Over the course of its rise in the hearts and minds of today's youth, the ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!' craze has spawned a truly suffocating amount of merchandise, of which the spillover into videogames has been a significant contribution. The Game Boy Advance alone now boasts a catalogue of sixteen games bearing the franchise's name - the newest entry being Yu-Gi-Oh! Destiny Board Traveler. If that title seems obscure to you, that's because it is. It's fairly common knowledge that the Yu-Gi-Oh premise is based around a collectible card game, where players dual monsters of varying elements and strengths. The story itself behind the game capitalizes on the anime trend of the past few years - and vaguely relates to a young dualist possessed by the ghost of his grandfather, which makes him seem somewhat schizophrenic. But, I digress.

The game itself is played out like a board game on a circular path. The object of the game is to move around the circular board - claiming spaces as your own by defeating the monsters on that square (or players, if they have previously claimed the spot) so that you can obtain the specified number of Victory Stars. Certain spaces also sport special properties - like the ability to replenish your Life Points, for instance. You determine which monsters from your deck go into battle by assigning them to varying sides of a die, which is rolled for your turn. The number of stars on that card is the number of spaces you move, and that monster is used to battle. Battles essentially amount to comparing attack and defense points on the respective cards.

As simple as that might sound, the game offers absolutely no tutorial whatsoever - making the game fairly inaccessible at first. Having never had any interaction with the franchise besides hurriedly flipping past the programming when it appeared on network television, the premise of the game wasn't immediately familiar to me. This game is very much geared to connoisseurs of the previous 15 games, with an even younger skew, if that's possible. So while any nine year old with half a brain can dig into this game within minutes, a jaded adult game reviewer will have a significantly more difficult time ascertaining what the hell is going on.

Graphically, the game is fairly bland - the character avatars are pretty basic, even for the Game Boy Advance. To the game's credit, you can pretty ably differentiate between the franchises' staple characters - and the boards have enough going on in the background that, if you aren't put to sleep by the gameplay, are visually stimulating enough. The cards aren't as sharply integrated as I might have liked, since they usually sport some fairly decent generic anime art. You can barely make them out in-game, which is unfortunate. Not that it really matters, of course, but I'm trying to find things to like.

Finally, the game sports a multiplayer component visa vie the link cables. Ordinarily, this would seem like the way to go since the single player utterly lacks an incentive to keep playing beyond unlocking new useless items, but I can't see any reason why anybody would recommend this game to friends beyond as some sort of cruel joke. But if one were to play the game - multiplayer would be the way to go. The AI opponents are lifeless and watching them is a waste of time.

I honestly don't think that anybody uninterested in Yu-Gi-Oh is even going to look at the back of Destiny Board Traveler's box, so the following caveat probably isn't even necessary. Nonetheless, don't touch this game with a 10-foot pole unless you sleep in Yu-Gi-Oh sheets in your Yu-Gi-Oh pajamas with your Yu-Gi-Oh plush toy. There's nothing here worth looking at.

Oct 26, 2004 | 0 comments
Chris Chester