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.
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.