Merciful god, please! No! Wasn't the last time enough for you maniacs?! I don't want to play any more children's card games! I just don't! Please!
...oh, fine. Let's get this over with.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Millennium Duels is another of the many, many simulators of the wildly-popular anime series known as Yu-Gi-Oh! More specifically, it's a simulator of the card game based from the widely-popular anime series known as Yu-Gi-Oh! Unlike...certain...other games, this one actually follows the set standard of rules put forth by Konami...at least at the time that this game came out. So, those of you who aren't at all familiar with the rules of Yu-Gi-Oh! by this point, the line starts here!
Luckily, there's a tutorial to give you some insight and then you're let loose into either the Single Player or Multiplayer mode depending on preference. As I didn't play the Multiplayer (because anyone who's not in the same room with me is not bound by the most basic rules of social etiquette), the Single Player is split up into four categories - one for each of the main series of Yu-Gi-Oh! (that is to say, the classic, the one everyone hates, the one everyone thought was stupid until it aired and it was actually kind of awesome, and the one that's EXTREMEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!) - where you battle five duelists with a pre-made deck that's handed to you from the jump.
Like other Yu-Gi-Oh! games, you get a premade deck from the beginning that you can edit with cards you win from booster packs and from your opponents. Unlike other Yu-Gi-Oh! games, you don't have the option of being able to enter the code on the bottom of cards to receive said card in-game. In older games, you could do this but the code would only work once - hence you only received one copy per code. Here, I assume the feature is absent to help balance the online gameplay...which, knowing the MMO mentality will mean next to nothing so, good job there, Konami!
Just to tell you how hilariously dated my knowledge of Yu-Gi-Oh! really is (the actual game, that is), I was completely confounded by the Synchro and XYZ monsters. Just goes to show how different it is from the anime, particularly the first season when the rules were just sort of a vague notion of a suggestion than any actual guidelines to be followed. At the very least, however, this game isn't misleading. Unlike The Sacred Cards, this game doesn't make anyone who buys this think they're getting anything less than the legitimate Yu-Gi-Oh! experience. However, like Eternal Duelist Soul, it's nothing more than that. It's a simulator of the game with CPU opponents that have the faces of characters from the anime slapped over them.
It's appropriate that the first character you encounter is a computer simulator set up for teaching you the basics, because that's what this game feels like on the whole. It is the bare basics - a computer program made for a task, with some garish paint smeared all over it in an attempt to connect it to something. It's an obvious tie in and it really seems pointless to bring it up, but it has no soul. Forbidden Memories might have had a system I violently disagreed with, but at least there was a point to it all. It wasn't just a card game sim, there was a reason for all of it. Even The Sacred Cards, as much as I've ragged on it, had a plot and a reason for doing what we were doing...even if it was just Battle City Fanfiction edition.
This, though? Good as a simulator of the game, but 0/10, would not duel again.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Millennium Duels is now available from Konami for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.
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