Duel Masters: Sempai Legends
I’ll see your monster and raise you… a montster
Tags: Duel Masters: Sempai Legends Categories: GBA Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Daniel "monk" Pelfrey on Aug 10th, 2004
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Duel Masters: Sempai Legends (title page) | 2 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Strategy | No | ||
The proliferation of collectible card games in recent years has seen a number of videogame tie-ins (not to mention cartoons). The latest license to find this treatment is Duel Masters, from Wizards of the Coast – a Japanese game that is beginning to make inroads here in North America.
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The plot for the game is fairly basic – the player is a young “up and coming” duelist-about-town. On his birthday (no choice of gender in this game) the player receives a special card from grandfather, only to have it stolen. This leads to a journey of such peril that it could only be reproduced on the Game Boy Advance, since larger consoles are just not up to the challenge.
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Traveling to the next town (after taking some time out for a few duels of course) the player seeks out the Famous Detective Kline to handle the case of The Missing Collectible Trading Card Game Card. Naturally there is a fee involved, and since the character played in the game is merely a young child (though allowed to travel, by foot, throughout the countryside alone) he doesn’t have that kind of cash laying about. Instead an alternate payment method is agreed upon – the local tournament medal.
Upon paying the fee, the Famous (yet apparently fiscally irresponsible) Detective Kline agrees to handle the case. It is then learned that there is a thief that goes by the name of Mr. X that lives in the capital city of Lakeburg. Unfortunately, to enter the city, one must be a professional duelist. It isn’t good enough to call oneself a professional, one demonstrates that by winning all of the various tournaments in each of the surrounding villages.
Allow me to point out that any country where the capital city has such restrictive access to its people must be ruling by some form of oppression. It is a shame that the underlying political subtleties readily exploited in this game are neglected.
And so the real journey begins.
By battling though the various villages, entering the capital, winning the tournament, defeating Mr. X, and ultimately becoming the best Duel Masters champion possible, the player will unlock a couple of more items to keep the play lasting even longer. There are 180 cards to find and collect as well as countless duelists waiting to spring out from the bush as players travel along the roads from village to village.
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Boiled down to basics, the cards get really mushy – don’t try immersing them or your Game Boy Advance in water. The gameplay however, is another matter. Basically, the player attempts to collect as many cards as possible to assemble the best deck of 40 cards. There are 5 elements, each with their own creatures and characteristics. Rather than go into details about each type of deck and the possibilities – further complicated by the different types of monsters and spells for each element – it will be assumed that the reader has an idea of what “5 elements” means and implies when it comes to combining into one deck of 40 cards.
Certain opponents will have decks stacked heavily in favor of one style (or element), while others have a grand mixture of different types of cards. Each possibility give a decent challenge to the player.
In each village not only will there be tournaments to win, but there are trading centers, where standard trades can take place, or “special” trades can occur – risky to be sure, since these involve dueling, and if the player loses, not only is there much shame involved, but possible rare cards could be lost in the transaction.
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Dueling is simple, even by collectible card game standards. Players start out with a few cards in their hand, and each turn a card is placed in the man pool, according to its element. Players can tap into this pool to summon monsters to the playing field – and naturally these each have different attributes. Some act as blockers, other are attacking powerhouses, while some demolish all of a certain type of card, or even allowing the player to get out of jail free. Ok, I made that last one up…
Different cards and spells require different amounts of mana to be spent. The good thing, is that mana can be reused at each turn. It’s also a good thing that the mana pool doesn’t have a diving board, since that would be an accident waiting to happen.
There are 5 cards placed in front of the player acting as a shield. Certain cards can be summoned to the field with a low amount of mana to enable players to start attacking and taking out those shields quickly, but they have very few hit points, and can be eliminated by the other player quickly when their monsters are finally summoned. Ah, to find the perfect balance between elements, spells, monsters – this is what Duel Masters is all about. A life lesson in finding balance.
Suffice to say that collectible card game aficionados, even collectible card game aficionados in training will find Duel Masters not only challenging, but worth the time investment. With a simple ruleset (5 shields, monsters, spells, and that’s basically it) Duel Masters is a game that will find an audience in people that not only like to collect, but don’t want to tax their brain too hard in doing so.
There are some RPG-lite elements to the game, mostly in the form of a ranking that is acquired as time progresses and duels are won. Lose a few duels, and not only does the player’s rank drop, but shame and dishonor is brought to the family, and everybody gets sent away to work in a gulag. Ok, maybe that’s stretching it a bit, but you get the idea.
The graphics are decent – and one could expect so much information to be crowding the Game Boy Advance screen, but Duel Masters has streamlined the game to a point where everything is readily available and seen.
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The audio is…. well, deaf people will not be missing anything. Particularly since there really isn’t anything to miss.
Altogether, Duel Masters is a game that is already picked up by the card game crowd, and one that will be enjoyed by those players looking for a way to get into these types of games without the pages and pages of special rules. A simple game (relatively speaking) that has a great deal of replay value when all 180 cards are collected and two Game Boy Advances are hooked together.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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+ Simple rules. Good for beginners and complex enough to challenge experience players + Graphically well done. It's nice to see so much information nicely arranged in a small area. |
6.9 |
| What Doesn't | |
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- The plot is so contrived that people who actually come up with this stuff should be fired. I mean, really... - Highly forgettable audio - It's just dueling, over and over and over and over and over and over... |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| A game that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. If the words "collectible card game" make you cringe, then stay away. If you can't get enough, then you most likely already have this game. If you have a mild interest, and a few extra dollars, then this might be worth checing out. | |
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Tags: Duel Masters: Sempai Legends
Posted by Daniel "monk" Pelfrey on Aug 10th, 2004 and is filed under GBA Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
