#MostVisuallyStunningGame
Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is Konami throwing its hat into the free-to-play digital card game space, sizing up to the likes of Magic The Gathering: Arena, Pokemon Trading Card Game Online, and Legends of Runeterra. And it's going in hard, with full cross-play and cross-progression across every platform it's released on, 10,000 cards at launch, and an impressive solo mode. While Yu-Gi-Oh! has had video games before, they've always been an adaptation of the anime and manga, rather than the trading card game. The game places the focus on the cards themselves, providing what feels like the purest way to play the card game online we've ever had.
This reverence for the cards over the shouty shonen boys we usually see playing with them extends into its extensive single-player mode. The missions themselves all follow the same basic structure of ‘learn the deck, beat AI missions with the deck’, but they serve as a bit more than mere tutorials. Even the duelling itself feels slicker and more mature than in other games. Yu-Gi-Oh! is notorious for being very information-dense, with entire novels filling a card's allotted text space, and while it can still be a bit of a slog to read a card like Ash Blossom & Joyous Spring, Master Duel presents it in a more digestible fashion. Everything is explained, the 'chain' of effects waiting to be resolved is visualised on a literal chain to help illustrate how it works, and there's even a full 'duel log' to explain what's happened on previous turns.
Now, with all this accessibility it'd be easy to think Master Duel may not have much room for veteran players, because many of the game's most powerful and complex archetypes are available, but that’s not the case. The skill ceiling here is just as high as it would be in a tabletop game; it's just been streamlined for convenience.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is Yu-Gi-Oh! at its best. The kid gloves have been taken off to give us a complex, deep game full of exciting plays and powerful combos, but presented in a sensible and readable way. Whether you're a veteran duelist, a lapsed player, or someone who's had a vague interest at some point in the last 25 years, this is the way you want to get into Yu-Gi-Oh!.
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