When I first played this series, I started with 2 and gave it a bit too light of a splash rather than getting properly into it. I recently decided to try running through this series and to do so I wanted to start from the top. I can say now that it's definitely better than I thought it'd be, but not by a lot (yet).
Tag Force 1 is... pretty interesting. It's rough in a whole lot of places and it's weirdly light on content, but I think I generally get what it's going for and what brings people back to it. If nothing else the presentation's really pretty, with (some) good music (i.e. the shop-shop theme) and lots of expressive character portraits drawn to a nice and high quality. They were loved so much that the style was even retained for much later titles like Duel Links and Legacy of the Duelist!
Getting back to the game, though, Part 1 is the biggest chunk of the game and it's where most of the game's issues and strengths lie as a result. It's pretty clear cut: wake up, go to class (or skip it), duel people, maybe go to the store to buy booster packs and sandwiches, hang out with the main GX student cast, and then go to bed. You can save any time you're on the world map, giving plenty of opportunities to play a little and save for bite-size chunks of gameplay. It's a neat enough concept, being effectively a player stand-in fantasy of attending Duel Academy and having Judai and co. as friends -- the problem is mostly in the execution and pacing.
As with how real life school tends to feel for younger kids, the 3-ish month span that Tag Force takes place in feels like it takes an eternity in real time. The game's sluggish speed on all fronts makes it so any action or duel takes far more of the player's time than one would hope for considering the intent for short bursts of content. Furthermore, getting from day to day feels almost unintuitive as duels take no ingame time to complete, meaning the player can play as many duels as they want in one map as they'd like before moving on. What this means, combined with the lack of AI deck changes as Part 1 goes on, is that you don't ever really get a sense that you have to move on with a given day. With time moving in 15-minute chunks and most packs unlocking pretty quickly, the middle of Part 1 feels like a grindfest where you might as well get it all out of the way in bigger chunks since you're able to do so with no restrictions.
This all comes crashing down in the later part of Part 1, that being the last half month to a month where you skip all dialogue and just go to bed every day because your deck is finished and you've maxed out everyone's affection. This was a slog, and if I hadn't been playing the game at 4x speed I'm not sure how I would have gotten through the massive amount of menu spamming I had to do. There's unfortunately not a way to skip days, only minutes or hours, and so you have to clunkily go to class, pass time via an NPC there, and come back out before going to bed every day.
None of this is helped by the obtuse nature of the affection system, not to mention the amount of grinding you're expected to do to even make Part 2 achievable. While packs don't feel nearly as costly relative to DP gain as in the World Championship games, they're still quite expensive in sets and the (almost unnecessarily) wide spread of the cards in them spread the player's funds thin. Many packs have only one to four chase cards that are generally high in rarity, meaning you may have to buy tens to dozens of packs for one Ultra or Super you want while the rest is pack filler you'll never have used even for free.
Of course, that grind is almost entirely divorced from the true grind: that of affection. As mentioned above I found it very obtuse, with a semi-random aspect to it making it almost unbearable at times without hunting down Pharaoh the cat and feeding him a sandwich (bought from the card shop) to automatically get maximum affection points from anyone you talk to. Even doing so daily, however, still didn't make it much less tedious to talk to everyone everywhere every day for no reward. Nobody has anything new or interesting to say or do, just a few generic lines that repeat ad nauseam. It's unfulfilling and unrewarding, and I figure even if I were wanting to experience the fantasy of being a Slifer Red student at Duel Academy, I still wouldn't have any fun hearing Kaiser say "You really want to talk to me?" hundreds of times just as the rest of the cast does. Don't even get me started on the repetitive class scenes, either.
Did I mention you're required to get at least one cast member's affection stat to near the maximum amount to even play Part 2? If you think about it, this is almost even worse than trying to max everyone out because the already low variety of dialogue and daily tasks would become even more monotonous if you only focus on one person all game. And imagine how it would be if you didn't know about the Pharaoh strategy! A snail's pace would be leagues faster than this. Once again not helping matters is the game's lack of unique events. There are maybe half a dozen of them across the entire length of Part 1, with the only other break in monotony being Tag Duel Sunday... but without being able to pick your partner each week, it's often not worth bothering with, either.
But finally we get into Part 2. The main meat of the game that Part 1 had been leading up to... not. Part 2 is almost painfully short compared to Part 1, with only the slowness and ineptitude of the partner AI and the sluggishness of the UI and menus making it feel even remotely lengthy. In Part 2 the Tag Force tournament comes into full swing, with a new subcurrency appearing that the player must collect by wagering them against fellow duelists. Collecting 90 allows entrance into the finals. Of course, getting those 90 points doesn't come without pain. The vast majority of the duelists you can choose from on a fresh save file - assuming you maxed out all of the cast - is pretty awful. Whether you pick Judai's Elemental HEROs or Manjome's Ojama deck, your options for your own deck are magically reduced to near zero. With GX's heavy focus on Fusion and the absurdly low power ceilings and floors of the main cast's decks (sans Kaiser and Daichi), you are all but railroaded into throwing your Part 1 single-duel deck out in favor of a drastically weaker and more limited deck mirroring your AI partner's. If you don't do so, you are effectively just playing your normal deck with a huge cinder block tied to your card-drawing arm in the form of awful plays the AI makes. It's genuinely horrible and it makes me wonder how the developers EVER thought this would be a feasible idea for a video game series' selling point.
