Continuing the trend of every Tag Force title improving upon the last one, Tag Force 3 has got more cards and characters to either partner with or duel. Otherwise the title is really similar to past entries with the same setting, although it contains some new story for filthy dub watchers because it takes place during the fourth season of the anime.
These old Yu-Gi-Oh! games are great in the sense that they let you experience a slice of the game's history but it's unfortunate how it also forces you to participate in dumb trends from the time. A small amount of content is download exclusive which means you can't get it without cheats or completing like 90% of the game.
Apart from that the starting deck is still garbage. It's such a pain to start one of these games and spending the first hour grinding through packs to get the cards you actually want.
Overall, I think Tag Force 3 is great for the duel simulation aspect and fanservice, but I can't believe you still have to grind this much in the third entry.

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.

Finally, a Yu-Gi-Oh game I can say I enjoyed and had lots of fun with without any asterisks or mental gymnastics! There's still plenty of room for growth, but this is absolutely where the Tag Force series finally becomes notably good.

This game is the step up from 2 that I desired. The card pool is finally at its peak for its era. The part of the story the game is at is, along with part of 2, around its show's peak as well. Each character's story is truncated to 4 heart events rather than 8, significantly speeding up not only the time it takes to unlock the ability to edit their deck, but also the time it takes to complete a given story! This sounds like a pretty neutral point, but one must keep in mind that these games have literally dozens of characters you can partner with; having each one be short enough to finish en masse on a handheld gamer's day-to-day schedule is great. Unlike the first two games, I felt motivated not only to complete one run with a first page character, but also a run with a second page character as well as starting with one from the third page! There's a massive amount of replayability added here that feels significantly less sore and misguided than previous games. It's truly a slick experience and doesn't feel like nearly as much of a dull grind (which I think is a very nice point of comparison toward other YGO games, not just Tag Force ones!).

Beyond what I described above, there are some very minor QoL changes that continue the trend of piling more improvements upon each entry. Hearts fill up at a rate that feels reasonable to the point where you don't wind up just trying to grind for golden eggwiches at the shop like in the previous games. Further, DP seems to be acquired at an all-time high rate, with the game even offering a large free sum of it to the player from the beginning. The challenges from the second game return and are helpful to complete even if some are masochistic in nature. Finally, the actual quality of packs feels greatly improved and getting actual usable cards is something you can expect rather than dream of. This even includes the random cards you can pick up off the ground, with heavy hitters like Elemental HERO Stratos and Book of Moon being random cards you can just... find. It feels much more of a nice little reward than what 2 offered.

One thing I very highly recommend is seeking out the downloadable update content this game received. The previous games had it, too, but this game is where it's at its most significant by far. With cards such as Test Tiger being locked behind it as well as updated banlists, it's an absolute must if a player wishes to build decks to their fullest potential during their time with the game. I must say I had a blast putting together a Gladiator Beast deck in my second run, with a cool Lightsworn deck in my first and a burgeoning Synchro good-stuff deck for my third.

Oh yeah, did I mention Synchros? Yeah, this game actually added some 'cards from the future' like the previous games, only instead of weirdly translated late GX cards they instead added in Tuners and Synchros, including cards from several early 5D's era sets. It's awesome, and even if they barely ever come up in practice in your first run or two you can pretty easily put a little something together once you've gotten further in. It really feels like a nice cherry on top of everything else this game has to offer, being one last additional layer of novelty serving as a reward for dedication.

The character stories themselves are pretty whatever, but they serve their purposes just as well as they did in previous games. If anything, they're helped by their brevity since things are no longer stretched thin. They're fine enough fluff content and string things together adequately, but I'd hardly rate the game's writing as a strong point. Still, it's fun getting to interact with the various cast members of GX as well as getting to duel one last time with the students whose decks you've gotten to know over the past couple games.

The game does still have an occasionally shoddy translation job though it's nowhere near as abysmal as the previous two games. It's also just as slow as them in terms of the in-duel engine, as well as having a very repetitive soundtrack with such a limited amount of music that I wound up muting it eventually as with the previous ones. Except for the shop-shop theme, that is. That one's lovely. Listening to that while cracking open packs ingame was great.

Anyway, the presentation in general feels a little stale by this third entry, almost amateurish in a way to contrast its relative sleekness and freshness back in the first game. I'm hoping the remaining games will do a little something with the UI and HUD at the very least. The portraits are fine enough, but everything looks like a random 00s doujin PC game at times and not in a particularly flattering way. Again, the keyword is 'amateurish'. The one other complaint I have is that the packs feel a bit more tiresome to unlock in this game and the second game compared to the first simply due to how the character selection system works, but it's not really much of a problem for how understandable it is.

There are still some things that I think these games can improve upon to feel more whole and truly stand head and shoulders above the rest of Yu-Gi-Oh's other TCG/OCG video game offerings. Duels with extra bonus rules would be nice to have again, as they were seemingly ousted randomly after the first game. Structure decks, starter decks (maybe selectable at the start of the game), or at least more curated themed shop items, would be great. For that matter, cosmetic items would be great too since I'm guessing it wasn't particularly difficult to edit the main character's relatively plain sprite. Finally, sidequests and more compelling character stories would be great. Even if the payouts for the sidequests are just an exclusive card and some DP, that would be great. As it is, even with all the improvements Tag Force 3 has made the Tag Force formula is still very bare-bones and needs more to entice the player to continue. As arcadey and fun as the gameplay loop finally is, it's still clearly not at its full potential in terms of sheer options. This isn't to take away from how relatively impressive this game is, but I do hope it sheds some light on my thoughts that led to this rating despite my generally positive perspective on it overall.

Even with its series' shortcomings, for the length of its run Tag Force 3 was a blast to play and I do see myself actually going back to it again sometime. Indeed, after finishing my runs I still feel the need to finish that third run and maybe even complete the whole first page of characters. I'm not sure if I'm going to run the 5D's era Tag Force games for a little while yet, but I'm sure when I do they'll be fun too. I don't at all prefer 5D's to GX as a show in general, but it's at least got a lot of potential with its world at points that I could see at least Tag Force 4 having a lot of fun atmosphere going for it. I suppose I'll just have to find out.

Until then, though, I'm impressed with this series now. I've spent a while trying to find Yu-Gi-Oh games of relatively high quality, and this seems to finally be it. I wholeheartedly recommend this particular entry to any fan of the franchise who's looking for a fun time-waster, and especially to fans of GX and its respective TCG era.

Like the rest of the Tag Force games, it's kinda grindy, it's first and foremost meant for fans of the Yu-Gi-Oh anime and TCG, and has those weird dating sim elements, but I ultimately found it to be a great game.
If you know what you're doing, if you wish to, you can make a powerful deck within the first few hours of playing and proceed to steamroll pretty much everybody. While this gets boring after a while, you'll have made enough in-game currency to buy enough cards to make at least a few fun to play decks.
There is a pretty good variety of decks to play against and the card pool allows for some pretty cool decks to be made as well.

The best possible sendoff to Yu-Gi-Oh GX. There's a lot going for this game.

First of all, most of the grindy parts of the previous tag force games has been eliminated, making it much more reasonable to complete every character's story mode. Each character has multiple stories, not only allowing you to tag with characters as they are in GX, but also different version of them. What if Syrus never matured? What if Zane never became a masochist? It's really cool to see the ideas that they came up with for this one.

The downside to this is that there are a lot of GX characters who should have had stories who just didn't, like Jesse and Axel. You can still partner with them for a more generic story, so it's not the end of the world.

This game also give Bastion the sendoff he deserves, which makes me happy.

Anyways, I love this game.