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Pook’s Review: Yu-Gi-Oh! 7 Trials to Glory
World Championship 2005
02.23.05 - By Pook

Another year, another World Championship edition. I’d like to congratulate Dark Paladin for beating me to the punch in reviewing this game, but I plan to offer a different perspective on the new Gameboy Advanced game.

Now last year’s edition received a hefty amount of criticism because it offered nothing but straight-forward dueling. For me, that was exactly what I wanted. This year’s edition returns actual gameplay back to the GBA, but is this necessarily a good thing?

The World Championship couldn’t have been simpler – duel, unlock characters, duel them, unlock more characters, repeat. It took me months to unlock everyone (many, many hours) and then I tried to beat every player at least 20 times. 20 x 24 = a lot of dueling. I got my money’s worth, several times over. This year, it’s not that simple.

WC ’05 returns the day-of-the-week and location gameplay that made Worldwide Edition stressful. If you forget to check a location (all whopping 4 of them) on a certain day, you miss your chance to duel in a tournament. The Card Shop loves to close on Tuesdays (although the packs restock, more on that later), so sometimes that’s a waste of a day. Other than that, you can walk around and duel with everyone, or anything. Yes, you can duel a dog and a cat. They love to use Equip Spell-heavy decks, so they will be a pain. Speaking of decks, did you know you get to have 20 of them? TWENTY?! Ok, there were times that I wanted to try out a certain kind of deck but I had to disband another in order to make it, but isn’t 20 a bit excessive? Three decks in ’04 was too few, but twenty is too many. It’s hard to keep track of all of them, even though you can overlap cards.

Another big change in this game is the addition of Duel Points. You get points for defeating opponents, but there are factors into deciding how many points you get. You get more points for destroying more monsters in battle, or doing more Life Point damage. This means, in order to get more than 400 or so points, you need to really draw out the fights, hoping your opponent will try to replenish some lost LP. Tea is not bad to get extra points from, but she gets old, real fast. On top of that, you only get an extra 50 points for getting an opponent’s Life Points to 0, but you get 1000 points for an Exodia win. A thousand points! 200 times more points for an Exodia win! That means that everyone will build an Exodia deck at least once – heck, you could have 20 different Exodia decks if you wanted to. But you will need those 1000 Duel Points in order to access the worst function in the game, the Card Machine.

The Card Machine was in past games (except WC ’04), and it was a great way to enter the passwords from your actual cards in order to have them in the game. This time, there is a price – 1000 Duel Points. But here’s the catch – you have to pay them up front. This means, if you mess up entering your password, say goodbye to those points. It’s ok, you can just duel 3-5 more times in order to try again. This is also a painful way to learn that your favorite card not only isn’t in the game, but that you feel foolish for wasting your points. It was a wonderful feeling to find out that Breaker the Magical Warrior wasn’t in the game this way. That’ll teach me to not read online FAQs before trying to enter a card. By the way, if your card even hints at the words “Spell Counter”, your card isn’t there. Neither is Creature Swap. Or Vampire Lord. Or Lava Golem. Hooray.

In the past games, after you win a duel, you get to pick a pack of cards and you get 5 cards. In this game, you don’t. You can take those hard earned Duel Points over to Grandpa’s Shop and spend them on packs. Packs range anywhere from 3 cards to about 10. Now there is the advantage of knowing what kind of cards are inside – there’s LIGHT packs, WATER packs, Quick-play packs, etc. The only problem is that all of the cards you really want are in the most expensive packs. And you can’t win duels as easily without the cards you need, but then you can’t afford to buy the packs. It’s a vicious cycle. To top that off, the shop runs out of cards if you can manage to rack up that many points. Like I said earlier, they tend to restock on Wednesdays, but you will find yourself skipping nearly the whole week just so they can get more cards in. The plus side is that you can buy three Starter decks – Yugi, Kaiba, and Joey. Most of the cards are the actual ones found in each starter, with some changes made due to the lack of the card in the game (Kaiba’s deck comes with Negate Attack and Ring of Destruction, probably making up for Lord of D. and Flute of Summon Dragon, but isn’t that almost too good for a Starter deck?).

Other than all of that, the gameplay itself is fine. The only drastic change is that the view is diagonal, as if you were looking at a table, as opposed to the top-down view of years past. However, there is a really strange option, though, and that has to due with the activation of Traps and Quick-play Spells. You can either set it to Automatic or Manual. In manual mode, you basically have to predict when you want to use a trap – that’s pretty easy with cards like Mirror Force, but not so easy for anytime-activation cards such as Just Desserts. Do yourself a favor, stick to Automatic. The only problem with automatic is the same issue the past games have had – they ask you non-stop to use them. You’ll be pestered to activate that Waboku after every single action. Take a look at the bottom right of your screen – there is a timer. You’ll notice that if you have a trap set, your clock will have had much more time pass than your opponent. It’s obnoxious, but I guess it is better than feeling sorry for yourself when you can’t use a trap when you want/need to.

Overall, the game is fine, if you are incredibly patient. You won’t get those cards that you are dying for right away (or at all…poor Breaker…), but there is some solid dueling. The AI was fixed to avoid the MAJOR issue of last year’s edition – the computer would almost never attack a face-down monster with 2000+ DEF (it wouldn’t attack 99 times out of 100, if not fewer). But if you have no one to duel with in person all of the time, you’ll be raking up the hours. I’m not going to bother reviewing the promo cards included – I’ll leave that to the Card of the Day team. Happy dueling.

Final Scores: (model taken from the reviews at ign.com – all scores out of 10)

Presentation – 8 – it’s fun to walk around, and the fact that you can duel anyone is fun, but only 4 locations?

Graphics – 7 – the world looks ok for a GBA game, but it isn’t pushing the limit for graphics. The card scans are accurate (usually look like the Japanese editions, too), but the semi-3D feels awkward.

Sound – 5 – standard repeating MIDI music. Minimal sound effects. I usually keep the sound off.

Gameplay – 9 – it’s dueling, alright, but the Duel Points takes away from the ease of receiving new packs. Plus, the traveling and days of the week grow old, fast. And 20 decks, come on…

Lasting Appeal – 10 – once you do get those cards you want, the combinations are endless. You’ll be playing this game until ’06 comes out, or at least until Nightmare Troubadour comes out for the DS.

Overall – 8/10. Being kind of generous, but hey, I’ve got a soft spot for Yu-Gi-Oh games. Keep them coming, Konami.