A key to understanding Dark Duel Stories is realizing that there was a period of time between the author of Yugioh adding a trading card game into his manga, and said trading card game actually existing and having actual consistent rules. This is readily apparent in the entire first season of the anime itself, which predates the actual card game and has multiple pieces of bullshit that look cool but make no goddamn sense. A brief and famous example for you. To its credit, Dark Duel Stories is a little more in line with the rules of the card game. You summon monsters and try to have the highest numbers to beat out the numbers of your opponent's monsters, dealing damage to them with your attacks and reducing their life to 0. There are other fun little wrinkles, like spells to help you out or traps to hinder the opponent, but that's the basics. The actual card game itself has evolved over 15 years to become more of a game of making an unbreakable board with powerful monsters that can negate anything and everything the opponent attempts to do, but that's not the concern of 2002. No, this mostly plays like the actual card game. Mostly. There's no real story behind it, you just battle a bunch of the anime characters and try to beat them all, getting more powerful cards and fighting off characters with more powerful cards. Dark Duel Stories deviates with two wild innovations. We'll talk about the first, since it didn't come back for any other games. Winning a card game earns you a new card as well as a card part. The parts can be mixed with other card parts to create your own custom cards, and these vary in quality. Some mixes are just atrocious and no good, while others are powerful beaters that you'd be foolish not to run. It's neat, from what I remember. It's the second system that's real interesting: the attribute system. In the real card game, attributes are more of a flavor thing. There are spells and whatnot that will let you do things with cards of that attribute, of course, but on their own without any support? Attributes are just there. Dark Duel Stories not only adds more attributes, but also turns them into a giant rock-paper-scissors system. If your type beats out the opponent's type, their monster is destroyed. Attack values don't count. You could attack something with ten times the attack power of your monster, but if your attribute wins out, you win the battle. It's a strange system, but one you get used to. I did, back in the day. Let's fast forward to now. The attribute system came back for one or two games, and I actually played one of them this week. Yes, we've finally made it to the subject of this waffling. Now we get to talk about Yugioh The Sacred Cards, for the Game Boy Advance. Buckle in, here we go.ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THE GAME NOW
The first striking thing about The Sacred Cards is that it actually has a plot. A lot of the games up to this point have just been a series of anime heads that you challenge to card games to sequentially win. The Sacred Cards has a lot of anime people to challenge to card games to sequentially win, yes, but it also adds in a story and an actual world to explore. It's not exactly an original story, mind: The Sacred Cards is an adaptation of the Battle City arc of the Yugioh anime. It's something the majority of the players of the game would be familiar with, knowing all the major plot beats and foes to face. The Sacred Cards adapts this by letting you play as your own OC. They get to be the cool hero of the day, and fight off all the famous opponents from the anime in card game battles. The sprite is quite obviously supposed to be just a generic boy, but the hell with that. I named her Cynthia. She's tomboyish, I guess, so she dresses like a cool boy in a baseball cap. The illusion only broke once at the end when Yugi called me "he" but otherwise it holds up. A Haruka Tenoh for the modern card game age. I can see the appeal for the target demographic here. It's the Battle City arc mixed with self-insert fanfiction. YOU get to be the cool kid hero who fights off all the card thieves and wields the power of the God Cards to save the day. I can imagine that being quite empowering for a kid playing this on their Game Boy in 2004. That's not what made me want to write about The Sacred Cards, though. What got my imagination going was the specific way in which the fucked-up "not the real rules of the card game" systems ported over from Dark Duel Stories turned the progression and obstacles of the game's escalating difficulty into something wholly unique. See, your deck starts off with a bunch of weak little monsters. My strongest in the early game had 900 attack. For reference, in real life at the time the baseline for an ordinary monster would be about double that. Now, luckily for you, the opponents in the early game all have weak monsters as well so you can actually win. Winning gives you one of their cards (if you bet a rare card of your own before the duel began, that is) and increases your deck capacity. Deck capacity is very important, as it determines what cards you can use. You have to have 40 cards and their cost can't exceed your capacity. One of those good monsters from the real game, with like 1800 attack? A good 250 capacity cost. You start with 1600. You aren't running a powerhouse beatdown deck without a hell of a lot of grinding. Important battles will give you 30 capacity, with regular ones giving 5 or 10. I made improvements as I could as my capacity increased, dumping the weakest monsters for ones with just an extra bit of power comparatively... but then I hit a bit of a brick wall. What I ended up doing to solve these, what I ended up being ABLE to do to break free... well, that's what inspired me to write.
