You know, I'm not a huge fan of VNs or anything like that, but... all in all, this is actually pretty solid. The game appears to end after beating Pegasus in a children's card game, but everything up to that is decent. I think the only disappointing thing(s) that I can think of are as follows. I'll try to be succinct with as many points as I can. Note that these are not reasons why you shouldn't play the game, just... things that I was either not expecting, or was personally disapproving of.
- First, deck building is awkward and slightly unintuitive to start with. For one thing, you have a maximum "star" count that your deck can hold, which is 55; at the same time, you need at least fifteen cards in your deck in order to battle. (This value is apparently arbitrary for the CPU players.) Spell cards also cost three "star points" each, so at most you're getting five spells in your deck, a couple of strong monsters, and a few low-star deck fillers. I can imagine why it was done that way to prevent the player from steamrolling completely, but, uh... I'm pretty sure at one point, I ended up fighting a 12,000 ATK Blue-Eyes, which is weird because the only way I could imagine that would happen is with double casting of "Ultramorph", which is a broken card... in the hands of the player, that is. Broken as in "it halves your attack instead of doubling it as you'd expect".
- The game doesn't really tell you what you need to complete some quests; it just kind of tells you what you should do and throws you out into the world unaware of your goal. A quest log or something, if possible, would be a life-saver for the player to at least know what to do or where to go.
- You have the back row drawn out for spells, but spells don't actually go there. "Okay, I use Swords of
Revealing Light Block Attack!" And then it just goes to your graveyard, and there's no indication of how many turns it's been out... not that it matters, since you can win almost every game in two or three turns once you unpack a Blue-Eyes.
- I'd like a slightly better glossary for cards. You get the cards and they end up in your deck builder, sure, but you don't get to see their names or spell effects until you actually use them in battle. In addition, something to list the types of fusions you can make in the game.
As for the stuff that I did enjoy:
- Yugi has some solid taste in card waifus... "Tour Guide from the Underworld"? Nice.
- Just about every female character has a sex animation... I say "just about" because there's that one loli in the pink jacket that only ever gives me money, even though the purple-jacket loli has her own animation.
- The game is pretty easy to pick up and master... though the "law of dominant strategy" applies heavily here. "Oh, look, the enemy only has one creature on the board—let's play Gimme That, Blue-Eyes and Dark Pendant, and swing for game immediately."
- Even though I don't like the VN game style, I did like the slow build-up of Tea and Yugi's relationship. And I can only hope that in future chapters, it gets further developed.
- "YOUR WINNER! End duel?"
Hopefully, the developer can get someone on board to retool the artwork, because it's fine as is, but I'm sure we all agree that it would definitely improve the game as a whole if the character sprites were a lot better. (Not the cards, though. Keep those as they are, just for shits and giggles.)
