Duel Masters: Kaijudo Showdown (GBA)
So weeks ago I brought you a long boring post about Yu-Gi-Oh: The Eternal Duelist's Soul. I never got to tell you guys the hilarious story of Kaiba's suicide, but whatever. Today I'm taking another trip into memory lane.... or what might possibly be "Ugh Don't Remind Me" lane for people who saw things like this as the death of anime (I know several who did).
First off, the name alone always seemed weird to me: Duel Masters. Yu-Gi-Oh's card game was called Duel Monsters. Was Wizards of the Coast intentionally trying to confuse people?
And yes, unlike the game whose hero has three different hair colors, Duel Masters actually began as a card game--specifically it began as Magic the Gathering. I'm not even joking--the early manga volumes in Japan specifically advertised the connection, and when you play the game, it becomes obvious. We never got the manga in English, and the version of the anime we got basically got the Samurai Pizza Cats treatment... and it was glorious. At least, I remember it being so. Unlike Yu-Gi-Oh where I became a franchise-wide fanboy, for Duel Masters I really only liked the anime and refused to touch the card game beyond video game adaptations, simply because card games cost money and I'm not made of it.
But onto the game.
Duel Masters: Kaijudo Showdown (and please take a sip every time you misread "masters" as "monsters") plays more like an RPG than Yu-Gi-Oh: Eternal Duelist Soul (which was pure dueling). You have an avatar who talks to people and you can challenge random dudes to kaijudo duels. Yes, they have a special term for "playing a children's card game," and apparently "kaijudo" was a term invented purely for the English language audience (it roughly means "art of the giant monster," even though the monsters aren't giant) because I guess playing card games sounded dorky or something. As the game starts, your brother is moving out, and he hands you all his Duel Masters swag--two full decks and five tournament invites. Naturally you immediately nerd out and challenge people to card games and spend all your money on decks while he, I dunno, goes to college and gets laid or something.
If you don't know how to play the game, don't worry: right at the beginning an anime cameo character named Knight--the only adult (besides the store owner) in a store clearly full of kids, incidentally--is there to teach you the fine points of the game and possibly to get a feel for your "potential" if you know what I mean.
My first real criticism is that the game looks more complicated than it is, because dueling has three screens for different activities. This makes the game LOOK complicated, and I've known people who mistakenly thought it was a lot to take in, but in actuality its pretty simple: Both players have decks of (I think) 40 cards. The first five are placed face-down in front of you and are your "shields." If the opponent destroys all your shields and then attacks you directly, you lose. There's no life points--just shields.
So the first thing each turn, you're asked if you want to put a card in your mana zone. Mana is "tapped" to summon monsters or casts spells, and by the way monsters can't attack the turn they're summoned because of "summoning sickness" but they can defend and gee it sounds a lot like Magic: the Gathering doesn't it? But one difference is that in Duel Masters, ANY card can be a mana card. Your opening hand had a monster that costs seven mana? You won't be able to summon him for a long time, so better put him in the mana zone so he can fuel cheaper summons. And yes, mana comes in different colors. So from there, you tap mana, you summon monsters and, when possible, you attack. You can choose whether to attack an enemy monster or one of the shields (or the other player if there are no shields), but if the enemy has a monster with the "blocker" ability they can, well, block an attack and force you to fight the blocker. When fighting happens, numbers are compared--there's only one number here, unlike Magic which had attack and HP and Yu-Gi-Oh which had attack and defense--and whoever has the bigger number wins.
Every time you win, you get a booster pack. Which makes spending money on them almost pointless. You only get money through tournaments by the way. And that's how the plot is advanced: you go to tournaments, people see your leet kaijudo skills, you get "sponsored" by the card shop, then get to go to more places and show off your card skills and meet more anime cameo characters. All while your brother is off getting an education or something. Note: I never beat this game, so I dunno if you ever catch up with the brother or whatever.
Now, when I first played this I thought of it as the better card game--Yu-Gi-Oh was pretty much just about having higher attack values, this felt more strategic. Unfortunately though, the problem with Duel Masters: Kaijudo Showdown is, its kinda boring. The duels move slow, and the dueling music is just this drone that's attempting to sound ominous (because that totally makes sense) but just gives them this atmosphere of "is this over yet?" The different screens for functions that really should've been all on one field doesn't help. It's a lot of little things, but they add up. It's not a bad game, and there's no obvious bugs or game-breaking flaws, but all these little presentation issues let it down something fierce.
As for the card game itself (or at least as its played here--again I never played the real thing), I've come to understand why it never took off: It's slow and boring, whole turns can pass with you unable to do anything because you don't have enough mana (a problem this game's daddy also had, but which Yu-Gi-Oh lacked), but what really hurts it for me is the whole "blocking is a special ability" thing--you can have seven bazillion monsters but if none of them have the Blocker ability, the enemy can still direct attack all your shields and then kill you and you can't do a damn thing about it, and that just seems effing stupid to me (in Magic, any monster could block, which is a far more sensible system).
On the whole, the problem isn't that the game is bad. The problem is that it doesn't stand out in any way. The anime was at least funny.
... What is with me and playing games where you summon monsters lately?
UPDATE: Apparently some of my information is slightly incorrect. According to TV Tropes (who aren't always reliable but who I'm inclined to believe in this case), Duel Masters actually began life as an actual MtG manga, but Wizards didn't like the manga author's direction, but decided to fix things by making a new card game. Which explains a lot, actually.
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Originally Posted by Edmond Dantes
