This game is similar to Tag Force 2 to a fault. Almost everything is just a direct port of that game, from the locations (which technically came from 1), the generic NPCs, the minigames (1 new one), the class game-thingy. It doesn't even fix any of the things I've wanted fixing since game one, like not being able to customise duel animations so that you can keep certain ones, but not have to sit through a million pointless ones at the start and end of every turn. You can set cards to be "labelled" for a quick search of your staple spells and traps, but for some reason despite every other filter option having a quick reset, this one option has failed to have it the entire time. It's minor, but why do I have to keep manually turning the labelled card search on and off when every other kind of option for filtering cards is done via 2 button presses? Another problem I have is that in tag duels your partner goes first 100% of the time. After playing World Championship 2008 I much prefer that system (if your team goes first, you play first, if your team goes second the AI will go first, then your partner second).

One of the funnier copy/paste jobs comes from the challenge list. You can manually select one challenge that you can try to meet per duels, e.g win in X turns or less, deal X amount of effect damage. There's a challenge for every "Win with nothing but X type of monsters in your deck". This game introduces the new-at-the-time psychic types, but they forgot to add a challenge for using a psychic deck.

Speaking of new things at the time, despite this being a GX game there's some early Synchro cards. But because it is GX it means none of the AI use them. Like it's nice that they give the player an option, but it's kind of weird that not a single opponent uses them (that I saw anyway), making it feel like an unfair advantage if anything.

Like technically speaking I guess it's a "better" game than Tag Force 2 because it's the exact same game but with more cards. But it feels so lazy.

The story modes for characters are halved, so there's now only 4 heart events instead of 8. This encourages playing more times while experimenting with multiple tag partners rather than burning out on only a single one. I don't hate or love this really, it's nice to be able to try out so many different ones, but it also makes them feel too fast. Tag Force 2 had you with your partner so long that it felt more like a journey, while this is just a "Play 20-30 duels with this partner then move on to the next", like a checklist.

Stories remain pretty lackluster themselves. They're mildly entertaining at best. And anyone who isn't a page 1 character (of which there are about 9 I think) shares the exact same story. This sucks because imo most of the more interesting characters are on page 2, but if you use them you'll end up facing the exact same 4 tag duellists every single time as part of their story duels.

Also not unique to this game, but story duels are so dull. Literally any duelist in this game can be found in the map (in my 6 runs of the game I only saw one duelist in a story duel that I never dueled before), so everytime they show up it's just like "Hey here's these opponents you've probably beaten dozens of times already!" with the only difference being now if you lose you have to retry. I feel like these games should have saved the real anime characters for story duels, while gaining hearts could have just been exclusive to the game NPCs, it'd just make them a little more special. Plus you can do free duel from the menu at any time so it's not like people would miss being able to duel Jaden whenever they wanted.

For all the complaints the game is good as a Yu-Gi-Oh! game for the time. It's just not really a jump from 2 to 3, you only play this as a way to get access to a years worth more cards. In modern days this'd just be new packs getting added to Tag Force 2's store, basically.

The best GX Tag Force game, and i believe the best experience if you feel like playing the game JUST before the introduction of Synchros since it has the most complete cardpool + a few early synchros and tuners as teaser (they're worthless and nobody uses them so the game is pure late GX).

Now there's no filler plot like in TF2 making the stories a lot more enjoyable to do, and it gives closure to a lot of characters that got screwed over in the anime.

Easily one of the best ygo games of all time and peak classic ygo.