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Yu-Gi-Oh! Stairway to the Destined Duel

Yu-Gi-Oh! Stairway to the Destined Duel

Written by Matt Mirkovich on 7/4/2003 for GBA  
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Okay I’ll admit it, I like playing Yu-Gi-Oh, I like how it’s a very easy game to pick up that you can play with just about anyone. Plus I needed a new collectible card game to pick up since I stopped playing Magic the Gathering (Nerd Alert! -ed) years ago. So it was only natural that I get my hands on Yu-Gi-Oh: Stairway to the Destined Duel. Not only is the card library expanded but you also get a story this time, and it is worth mentioning that this is a bare bones experience of the game, no extra rules like what we’ve seen in Dark Duel Stories, Forbidden Memories, or Duelist of Roses which makes this game perfect for fans of the game/show that play the game with their own cards.

Eternal Duelist Soul was a good representation of the Yu-Gi-Oh game, a very simple card game given a very basic platform. You have ten spots on your field, five are meant for monsters and the other five are ment for Magic and Trap cards. Monsters are played by setting them on the field in either a face-down horizontal defense position, or in a vertical face up attack position. Monsters are given a star level, level 1-4 are summoned without any costs, level 5-6 monsters require a sacrificial tribute to summon, and level 7-8 require two tributes to summon. There are four different kinds of monster cards, there are the normal monsters, monsters that have some sort of effect (i.e. when the monster is summoned you can draw a card), ritual monsters which are summoned through the use of a magic card, and fusion monsters which are created through the use of a polymerization card that fuses two monsters together.

Magic cards can range from direct damage to monster equipment cards. And trap cards are cards that are usually activated after something occurs, like when a player summons a monster or plays a magic card.
The graphics of the game have been only slightly updated from Eternal Duelist Soul, the card graphics and field graphics remain the same, however there is now a map you travel across when looking for an opponent to challenge. The character art has been updated to follow the current story arc running on WB, which is currently in the battle city tournament storyline. The sound is nothing special in any light and is only there to give a little bit of ambient noise. A nice addition to this game is the faster pace at which the game goes now, where as in Eternal Duelist Soul you would have to hold down the B button to pick up the pace, that is no longer necessary here, which is quite funny because I started off the game with my thumb perma-pressed onto the B button, not until recently did I discover that I didn’t need to do that, thank you Konami.

If you’re a fan of Yu-Gi-Oh and want to play the game the way it is meant to be played then this is the way to go. Ignore all those console iterations because this honestly is about as good as it is going to get.
Konami expands on their card game craze with an update to Eternal Duelist Soul. Is it worth your hard earned money or should you just buy your own cards? Read on to find out.

Rating: 7.9 Above Average

* The product in this article was sent to us by the developer/company.


About Author

In a past life I worked with Interplay, EA, Harmonix, Konami, and a number of other developers. Now I'm working for a record label, a small arm of casual games in a media company along with Gaming Nexus, and anywhere else that sees fit to employ me.

 

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