Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel

Genre: Turn-Based Collectable Card Game

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Online)

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Review:

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS AND LOOTBOXES

Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is a free-to-play Turn-Based Collectable Card Game released on PC, mobile devices, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2022. Like most games in the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise, Master Duel follows the same rules as the actual physical Yu-Gi-Oh! Card Game, but brings this long-running game to the Nintendo Switch for the first time, with the free-to-play format holding the potential to be a great way to introduce newer players to the franchise, albeit without the characters from the manga and anime the card game is based on.

For the Nintendo Switch version of the game, the presentation has its good qualities and bad. On the one hand, the 3D visuals are clean, the text is easy to read, and there are nice effects with cards moving around, bashing into one another and exploding to add some visual flair to the card game, with even some lightly-animated character portraits when you summon a particularly strong monster. However, despite how little is going on here, this is a game that chugs at times on the Nintendo Switch, in particular at the beginning of each match. It doesn’t interfere with the gameplay, but it definitely brings down the presentation a notch.

On the other hand, this game’s soundtrack is excellent, with some fittingly epic anime-esque fantasy-style music like the Main Menu Theme, Normal 1, Keycard 2, Normal 3, Climax 3, Normal 4, Keycard 4, Climax 4, Normal 5, Climax 5, Keycard 5… look, I could just go through the entire game’s soundtrack, it’s all great here. In addition to the main menu theme, this game’s soundtrack features eight card battle themes, each with three variations for when the match’s intensity ramps up. This does a magnificent job building up the tension and really making every match feel like an intense experience.

As for the gameplay, well, if you’ve played Yu-Gi-Oh! before, you pretty much know what to expect here. It’s vaguely similar to other collectable card games like Magic: The Gathering, but without the resource management those games typically have. Instead, players will need to balance out a deck with smaller and larger monsters (the latter requiring the sacrifice of “tribute” monsters to summon them), spells, and trap cards, with various other more specific types. Monster cards can be in attack or defense positions, with different strength levels for each as well as different uses. And players have an additional “Extra Deck” with cards only used in specific situations.

It all works as well here as it ever did, I suppose, although I personally found myself having a harder time wrapping my head around the game’s strategy than I did with games like Eternal: The Card Game, Hearthstone, and Magic: The Gathering itself.

However, I think players new to this game and particularly new to the genre as a whole may find themselves easily confused by this game’s mechanics. There is a tutorial at the start that explains the core gameplay, and then an extended tutorial that explains additional elements of the game as you play. However, the game doesn’t seem to care if players have a good grasp of its mechanics, and it doesn’t readily display information players may need access to – in particular, spells the enemy uses disappear off the screen before the player necessarily even understands what’s going on.

Even more frustrating, while some elements of the gameplay flash by too quickly, others are agonizingly slow. There are times when the AI player will pause for minutes at a time thinking about its next move, something that literally forces the player to sit and wait for no good reason.

At the very least, the Nintendo Switch version of the game makes good use of the touchscreen, something I would consider a must for this sort of game on the platform. However, those who prefer to play the game docked or simply want to use traditional gamepad controls will find they are sufficient enough here.

In the end, I really wanted to like Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel a lot more than I did. There’s definitely some unique Card Game mechanics at work here that make for some interesting strategy, and the soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal. Unfortunately, a sorely lacking tutorial and some frustrating performance issues make it hard to recommend this game unless you are already a fan of the franchise and insist on playing the game on Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr –Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is a free-to-play Turn-Based Collectable Card Game that brings the long-running franchise to Nintendo Switch. The game itself still works well, and the epic soundtrack backing everything is absolutely wonderful. However, newer players may find this game hard to get into due to a not-so-great tutorial, and the Nintendo Switch version suffers from some unfortunate performance issues, making this game a mixed bag overall.

Grade: C+

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2022 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Card Game, Best Music, Best New Free-To-Play Game

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