First things first. If you are a fan of Duel Masters card game, do not look at the score and do not read this review. This game is what you already expect it to be. The game involves a lot of deck-building, and allows you to test your decks against the CPU to see how your strategy stacks up. And it comes with five cards. I don’t believe you could ask for more. Go on and get it and enjoy.

I first approached Duel Masters with guarded optimism. I have seen firsthand one of these card-battling handheld video games, in the form of the earlier GBA Yu-Gi-Oh! games. To say that it looked boring and tedious would be a gross understatement. Card battle after card battle after card battle. Even if I had a predisposition to like such a game, I still don’t see how I could play it over and over. It just seemed endless. There was no real prize for completing it. After you win a battle, there is no neat puzzle to solve, no attempt at varied gameplay, only more card-battles.

The card game itself seems adequate itself. The very first thing that happens is that from your deck of forty, you draw five cards that act as your shield cards. You have six “hit points” so to speak: your five shields, and you. Then you draw five cards from your deck for your starting hand, and depending on whether or not you won the coin toss, you either get to play first or draw a card after your opponent’s turn. If you have the first turn, you don’t draw a card. Then you build up your mana pool by adding cards in your hand from it. Then depending on what color of mana you have stocked in your mana pool, you can tap those cards to cast spells or summon creatures. Tap… Tap… Have I heard that somewhere before? Anyway, after you tap the cards in your mana pool, you can summon creatures and cast spells with the same color. Red cards cast red things, green cards cast green things, birds of a feather, etc. You only need one card of a certain color, though; the rest can be any cards in your mana pool. After summoning monsters to the field, you must wait a turn to attack because they have “summoning sickness.” This is starting to sound familiar. After the sickness is over, you may have the monsters attack the other player’s shield cards (which will then enter the opponent’s hand) until they eventually attack the player himself (just once) and you will have attained victory.

If you haven’t guessed by now, this game seems heavily inspired by Magic: The Gathering. And it should, because Wizards of the Coast makes both. In fact, I see other things this card game has been inspired by. Shield cards are a weird mixture of Prize Cards from the Pokemon TCG, and Trap Cards from Yu-Gi-Oh!. It appears that Duel Masters is a mish-mash of all the other TCGs on the market.

There are some people who enjoy Duel Masters, and that’s fine. I, however, do not enjoy Duel Masters. I find the matches in the game to be somewhat boring, and with each new segment of the game bringing nothing but more card-battles and deck management, I find myself getting more bored by the minute. At this point, since there are parallels with this game and most RPGs I have played, something of a story should show up to keep the between-fight segments filled. Unfortunately, this is where the game takes a turn for the odd.

Our young hero, whose name should be Tom but I renamed to something more fitting, which I can’t repeat here, is having a birthday at the story’s start. Now usually, the hero is somebody who wants to do good things and be a forthright and noble person. “Tom” shows none of that, by being a selfish little wanker, proclaiming that he hopes he gets many presents from his friends and parents. That is in the very first line of the game. He then goes into the living room where his mother and father await him. His father says something about Duel Masters. Then “Tom” leaves, moving right past his mother without greeting her, who has since has not uttered a word and more disturbingly hasn’t moved. By the way, this “Tom” looks 100% like his father and 0% like his mother. If you understand genetics, you might understand my initial perturbed feeling. Thankfully, later at said birthday, “Tom’s” mother moves around a little bit and says some short sentences. That should prove that… Well they could be recordings. I don’t know. I can’t shake the feeling that this boy’s father built a robot wife and had to resort to cloning to pass on his DNA. Long story short: boy gets card for B-Day, Fat Ninja Man comes in and steals it, boy gives chase, boy’s quest is to get the card back. He must find a detective who won’t work for him unless he wins the tournament medal. After that, the detective won’t help you until you win the tournament medals in all the other towns. That’s it. I’ve spent too much time on this. Forgive me if I sound cold, but at this point I really don’t care if this kid gets his damn card back.

The rest of the game’s qualities can be summed up with the word “mixed”. Visuals include neatly 3D rendered backgrounds, with the actual characters looking like highly pixellated, crudely animated, poorly drawn fan art. The game uses quirky sound effects for attacks, with a sort of nouveau New Age-Muzak soundtrack mix that has its moments but is overall boring. And the control is as good as navigating through various menus can be.

Just in case you ignored my warning up top, I’ll repeat it. If you already like Duel Masters, have lots of the cards, and like its game mechanics, go ahead and get the GBA version. It sports a whole lot of what you already like. But if you are like me and are getting quite burned out on the whole card battling scene, this game most definitely will not change your mind about it.