Dawn of Destiny:
Same meta as WC04 but did not release in Japan
It's now just hitting me that Dawn of Destiny is a completely nonsense subtitle. What the hell does 'Dawn of Destiny' mean. At least the GBA games had some allegory to the card game.
It's really neat to be playing a full simulator on Xbox, but what the fuck this is worse paced than World Championship 2004. This is a baffling addition to the lineup, to say the least. You start the game with a random deck from 3 choices and have the option to either do a single duel against three 'duel robots' or a 'triple duel' against 3 characters from the anime (also Shimon). Almost immediately this game rears its ugly side as you load up your deck with absolutely garbage vanillas, with maybe 1 or 2 power cards differentiated between the 3 random decks (like 35 of the given cards are similar across each deck). This wouldn't feel so bad but after you win a duel, instead of obtaining card packs like every other card game since the game boy advance- you pick one of three statues of the God Cards. Then, you are given 3 (5 if you beat a triple duel) cards of a random pool in which I have no idea what is being pulled. Sometimes you get a pretty good card and it feels like a mistake because most times you'll just get 2 petit dragons and a Turu Purin. Despite this not all hope is lost- the braindead AI from World Championship also makes a return and its currently on its last remaining cell of gray matter. Joey will absolutely have a full front row of monsters that could walk over the vanilla monsters you bricked on, stay on the defense for some reason, and then summon Time Wizard so that can flip a coin and have a 50% chance to wipe his own board (smartest Dawn of Destiny opponent). I guess it's at least playable under these conditions but it probably has a worse grind than WC04 because of the egregious card pulls. There's a GameFAQs guide that displays the listed pulls somewhere in its guide so maybe there's some method of weeding out certain pulls but its such a low amount with no guarantees and the chance for multiple cards to pop out (no shit I got three steel ogre grotto #1s in one pull) that there's not much fun in deckbuilding outside of removing a 1300 attack vanilla with a 1400 attack vanilla. Sure the earlier PS1 and Game Boy games had a single pull after each duel but hey, at least the fusion mechanics helped to mitigate this slightly AND they also had a password system of any kind.
There isn't much to talk about in all honesty, hell I even wished there was enough for me to talk about the card sets I missed out on in WC2004 but Dawn of Destiny is an even more barebones experience.
(Sidenote: As of writing this I have played a bit of 7 Trials to Glory! It feels so good to play 'real' yugioh...)
Same meta as WC04 but did not release in Japan
It's now just hitting me that Dawn of Destiny is a completely nonsense subtitle. What the hell does 'Dawn of Destiny' mean. At least the GBA games had some allegory to the card game.
It's really neat to be playing a full simulator on Xbox, but what the fuck this is worse paced than World Championship 2004. This is a baffling addition to the lineup, to say the least. You start the game with a random deck from 3 choices and have the option to either do a single duel against three 'duel robots' or a 'triple duel' against 3 characters from the anime (also Shimon). Almost immediately this game rears its ugly side as you load up your deck with absolutely garbage vanillas, with maybe 1 or 2 power cards differentiated between the 3 random decks (like 35 of the given cards are similar across each deck). This wouldn't feel so bad but after you win a duel, instead of obtaining card packs like every other card game since the game boy advance- you pick one of three statues of the God Cards. Then, you are given 3 (5 if you beat a triple duel) cards of a random pool in which I have no idea what is being pulled. Sometimes you get a pretty good card and it feels like a mistake because most times you'll just get 2 petit dragons and a Turu Purin. Despite this not all hope is lost- the braindead AI from World Championship also makes a return and its currently on its last remaining cell of gray matter. Joey will absolutely have a full front row of monsters that could walk over the vanilla monsters you bricked on, stay on the defense for some reason, and then summon Time Wizard so that can flip a coin and have a 50% chance to wipe his own board (smartest Dawn of Destiny opponent). I guess it's at least playable under these conditions but it probably has a worse grind than WC04 because of the egregious card pulls. There's a GameFAQs guide that displays the listed pulls somewhere in its guide so maybe there's some method of weeding out certain pulls but its such a low amount with no guarantees and the chance for multiple cards to pop out (no shit I got three steel ogre grotto #1s in one pull) that there's not much fun in deckbuilding outside of removing a 1300 attack vanilla with a 1400 attack vanilla. Sure the earlier PS1 and Game Boy games had a single pull after each duel but hey, at least the fusion mechanics helped to mitigate this slightly AND they also had a password system of any kind.
There isn't much to talk about in all honesty, hell I even wished there was enough for me to talk about the card sets I missed out on in WC2004 but Dawn of Destiny is an even more barebones experience.
(Sidenote: As of writing this I have played a bit of 7 Trials to Glory! It feels so good to play 'real' yugioh...)