Retro Coin: Yu-Gi-Oh: The Sacred Cards
Card RPG Lite
In the modern age of gaming, it’s easy to forget our roots. With this feature, we’ll be diving into some classic (and not so classic) games of yesteryear. Blow out the cartridge and pick up some batteries… It’s time for Retro Coin.
While Yu-Gi-Oh: Dark Duel Stories was the first title I covered for Retro Coin, it’s eventual sequel The Sacred Cards is the real reason I kicked Retro Coin off. I sought this game out because I had an urge to replay this RPG from my early years. I wanted a Yu-Gi-Oh! game, but I didn’t want a basic battle game.
(The newest entry in the series, Yu-Gi-Oh: Legacy of the Duelist, is one such game. It’s a basic battle game to the core. While it has tons of cards and text versions of famous story beats, that’s kind of it. I assume these games still sell pretty well, so why can’t we get a full-fledged RPG with an original RPG story? It seems like a misstep. Oh well.)
It took me a visit to two local game stores (this was of course pre-COVID) before I found a copy. It came in some kind of dual-cartridge with Reshef of Destruction, which is a sequel that I’d never heard of. I could have just found some ROM somewhere online, but just like all the other titles for this series, I wanted the real deal, the real experience.
City Experience
So what do I remember about The Sacred Cards? Even with my early memories, I got a lot of the basic details right. It concerns yet another dueling tournament in Battle City. You’re a nameless character that enters in with your best friends (all the leads from the original anime). Your mute protagonist is tasked with defeating the best duelists and collecting six Locator Cards so you can enter into the finals of the tournament. This premise goes off the rails when a mysterious organization known as ‘The Ghouls’ appear to ruin the tournament and take over the card dueling world (oh NO). Outside of the plot, I remember a grand RPG adventure where I battled against other duelist in cutthroat battles while unraveling an evil conspiracy. That is (as you can imagine) not accurate in the least.
This game is painfully shallow. Though the above plot sounds interesting, it really isn’t. I think this game’s biggest issue is pace. It starts off pretty okay. You battle all the local duelists, slowly leveling up your deck. That’s the entire game play loop, but the game has such massive spikes in difficulty toward the end game. It doesn’t help that the world (small areas broken up by a navigation screen) has nothing worth looking into. The NPCs are boring and there are no rewards to step outside the duels for.
To get through the game, you have to meet certain conditions. Battling major characters usually does it, but the game gives you no guidance on how these conditions are met. It’s dull trial and error. On top of that, there is no information on how to build a proper Yu-Gi-Oh deck. Why couldn’t we have a basic tutorial?
And then the end game. Oh HO the endgame. You are faced with a series of battles where you are insanely out-matched. Unless you’ve been grinding for endless hours, you will get nowhere. And the game decided to stock their deck with unstoppable monsters (no easy weaknesses) so the tried and true method that the game teaches you (cheese it till you make it) is not even an option.
Re-Shuffle
The Sacred Games is a bit of a wash. Its feels so outdated (even for the time! The GBA had countless awesome RPGs!) that it’s an utter chore to stumble through. Sorry Sacred Cards. You are not the Yu-Gi-Oh RPG I’ve always needed.
And that’s it for Retro Coin! Join us next time as we fall into the rabbit hole with the classic Final Fantasy Tactics Advance…
