If you’re not really into card battling games like Warhammer or Magic: the Gathering—you won’t like Duel Masters. If, on the other hand, you enjoy this type of genre, it’s still a solid card game, albeit no substitute for playing with real cards.
Here’s the deal: the game is comprised of two different sections — arcade mode and story mode. Arcade mode is pretty much just bare-boned card battling. In story mode, your goal is to stop an evil woman from summoning a group of monsters that come from the card dimension — the very cards you use to play Duel Master. The dialogue is cheesy, the plot is hackneyed, and the voice-acting is so intolerable it is not even good for comic relief.
Apparently the only way to battle this villainess is to build up your deck of cards by card-battling with other opponents — you’ll walk around very exotic locales like shopping malls, schools, and card-shops and approach people to card battle. Basically, you’ll choose cards from your Starter Deck, and your goal is to maintain your five shields by summoning blocker and attacker monsters. Blockers protect your shields directly. If your opponent summons an attack monster to attack a shield, your blocker will automatically protect the shield. Generally, if the blocker has a higher numerical value than the attacker, than your opponent has just wasted a turn, as the attacker is destroyed with the blocker none the worse for wear. If the blocker has a lower numerical value than the attacker, then it will protect one of your shields for that one time only, as then it will be sent to the “graveyard”. And if both the attacker and the blocker are of equal strength, they both are destroyed for the remainder of the battle. If you manage to destroy all five of your opponent’s shields, your next turn can be used to summon an attacker to strike the opponent directly, and win the match. You need to unlock the ending of each of the five main characters in the game in order to proceed onward — and each character specialises in a “civilization.”
Duel Master decks can be comprised of five different types of cards, known as civilizations. In order to summon any of these creatures, you need a certain amount of mana of the corresponding civilization, which you obtain by sacrificing corresponding civilization cards for a turn. The civilisztions are:
- Fire creatures — monsters that are fast, relentless attackers that can quickly overwhelm an opponent, but there are no blockers.
- Darkness creatures — monsters that cost a lot of mana to summon, but are very powerful fighters and decent blockers.
- Earth — monsters with special abilities that can increase your mana.
- Light — monsters that are very slow but very powerful.
- Water — monsters that have the best blockers.
There are many more rules — and it can quickly become confusing and overwhelming to all but the most hard-core of card-battling fans. This is not the type of game that you can pick up and play. What doesn’t help at all is the atrocious graphics and sound. The animations that show two monsters duking it out are kind of fun to watch, but it really isn’t all that special. I would imagine people who enjoy playing the real Duel Master card game would enjoy playing the video-game version so that they can see animations that they cannot in the real world, but Atari dropped the ball here, as the battle scenes are short, swift, and with little in the way of special effects.
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In addition, choosing which cards will engage in battle is very hard in the eyes, because you’ll want to look up the details of your cards to find out if they are attackers, blockers, or have any special attributes. The problem is that the in-game text is so small — you’ll be squinting your eyes all the time to glean the card particulars, and that’s just inexcusable.
The loading times are also very long — even by PS2 standards, and people who are not fans of the card-battle genre will find Duel Masters to be slow-paced, methodical, and just plain boring, as each card battle will take at least 10 minutes, and there are many, many battles. In short, you should probably stay away from this game if you’re not a fan.
