The big shakeup this time around, other than the move to 5D's, is that you're no longer tied to a specific tag partner. Every day gives you a fresh start for who you can team up with. Once a characters heart fills out it will automatically start their next story event though, which can be a bit funny because once you learn how easy it is to a max a heart, you'll end up with just a huge string of story events and no down-time. The problem with that? Well after the 2nd event, like in past games, you unlock the ability to edit your partners deck. Except... it doesn't unlock this feature if you go straight from the 2nd heart event to the 3rd. So essentially you need to force yourself to play the game slowly and leave characters not-quite maxed if you want to unlock that ability. And for many characters you will want it because so many of their decks are utter dogshit.

You also can't see your partners hand anymore, which I assume is to help hide how remedial the AI can be. Though having said that trying to make AI that can use literally every possible combination of cards you can put in a tag duel must be tough, so I won't be too harsh on them, especially since I didn't notice anything too bad in this one.

Many of the past games flaws are still here. You still can't set specific animations on or off, it's all or nothing as always. They do have an option to make animations only show up during story events now, so that's nice. I also recently learned the Japanese version had voice acting in these scenes which the English version removed.

Your tag partner still moves before you every single time. How have they not taken a page out of World Championship's book and let the order be decided by if you or the opponent goes first? C'mon.

The "reset filters" option in deck editing still doesn't reset the "show only labelled cards" filter, which makes adding staples to decks just that little more annoying.

And playing the game in general can feel hollow due to how pretty much every single story event is just dueling opponents that you have likely duelled dozens of times before, even outside of story events. Like the game literally lets you duel Yusei whenever you want, doing so in a story event just isn't special. It doesn't help that since we left GX for 5D's, the amount of actual usable characters have shrunk as this series was still in its relative infancy. But to the games credit, there are a few characters who only seemed to appear after beating a certain amount (or maybe certain characters) stories. These even include weird cosplays of main characters from the show, which I found out are from something called "Yu-Gi-Oh! 5C's".

As a duel simulator the games fine. Making and testing decks is as fun as ever, just now with more cards. Ironically it's the tag duels that make it worse, as having to cater around some of the worst decks I've ever seen is unfun. And you can't really just ignore the story because beating a characters story is the only way to get copies of certain cards like Stardust Dragon, and unlock some packs.

As a dating simulator it's repetitive and boring. You just go through the same 3 "mini-games" every time you want to fill a heart. The rock-paper-scissors one is so stupid and most of the answers make no sense. At least when you start getting hearts complete characters will sometimes give you a pack of random cards. By the time I stopped playing I could easily just move around screens on the map and get 100 cards for doing nothing.

These games really just need a more focused story so it feels like I'm building towards something. Instead it kinda hits a point where you realise you're just playing to get more cards, but cards to do what? Complete more characters stories? They're so basic and uninteresting that it's not a reward in itself to play them. The only reason to do so is to get their card rewards, but then it goes back to asking why you want them. And forcing tag duels in general just limits the type of decks you can actually use, even if this game does do it better than the past ones by letting you pick a new partner all the time.

Weirdly a couple steps down from the previous entry. It almost feels wrong to rate this entry the same as 2 when this one seems on paper like it'd be better wholesale, but the game feels like it's less than the sum of its parts while also trying nothing in particular to shake up the formula or even improve upon it. I finished the stories for Yusei, Jack, and Crow, and made a bit of progress into a couple other character stories out of curiosity as well.

The game comes across as having a ton of cut corners which I find odd for an inaugural entry into the 5D's line of Tag Force games. No longer are there isometric 3D maps to run around in, or non-mechanically-relevant non-duelist NPCs. This game instead has a massive list of hallways with differing backgrounds as your sole playing areas, with no buildings or areas to examine or enter other than a shop and a tournament accessible from the stadium. Seemingly all the NPCs in the game serve a specific mechanical purpose of being a duelist or a non-duelist with some kind of underwhelming mechanic attached without a single bit of fluff.

There's not really a sense of picking a comrade and sticking with them for a long time, either. Now, you just have to search around the bloated number of flat-plane maps for the duelist you want to partner with, hope and pray that they're not sick or angry (they often are per RNG), and then slowly build friendship points with them. The quickest ways to get friendship in this game are to spam minigames and the "person of interest" dialogue feature, which becomes tedious fast as it very quickly becomes apparent that dueling and giving items is significantly slower than just doing a daily sweep of the map. This brought about a gameplay loop that de-emphasized dueling just as Tag Force 1 and 2 did with golden eggwiches and the like. At the very least you can spam minigames with characters whose stories you're interested in in order to speed up their friendship games simultaneously with your current partner, though I would imagine that wasn't a very consciously made choice as it can awkwardly lead to double-story-event days.

As with all the previous games the character stories are nothing to write home about, but this time the problems with them are the reverses of Tag Force 1 and 2's. Since this game effectively covers both the second season and retroactively the first, the density of the writing of 5D's is pulled together way too tightly to be too enjoyable. With only 4 heart events per character - something which I cited as a relative plus for Tag Force 3 due to pacing - it feels like you barely get to know the characters at all in this game.

Again, with how the party invite system works in Tag Force 4, it also feels like they become way too buddy-buddy for how impersonal actually hanging out with them works mechanically. It just rubs me the wrong way, and if anything it makes me wish this game had an actual overarching story since unlike GX, 5D's actually had more concrete of one in its two halves. I'd much rather have played as Yusei in this game and simply experienced the story through teaming with other characters instead of as the stand-in blank slate protagonist, as that sort of character just doesn't work nearly as well in this setting.

There are a few positives to note with this game, however. The card pool is nice - there's never really a point in the Synchro era where the card pool is bad - and the point at which it takes place is a pretty cool one. I really didn't like the resolution of this story arc in the show, but thankfully with the way Tag Force's story mode works I didn't have to experience that. The UI and menus have been updated and streamlined in a way that I had been hoping for from Tag Force 3, though I do wish things had been taken a step further in terms of making it feel more futuristic than GX. A lot of what's done here is just adding chrome and red to things the previous games already had. Oh yeah, the soundtrack in this game is probably my favorite one from any Tag Force game so far. That's not a high bar, mind you, but it's a plus. That said, the in-shop theme is inferior to the GX era one, tsk tsk.

I didn't mind how brief this game was. By my measure this game didn't overstay its welcome at all, but it also didn't really leave a lasting impression on me. This era of Yu-Gi-Oh is a lot of fun to play in, sure, but Synchro monsters were weirdly tough to gather in high quantities until quite a ways through the game. By the time I got enough for a proper deck or two stuff got much more fun, but again the game doesn't really encourage dueling very much unless you go into tournaments to boost friendship. It led to a very hollow experience that was aggressively adequate, sporting a level of disappointment that Tag Force 1 and 2 were spared from by their lack of bars to clear. At this point I'd still consider 3 to be the only Tag Force game that's worth recommending, though I've since started playing 5 before writing this review and it seems to be another candidate for a higher quality experience. I won't give up hope!