I've been on and off with this game for literal years so in my never ending quest of clearing my always filled backlog I decided to play a Yu-Gi-Oh game, expecting something along the line of the later entries.
Boy was I in for a jump of quality.
The game is ok, the rules for the game are the GX era so no Synchros and Tuners, the setting is fun and the characters are well presented, but it's a GRIND. The game doesn't give you much money and your starter deck sucks which means you grind for money, EXP and you have no clue how to start any events; you don't even have a main mission, just go to class and hope something happens after you duel everyone a lot.
I think the Dueling Academy has a lot of potential as a setting, with something along the lines of Persona where you build up your character as both a student and a Duelist, going on adventures with Judai and Co.
Here you just duel a bunch to see how your character kinda fits in the overall story of early GX.
Honestly the 5D's era games are better, with in my opinion more fun duel mechanics, a tight story, a better character creation and overall better quality.

It's not a bad game, but not great. It certainly showed me how spoiled I got from Stardust Accelerator.

The faster gameplay and more focused story mode (taking a good chunk of GX's story) make this a big step up from Nightmare Troubadour. But it still shares some issues with things like packs being too random with no way to make a deck outside of generic beatdown until at least half way through the game. It's weird that at a certain point packs start packaging obvious synergy cards that can make a deck, even if not a good one, like Dark Scorpions, while early packs are just "here's some normal monsters". And yet the strong spells and traps like Mirror Force are also thrown into these early packs.

You'll also be expected to face the same few opponents over and over, though that does make the unique story ones more exciting. They do also weirdly make some characters inaccessible to duel for way too long though. Why is Jaden of all people only faced in like 3 story-specific duels until the post game? Why do characters like the gym teacher require you to get a decent chunk of the way through the game before she'll duel you, despite showing up on the map way earlier, meaning she'll only serve to waste time every time you interact with her (which will be often as you can't tell who a person is on the map until you register them, which you can only do by duelling them a few times).

An enjoyable experience overall for the Yu-Gi-Oh time period though, and even if it takes a while to be able to make themed decks, the AI provide a chance to use decks that would never work on human players.

The spirit mechanic is great in theory, but somewhat ruined by them being very rare to find (especially when characters like Banner constantly pop up and waste your time) and even rarer to actually recruit. I only ended up recruiting a single one other than the starter one in the well.