Duel Masters - Limited Edition

Today I give you Duel Masters, an odd little Playstation 2 game by Atari based on the collectable card game of the same name. To be honest, I only bought this because i had a major jonesin' for Digimon Digital Card Battle, but since i seem to be stuck on BlackWarGreymon and just too lazy to upgrade my deck, I decided to shell out the $7.50 for this little number. I really have no interest in Duel Masters as a brand. It seemed to me like a cop-out of Yu-Gi-Oh!, a premonition that proved very, very correct.

While nowhere near the caliber and fun-ness of DCB, this game does have the card-based strategy i crave. It strongly resembles Magic: The Gathering in terms of initial play: you have to get mana in order to summon creatures; the player is given a set number of "shields" until they lose; the monsters attack the player directly. It diverges from Magic at the rules of combat. Only a tapped creature can be attacked, only certain creatures can block, certain creatures have dual-shield-breaking abilities, and creatures can evolve. All in all, a fun game if you're familiar with Magic or a similar card game. The benefits of a console card game are still there: no refereeing the rules as the computer does it for you, you save a lot of time from shuffling and dealing with decks, and, of course, you don't bend up that precious rare card. In fact, you can sell your rarest card (for annoying "store credit" - the average credit is 10 and packs cost 125!) and not have to deal with the loss of something actually worth value. Then again, this is Duel Masters we're talking about. I don't think there'd be many tears in real life if you used the most rarest card for a bookmark.

Ah, but we're missing the true value of any game! Let us now focus on that meaty, juicy plot; that storyline that grips us fishlike by the gills and reels us in!

Yes. Well. Duel Masters doesn't really offer anything in the way of plot. Some creature has escaped its prison in suchandsuch place and the five organizations (nature, fire, water, light, and dark) send special monks to find the five best duelests for some reason. Like Yu-Gi-Oh!, it's another case of "Does this card game REALLY affect the real world? And if so, why do they let preteen boys play it?" While YGO does, ehh, a decent job of explaining this, DM just lets it go. Reminds me of something else... At least with Digimon Card Battle it's the Digital World you're saving, not Earth. That's a little bit more believable.

Essentially, you play as 5 different characers: Rusty (fire), Luc (light), Flynn (dark), Rebecca (water) and....um...the loser kid (nature). Awesomeness point - Luc is African-American! :D And he's incredibly cool! :DD The rest of the gang are kinda stereotypes. Rusty's the little monkey-brat, Flynn is the emo, Rebecca is the smarter-than-men chick, and the loser kid is a whiny brat who can't win any battle he's put against and WHY DO YOUR CARDS ALWAYS LOSE, NATURE CLAN!? WHY!?!

Ahem.

The graphics in the game, along with the voice acting, are laughable. Characters' outlines ooze in and out of their colors; faces, mouths, and noses disappear; and they give the overall appearance of a bad marionette show. Though the graphics in the battle scenes, which you will thankfully be spending most of your time, are ten times better, the cinematics are horribly dull and repetitive. I ended up turning them off after i froze the game trying to skip through them. Really! I looked and looked for a game with cinematics like Digimon's and then end up hating them!? Where is the justice?!

Not that the cards are much to look at. Since the plot of the game is based on the TYPE of card rather than the CREATURE, your battlers only resemble a hodgepodge of Tolkien-ish mush. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the logic behind these creatures. Why is that floaty airship part of the light clan? Why is that computer virus in the water clan? It simply gets annoying.

No music in the battle scenes, but some of the creatures grunt and growl. While initially amusing, this can grow VERY tiresome VERY quickly. The only battle music is at the end of the battle, where the character does a little signature pose while their victory theme plays. Loser kid's pose is particularly amusing, as he looks like he's going to break into a full-scale Broadway show-and-dance. He whirls out his jazz hands but at the last minute remembers he's a duel master and just kinda twitches before looking his ultimate loserest.

All in all, it's not a bad game. The card battles are pretty fun and the plot is make-fun-of-able at best. It's at least worth $10 or a night's rent.