Unfortunately, this is probably the best yugioh sim ever made. Great accessibility, easy to pick up and fun to mess around in. However, this all comes at the cost of the gacha system - extremely hard to get cards you need consistently and can be hard to build multiple decks you want to use for this reason. The crafting system is excellent but you'll typically find yourself lacking SR and UR points pretty frequently. I've found it's best to plan around building a specific deck you'd like to play with for a good period (espc if you are F2P) so you have some consistency.
That being said, this game is also surprisingly free to play friendly as long as you're not itching to make multiple meta decks. While i can sympathize with new/returning players logging on, running into kashtira/vanquish soul/purrely, etc. getting chained into oblivion and getting frustrated with how much the game has changed, this remains the best way to experience a yugioh sim and i appreciate how it's let people (including myself) reignite their interest in the series.
As improvements, I would like to see the game's card base updated more frequently (as many others have brought up) as we're missing a lot of recent staples, and would like gems to be more frequent, which would fix some of the issues with the gacha system.

Forty-eighth GOTW finished for 2023. Not terribly dissimilar to another Christmas themed game I played (Santa Claus Jr.) in that it is actually better than it has any right to be. If there was a story, I didn't follow it, but there's some decent gameplay here and the sleigh levels were an interesting change of pace. Some terrible hitboxes (especially on the bosses), coupled with some other nonsensical story and gameplay characteristics, keep this from being a surprise gem, but there are certainly worse games to play.

Fun with fairly strong aesthetics and a banger soundtrack.
Tons of characters and lots of returning faces from Alpha, my personal favourite. Old classic Rival Schools is also very prominent with Akira and plenty of stage cameos.

While the game is very pretty this entry still doesn't translate well from the classic pixel art - the oversized palms and feet looks awkward on some characters and hair is mostly a mess - crazy anime hair doesn't really translate well, designs like Charlie and Rose looked good in 2d but are a bit harder to take seriously here, not that the game cares much for serious.

Story mode is a silly Power Rangers plot with little coherence. It's an impressive attempt at a cinematic approach but the mystique is gone. When the story bits were short and rare in earlier game there was a lot of room for imagination to fill in gaps, and now I feel this fairly lengthy story mode doesn't really say more than the minimal lines Alpha had for example.
Difficualy wise I couldn't tell if there were massive spikes in the last parts or it was just being forced to play characters I'm less comfortable with.
I feel those were spikes that my casual ass had a lot of trouble dealing with near perfect defence and punishment. Sometimes I treated those as an actual training grounds, but some I eventually just skipped after several tries.
The characters screen time is whack as well, poster boy Ryu literally only appears in the opening and closing acts and doesn't do much.

There's also a silly little personal story for each characters. They had varying quality but I liked those as they focused on slice of life rather than world ending drama. The art in this mod takes a while to get used to but it works.

The stage lights disco ball look for the pre fights looks great and I've never seen a direction like that before.

Main menu is an ugly messy sin, filled with buttons and store fronts, timed missions that you need to purchase tickets for with slowly acquired currency. It's not as bad as the nonsense I've seen in Injustice 2 earlier this year but this still has no place in a fighting game.

You can see some seeds for 6 - splashes of colour appear during certain combos and you get to fight normal people like OLD COP.

Street Fighter 5, six years in, is very fun and if the sequel wasn't so well received I might have tried to actually get good in it.

Third GOTM finished for December 2023. Aside from some awful backtracking bits and enemies/turrets being placed in places simply to be an annoyance, this was a very good game. The gameplay was fun and has aged pretty well, as have the cutscenes, and the characters were interesting. The story had some strange plotholes, and the amount of fourth-wall breaking was borderline off-putting at times, but they did a good job of keeping me mostly engaged throughout. Very glad to have finally gotten around to playing this one.