels ISN'T FREE. It already costs you money to play, so to then try and force you into this microtransaction bullshit in order to compete is disingenuous at best.
Again, the problem here isn't that they're selling card packs. That's fine. And if the game was a bit more balanced and varied I'd quite happily look at maybe dropping a few shekels for quick access to some of my favourite cards. Although I'd have a bit of a problem with working out which packs to get even then as none of the packs actually come with even the slightest hint as to what they contain. You'd think that if you're hoping to sell something part of your marketing strategy might include ACTUALLY TELLING PEOPLE WHAT THEY'RE BUYING. That way they might realize it's something they want and actually buy it. But no. What you'll see listed is simply "Starter Deck 001", "Starter Deck 002", "Card Pack 001" and so on. Even when you're buying boosters of cards in the real world you have some idea of the sort of thing that might be in there, even if it's only from the picture on the front of the packet.
There will not, however, be this guy. Not in any your packs.
I mean, would it REALLY be all that hard to label say, a deck containing Gadget monsters as a "Gadget Deck"? And maybe include a quick blurb saying something along the lines of "this is a deck containing gadget monsters such as Whatever The Big Gadget Monster In The Deck Is Called™!". REALLY?!?!
Now, for my sins I decided that I would in fact get some extra cards. So I plumped for the recently released super pack. This cost more than starter deck and contained half as many cards. Pleased I was not. A few of them were, admittedly, useful. But the selection was not nearly as super as the price tag indicated.
So then, a terribly flawed game. Not nearly a patch on the Wii's Master Of The Cards (AKA Duel Transer). So why did I bother? Well because I wanted a current Yu-Gi-Oh game with a current selection of cards. One that would receive updates for new sets. Be they paid or not. Of course Decade Duels fails here as well as there is not an Xyz monster in sight. Kind of baffling why they resurrected an old 5Ds game rather than pressing ahead and releasing something for the current iteration. But then baffling is clearly a key part of their design philosophy. Really how hard can it be to make a decent Yu-Gi-Oh game? Sure the interactions of the thousands of available cards can be a bit complex, but that's the bit they've pretty much got down. A suitable range of AI decks is again something that already exists. There's a whole bunch in every single version. There's no reason why you couldn't just take the decks and port the logic for running them across. A lot of them will no longer be particularly competitive, but I've already pointed out that's hardly a bad thing.
Really, decade duels should only be one of a number of games. There should be one for each different iteration of the franchise. Each containing cards and characters from that particular era. And each being part of a larger whole. Plugging together and providing more possibilities. I'd happily pay 800 points a piece for each era, provided they all displayed a decent variety of content and weren't so bafflingly laden with issues.
So... Yeah. Can't really recommend it.
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