Thankfully Part 2 is short as I said, though, and Part 3 is even shorter. In Part 3 the Shadow Riders appear, and all of them besides the final boss will challenge you and your Tag Force partner to tag duels rather than singles. Oh boy. It'll probably take a number of resets to get around your partner's lack of strategy or Trap-setting, but once you beat the Shadow Riders you're finally able to get in a duel with your old deck. Unfortunately I didn't realize the final boss was a single duel, so I used a half-baked Roid deck to beat him. Somehow I won both phases on my first try, and I could not be more thankful that I didn't need to suffer more.
With that, the game's done. I think before I wrap this up I'll get back into the more broad strokes regarding this game. The early GX era card pool sucks in general, with most playable decks being populated by DM staples or simple beatdown strategy cards like elemental beatdowns or even Normal monster aggro. I personally started with an upgraded form of the WATER deck the game gives you from the beginning, then shifted over to a "good stuff" deck in the midgame and finally made a fun Bazoo Return deck for the end of Part 1. As mentioned above I made a shitty Roid deck to work alongside Sho as I picked him for my partner at the request of a friend. It was pretty painful but every win felt nail-bitingly close. (if anyone's interested in deck lists for the first couple decks I can probably share them.) The one thing I can be thankful for is the game's "future" cards, some of which include gems like Doomcaliber Knight and Zoma the Spirit. These cards helped me effectively cheat wins out of AI duelists who didn't have any good programming to deal with them. Those helped for sure.
There's plenty more to say about Tag Force 1, like the weird obscure mechanics like the sandwich lottery and pack acquisition, not to mention the weird card exchange and rental, but I don't have time or any energy for that stuff. I think I covered what I wanted to here. Tag Force 1 had some potential but a lot of seemingly inherent issues as well. While the devs couldn't deal with all of them, I do with they had at least put more effort into others. More random interesting events, more structured school (duel puzzles, anyone?), and more options for duel partners on a fresh save would be ideal. There's also small things like the effect activation timing requiring you to manually hold X unless you only want to hit CL 2 or miss windows for cards like Trap Dustshoot, but I do at least know for a fact that the later games fix those. I guess next I'm going to return to Tag Force 2. Maybe with these more experienced eyes I'll appreciate it more than last time.
Tag Force 1 is... pretty interesting. It's rough in a whole lot of places and it's weirdly light on content, but I think I generally get what it's going for and what brings people back to it. If nothing else the presentation's really pretty, with (some) good music (i.e. the shop-shop theme) and lots of expressive character portraits drawn to a nice and high quality. They were loved so much that the style was even retained for much later titles like Duel Links and Legacy of the Duelist!
Getting back to the game, though, Part 1 is the biggest chunk of the game and it's where most of the game's issues and strengths lie as a result. It's pretty clear cut: wake up, go to class (or skip it), duel people, maybe go to the store to buy booster packs and sandwiches, hang out with the main GX student cast, and then go to bed. You can save any time you're on the world map, giving plenty of opportunities to play a little and save for bite-size chunks of gameplay. It's a neat enough concept, being effectively a player stand-in fantasy of attending Duel Academy and having Judai and co. as friends -- the problem is mostly in the execution and pacing.
As with how real life school tends to feel for younger kids, the 3-ish month span that Tag Force takes place in feels like it takes an eternity in real time. The game's sluggish speed on all fronts makes it so any action or duel takes far more of the player's time than one would hope for considering the intent for short bursts of content. Furthermore, getting from day to day feels almost unintuitive as duels take no ingame time to complete, meaning the player can play as many duels as they want in one map as they'd like before moving on. What this means, combined with the lack of AI deck changes as Part 1 goes on, is that you don't ever really get a sense that you have to move on with a given day. With time moving in 15-minute chunks and most packs unlocking pretty quickly, the middle of Part 1 feels like a grindfest where you might as well get it all out of the way in bigger chunks since you're able to do so with no restrictions.
This all comes crashing down in the later part of Part 1, that being the last half month to a month where you skip all dialogue and just go to bed every day because your deck is finished and you've maxed out everyone's affection. This was a slog, and if I hadn't been playing the game at 4x speed I'm not sure how I would have gotten through the massive amount of menu spamming I had to do. There's unfortunately not a way to skip days, only minutes or hours, and so you have to clunkily go to class, pass time via an NPC there, and come back out before going to bed every day.
None of this is helped by the obtuse nature of the affection system, not to mention the amount of grinding you're expected to do to even make Part 2 achievable. While packs don't feel nearly as costly relative to DP gain as in the World Championship games, they're still quite expensive in sets and the (almost unnecessarily) wide spread of the cards in them spread the player's funds thin. Many packs have only one to four chase cards that are generally high in rarity, meaning you may have to buy tens to dozens of packs for one Ultra or Super you want while the rest is pack filler you'll never have used even for free.
