The first thing I noticed about this game is that it kinda runs like shit compared to 2008. Everything seems to run at half the FPS. But then it gets really bad when a field starts getting more full, and if you play with/against a stall deck and the field gets full, you can expect very choppy gameplay and the opponent stuck in "thinking" mode for what feels like forever.

I guess it's lucky that this is the type of game where frames per second doesn't matter that much, but it's still a noticeable downgrade even when the field is relatively empty.

Another downgrade is the change of the top screen - what used to be a close look at the duel field, complete with the models of the monsters, has been turned into a generic screen that just displays the info of whatever card is being hovered over/activated. The only time it gets "interesting" is when a battle is made and high definition versions (for the DS) of the cards artwork shows up. It sounds dumb, and compared to being able to see close-ups of the holograms it is, but the quality of the art in these scenes is much better than anywhere else the card art exists, so you get to see some pretty nice shots of monsters that are otherwise just a clump of pixels at any other time.

The holograms do remain, but they're limited to the bottom screen, which shows a semi-birds eye view of the whole field, so the monsters are shrunken down so much you can barely make out any details. Basically it's the exact same as it was on the bottom screen in past games.

I can only assume they changed the top screen to improve performance, but since it's still crappy, why not also remove the little holograms. I really don't get any satisfaction seeing them in their shrunken form like I did with the top screen in past games.

Moving on from the actual duels, the story I think takes a portion of 5D's story - I'm not sure I've never watched it. But it really feels more like a story than any other DS Yu-Gi-Oh game I've played. World Championship 2008 had no real story and was more just a map with opponents to click on and duel to move on to the next area. Even Spirit Caller which followed the first part of GX was largely just clicking an area to find opponents until eventually you meet some vague criteria to move on to the next story event. But this game has you fully control your player character, walking around the city, finding treasure chests for loot, and even doing freaking moving block puzzles. It's crazy how hard it goes. And yet it still keeps the formula from 2008 - you can get through the story dueling only every story-related duelist once, but to unlock packs and characters to duel in "World Championship" mode - which itself will unlock more packs - you have to duel the non-important NPCs 5 times each. So it's as grindy or non-grindy as you want, but expect to use way less cards without grinding.

And speaking of packs, the distribution in this game is so dogshit holy hell. So many archtypes are spread across multiple packs that are locked to very different stages of the game. Oh and for some reason the first 4 packs you start with have 200+ cards in them, so getting a card you actually want out of them is much harder, and even getting to 80% pack completion (so you can use passwords to get the cards you want) takes longer and more money. Even the new synchro mechanic is massively underrepresented. Other than the 2 or 3 synchro monsters you start with, the packs to unlock more are pretty much all hidden between requirements you can't get until late or even post-game.

It just takes way too long to make any good decks in this game.

Back to story mode, since this is 5D's you have actual motorcycle mini-games too. Pretty much entirely "beat the time" ones. They're...fine? I mean I doubt anyone is playing Yu-Gi-Oh for them, but they're so novel for the series I couldn't help but be amused. What I'm not amused by is the fact motorcycle parts use the exact same currency as card packs. So as if it wasn't already hard enough to get a good deck, this game has you splitting your spendings between that and a what is essentially a non-optional freaking mini-game.

Oh speaking of the currency, they heavily nerfed the "wins in a row" bonus from the last game to cap out at 10 extra DP per duel. This means no more save scumming to keep a streak and get hundreds of extra points every duel. Now the grind is even worse.

Also it's not the games fault since I assume it comes from the anime, but what is up with speed duels? They're literally normal duels, except all spell cards are replaced by speed duel versions which use what is basically a mana system that you might find in other card games (a spell costs X speed points to use, you get a speed point every turn and for every 1000 damage you take you lose 1, if you hit an opponent when they have 0 left you get an extra one instead).

Why does this apply exclusively to spell cards? It's such a weirdly implemented system that turns 1/3rd of Yu-Gi-Oh into this system while keeping the rest exactly the same? Monster Reborn now costs 10 whole points to use, but trap cards like Mirror Force can still be used completely for free? The hell is the point? Even monsters would easily fit into this, by using their stars as their costs - it'd lead to a lot more 1 stars being ran so you can play monsters on turn 1, while the ever-present 4 stars wouldn't be nearly as dominating.

What this system also means is many decks become nearly unusable because speed spells are almost all generic ones that can fit into any deck. Any archtypes that rely heavily on a key spell, or more, are now unusable. There isn't even a Polymerization one, so that's an entire card type that is unusable.

So yeah, not the games fault, but it's just weird. Oh and you also have to buy every single speed spell separately. You don't get "Speed Spell - Book of Moon" just by having the original. So even MORE shit you have to waste your harder-to-earn currency on.

Also kind of worth noting that World Championship 2008 had its "story" mode fighting duel spirits, which unlocked more duel spirits and sometimes even anime characters for World Championship mode. This game of course has the Anime characters as a core part of the story, and you ONLY unlock duel spirits in WC mode. There's no GX or Duel Monsters characters to unlock unfortunately, which would have made perfect bonuses.

So this game is weird. The increased card pool from 2008 is nice, the story mode improvement is huge, but the increased grind and horrible card-to-pack distribution make the actual story mode a bit disappointing. I imagine if you played this a lot post-story, unlocked everything, you'd have a lot of fun using every deck possible, especially if you played it back in its time with WiFi. That's assuming you can tolerate the poor performance though.

I love this game so much, it's my favourite of the 5D's games on the DS, but realistically is a 3.5/5.
Fun game with a story mode that spans the beginning of the anime all the way to the Fortune Cup, I love how involved the story was with Satellite.
You can create decks, change your characters appearance and tune your Duel Runner to have races along different tracks.
There's a stealth section that is actually kinda hard but other than that it has solid Yu-Gi-Oh gameplay.
It's a fun game especially if you already like Yu-Gi-Oh (especially 5D's), but I believe its sequel (Reverse of Arcadia) did everything this one does better, I just love this one more.