It was the duelists in the aquarium that got me. They always start their fights with an ocean field spell active. In the real game, field spells usually give a small boost to monsters of that type. 200 extra attack and defense is the usual norm. Here in Sacred Cards, however, it's a 30% boost. They had already escalated to the point where their monsters on their own were about equal to mine in power, and with that boost they were just running over me. What to do, what to do? Grind out more capacity against easy opponents, 10 points at a time? That could have worked, but I came up with a better idea... the same idea, in fact. I put my own field spells into my deck. My logic was, even if the field I played didn't give me a boost at that moment, it would negate my opponent's boost since they were a dedicated water-type player relying on the ocean field to boost themselves up. My field cards only cost about 40 capacity anyway, so I was able to run a fair few and draw into them consistently. It also helped that I had a lot of shadow-type monsters for the Yami field I was playing to come in handy and boost me up. That was a clever bit of trickery to get out of fighting to grind up capacity to beat them with attack points... but then the final duels happened. By this point, the monsters were way stronger than mine. Even with the gains I'd gotten and some super-powerful cards, they were able to just put stronger things on board turn 1 and prevent me from getting a board going to tribute for stronger monsters who could wipe the floor with them. What was the answer to get out of this one? Hopefully you were paying attention and knew the answer already. The weird attribute system! These folks were indeed playing strong as hell cards, but they were still following a consistent type theme. All I needed to do was side out some of my cards that didn't stand a chance for anything, anything at all, that had an attribute to beat out theirs. Attack points didn't matter, since attribute beats all. In this regard, The Sacred Cards almost resembled something like a goddamned Shin Megami Tensei game. The normal card game of beating out the opponent with the higher number became a game of exploiting elemental strengths and weaknesses to gain advantage, summon the big beaters, and win the card game. There's something about that which utterly fascinates me. In the Fire Emblem post from a few weeks ago, I lamented that Fire Emblem Echoes was a beautiful unique game that I'd never play anything like again. Here we have a similar little oddity. A trading card game video game, with rules and mechanics markedly different from the card game it's based on, that can become a grand strategy of countering the enemy's element to overcome their inherent advantage. Someone put a black sheep sequel a la Castlevania 2 or Zelda 2 (or indeed, Fire Emblem Gaiden) in a blender with Shin Megami Tensei mechanics. I admit, I wasn't expecting that... but I'm glad to have experienced it. Is The Sacred Cards a great game? I mean, it's okay. I've no doubt that a lot of ink was spilt decrying the very fucked up nonsense rules that I came to know and love in Dark Duel Stories and this, but the hell with it. Those folks have a shitload of card games that are 100% faithful to the source card game... or, you know, the actual card game to play. For those with an inclination for the weird and wild, this strange duo of games exists. It's fairly short and breezy, but I like it that way. It didn't overstay its welcome, and it really got me thinking. It inspired me enough to write this, after all. It's a game I'll keep with me now, because few other games in the world can do what it did. If you agree, that's great and I hope you enjoy it for yourselves! If you disagree? Well, I'm sorry to say it, but...YOU JUST ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD!
My one and only Yu-Gi-Oh anecdote:
ReplyDeleteAbout fifteen years ago, I was at a rehearsal dinner prior to a friend's wedding, and I was seated by the mother-of-the-bride. And this was one of those families with a big age gap between the oldest and the youngest children, so the bride had a kid brother who was like 8-10. Making small talk, the mother of the bride told me that her son was collecting cards for this Yu-Gi-Oh game, and she didn't really understand it, and asked if I knew anything about it. My response was, "Not too much, but I think one of the rules is that right before your turn, you're supposed to say 'Not so fast!' then reveal a rule no one else has ever heard of, or tell your entire life story."