Retro Coin: Yu-Gui-Oh: Dark Duel Stories
It’s time to DUEL on the GBC
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.
This was one of my favorite games when I was a kid. This game released in 2002, which would make me nine years old when this came out. I can trace my love of card games back to my hours spent playing Yu-Gi-Oh!: Dark Duel Stories on my Atomic Purple Game Boy Color. What I remember about Dark Duel Stories was an epic and challenging dive into a game I barely understood.
At the time, I’d only seen a handful of episodes of the show. But I’d seen enough to get a basic gist. (For this feature, I watched most of the first season of Yu-Gi-Oh!. In some ways, it’s painfully cringy. In other ways, it’s fun and hilariously earnest. I probably won’t keep watching after Season 1. Probably.) How does this compare to the show and my memories?
Well, for starters, the game feels very much of it’s time. It’s obtuse and frightfully basic. Essentially, you battle several sets of duelists to increase your rating and earn more cards to build your deck up. It gets annoying really quickly though: you have to battle each duelist five times to progress. And because the duels are laborious, these five duels get tiresome quickly. The mid to late game duels aren’t quite as bad, especially once you can build a deck that has a few more outs.
Another unique feature in Dark Duel Stories is the element system. Each monster card type has an element. From there, each type is weak to a certain one (Wind to Earth, Light to Fiend, etc.) This makes things interesting: even if your opponent lands a powerful monster, even the smallest play on your end can shift the tide. I like that it incentives you to build a diverse deck. But then again, it makes a lot of certain duels very easy if you prepare correctly. It’s a cool system that doesn’t feel completely fleshed out.
Although the dueling is very basic, I think it actually works in the games favor. Because the game play is so simplified, this basic interface does a lot to make everything look and feel pretty good. For the time, this works exactly as it should. Unfortunately, this does not apply to the deck building. Clicking back and forth between the deck list and the Chest is annoying and makes it hard to actually put anything together. I know we are dealing with GBC technology, so I won’t hold it against the game too much.
So how does Dark Duel Stories compare to my rosy memories? Overall, I think pretty well. It has an archaic charm and its simple, no nonsense nature is endearing. I also love that the game is quick to beat, but slow to master.
And that’s it for Retro Coin! Join us next time as we once again deal some cards in Yu-Gi-Oh: The Sacred Cards…
