Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of The Duelist (PS4 review)

It’s been 15 years since the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game was first released in North America, and the game is still as strong as ever, thanks to some very creative ideas to change up how the game has progressed over the years. As a kid I remember buying a Yugi structure deck and playing with friends, and while there was some basic strategy involved, it has since evolved in so many ways that no one could have expected with new summoning methods including Synchro, XYZ, and Pendulum summoning. However, one of the biggest issues when it comes to playing the TCG is the money involved. Buying all those booster packs and booster boxes really adds up overtime, especially if you want to play competitively. That’s where Konami’s Yu-Gi-Oh! video game series comes along.

Developed by Other Ocean Interactive, Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy Of The Duelist gives duelists the chance to play with over 6,600 cards and create your own decks without the need to spend money, aside from the initial price of the game ($14.99), which is about four booster packs at normal retail price. While the video game series has seen many different iterations, its core gameplay mechanics have stayed the same: play with a pre-built deck or create your own deck filled with monster, trap, and spell cards as you try to reduce your opponent’s life points to 0 or make them run out of cards to win.

So what makes Legacy Of The Duelist any different from the rest or why even bother when you can just play the game online by downloading the Yu-Gi-Oh! game app? While there are other alternatives, they don’t offer much aside from the ability to play against the AI and people online. They are also limited in just how much you can play or collect cards while Legacy Of The Duelist, in its most basic form, offers a story campaign that lets you relive the duels from all of the different Yu-Gi-Oh! animated series starting from the original series all the way up to the newest series, Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V, only with you controlling the deck. Duelists will be able to play as certain characters and duel with the characters deck that they used at the time of the show, meaning you will see different variations as you get further in the duels. Winning the duels rewards you cards used by the character and Duel Points (DP), which you can use to buy booster packs in the card shop. After you complete a duel, it’s not over as you can use the “Reverse Duel” option to play as the opponent, letting you play as the opponent and have some fun using the opponent’s deck to win.

There are a few other modes in the game, including a Vs. Mode (where you can play against the AI or other duelists online) and a Challenge Mode (where you face off against characters who have updated their classic themed decks with new cards to make them much more difficult), but the one that I found most interesting was the addition of Battle Pack Sealed and Draft Play. Battle Pack Sealed is a different way to play Yu-Gi-Oh! as you play with the cards, you pull out of your packs and that makes up your deck. Draft Play lets you select individual cards from packs until you make a deck. After Battle Pack Sealed was introduced, many of the Yu-Gi-Oh! tournaments have added the new mode in the final round of the tournaments where players create decks based around what cards they pull out of the battle pack, so it’s a great way to practice in case you do find yourself in that position.

So after collecting all those Duel Points, it’s time to start opening packs. Each pack you buy contains 8 cards and the most interesting thing about the game is different characters contain quite a few combination of cards. While you would expect to get a few of Kaiba’s monsters (including his Blue-Eyes White Dragon and Ultimate Blue Eyes White Dragon), he also has the all important Maxx ‘C’ cards, along with cards that are used by Marik and Pegasus. Opening packs are addicting; once you start, it’s hard to stop and the game is no different since there are a variety of cards to collect with each character. Below is a video of me opening more than 51,000 points worth of cards just to get a few dragons for my dragon deck, and a few other cards on my hunt to collect as many of the 6,600 cards that are available. To this point, the most recent cards I pulled have been Infernoids and Shadolls.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy Of The Duelist is exactly like playing the trading card game without having to spend your entire paycheck to make a full deck, outside of Konami releasing DLC packs with new cards and added scenarios for the game. It’s a great way to try out new deck formulas for yourself and play them against other duelists, but of course that also means you deal with a lot of rage and angry players who do have a habit of quitting if they are losing.