Of course, that grind is almost entirely divorced from the true grind: that of affection. As mentioned above I found it very obtuse, with a semi-random aspect to it making it almost unbearable at times without hunting down Pharaoh the cat and feeding him a sandwich (bought from the card shop) to automatically get maximum affection points from anyone you talk to. Even doing so daily, however, still didn't make it much less tedious to talk to everyone everywhere every day for no reward. Nobody has anything new or interesting to say or do, just a few generic lines that repeat ad nauseam. It's unfulfilling and unrewarding, and I figure even if I were wanting to experience the fantasy of being a Slifer Red student at Duel Academy, I still wouldn't have any fun hearing Kaiser say "You really want to talk to me?" hundreds of times just as the rest of the cast does. Don't even get me started on the repetitive class scenes, either.
Did I mention you're required to get at least one cast member's affection stat to near the maximum amount to even play Part 2? If you think about it, this is almost even worse than trying to max everyone out because the already low variety of dialogue and daily tasks would become even more monotonous if you only focus on one person all game. And imagine how it would be if you didn't know about the Pharaoh strategy! A snail's pace would be leagues faster than this. Once again not helping matters is the game's lack of unique events. There are maybe half a dozen of them across the entire length of Part 1, with the only other break in monotony being Tag Duel Sunday... but without being able to pick your partner each week, it's often not worth bothering with, either.
But finally we get into Part 2. The main meat of the game that Part 1 had been leading up to... not. Part 2 is almost painfully short compared to Part 1, with only the slowness and ineptitude of the partner AI and the sluggishness of the UI and menus making it feel even remotely lengthy. In Part 2 the Tag Force tournament comes into full swing, with a new subcurrency appearing that the player must collect by wagering them against fellow duelists. Collecting 90 allows entrance into the finals. Of course, getting those 90 points doesn't come without pain. The vast majority of the duelists you can choose from on a fresh save file - assuming you maxed out all of the cast - is pretty awful. Whether you pick Judai's Elemental HEROs or Manjome's Ojama deck, your options for your own deck are magically reduced to near zero. With GX's heavy focus on Fusion and the absurdly low power ceilings and floors of the main cast's decks (sans Kaiser and Daichi), you are all but railroaded into throwing your Part 1 single-duel deck out in favor of a drastically weaker and more limited deck mirroring your AI partner's. If you don't do so, you are effectively just playing your normal deck with a huge cinder block tied to your card-drawing arm in the form of awful plays the AI makes. It's genuinely horrible and it makes me wonder how the developers EVER thought this would be a feasible idea for a video game series' selling point.
Thankfully Part 2 is short as I said, though, and Part 3 is even shorter. In Part 3 the Shadow Riders appear, and all of them besides the final boss will challenge you and your Tag Force partner to tag duels rather than singles. Oh boy. It'll probably take a number of resets to get around your partner's lack of strategy or Trap-setting, but once you beat the Shadow Riders you're finally able to get in a duel with your old deck. Unfortunately I didn't realize the final boss was a single duel, so I used a half-baked Roid deck to beat him. Somehow I won both phases on my first try, and I could not be more thankful that I didn't need to suffer more.
With that, the game's done. I think before I wrap this up I'll get back into the more broad strokes regarding this game. The early GX era card pool sucks in general, with most playable decks being populated by DM staples or simple beatdown strategy cards like elemental beatdowns or even Normal monster aggro. I personally started with an upgraded form of the WATER deck the game gives you from the beginning, then shifted over to a "good stuff" deck in the midgame and finally made a fun Bazoo Return deck for the end of Part 1. As mentioned above I made a shitty Roid deck to work alongside Sho as I picked him for my partner at the request of a friend. It was pretty painful but every win felt nail-bitingly close. (if anyone's interested in deck lists for the first couple decks I can probably share them.) The one thing I can be thankful for is the game's "future" cards, some of which include gems like Doomcaliber Knight and Zoma the Spirit. These cards helped me effectively cheat wins out of AI duelists who didn't have any good programming to deal with them. Those helped for sure.
There's plenty more to say about Tag Force 1, like the weird obscure mechanics like the sandwich lottery and pack acquisition, not to mention the weird card exchange and rental, but I don't have time or any energy for that stuff. I think I covered what I wanted to here. Tag Force 1 had some potential but a lot of seemingly inherent issues as well. While the devs couldn't deal with all of them, I do with they had at least put more effort into others. More random interesting events, more structured school (duel puzzles, anyone?), and more options for duel partners on a fresh save would be ideal. There's also small things like the effect activation timing requiring you to manually hold X unless you only want to hit CL 2 or miss windows for cards like Trap Dustshoot, but I do at least know for a fact that the later games fix those. I guess next I'm going to return to Tag Force 2. Maybe with these more experienced eyes I'll appreciate it more than last time.
Isidoro23
7 months ago