Remember all the boring YGO TCG games nowadays? Now, this one is the exception of the year! Surprisingly good!
But unfortunately, most of the games are fun in the beginning, but extremly boring and dissapointing in the end. Then you usually ditch the game.
But Ultimate Masters 2006 is a very surprisingly good exception! Aside from most other YGO games, this one doesn't contain any story. Mostly, that would leave me bored, because I like stories in games like that quite as much as I like the card game. But most of the original YGO games' stories revolves round the end of the world and egyptian god cards, while the GX games are about Jaden Yuki and his carrier at Duel Academy. That results in that if you've played on of them, you've played them all! So the stories can become a bit boring too.
This game however is extremly entertaining even without a story! When you start, you're allowed to choose between the 6 first structure decks that were ever released in reality (videlicet up to Warrior's Triumph). That won't leave you to have to use one lousy, crappy noob deck you usually get when playing similar YGO games.
Then, you can choose between a lot of different actions. You can play the campain, which lets you duel against a number of tiers in different levels. Every tier is quite stronger and harder do win against than the previous one. But these tiers are, compared with early duelists in other games, incredibly hard to duel against! The first one is Kuriboh who would let you think would be quite easy to defeat. But that is not the case! I chose the Warriors triumph deck at the start (yes, yes, I AM aware of that I SHOULD have choosen the Zombie deck) and i lost the 1st two times! The next one was scapegoat, but these small goat tokens were even harder to defeat than Kuriboh (okay, I know, that's logical...)! These duels really ARE a challenge to both beginner and pro-players. And we love challenges, don't we?
But the real charming thing about the duels is the surprisingly clever AI! In most of the YGO games, even the PC-games, the AI's always following a straight scheme in how to play their cards. Often, that results in really stupid and ridicolous actions which makes you really feel and hate the AI's astronomical idioty. Then you realize that one duel with that AI is like all other follwing duels.
The AI in this game however is very smart! More than often, he knows how to turn the duel around, right when you think you have got him. Also, he uses some quite inofficially "rules" like how pro-duelists use themselves, like the "commit sucide"-rule ("If your opponent has two monsters on the field, and you only one which has the same ATK as one of the opponent monsters, you commit sucide against that monster to reduce the opponents chance to use that monster as a tribute in his next turn.") Otherwise, in most of the other games, the AI either just summons the monster and ends his turn or he sets the monster in defense mode, which both are only good for you!
Other things you can do are card puzzles (you have 1 turn to win the duel in a certain way), limited duels (you play duels with some handicaps), theme duels (clear some goals while dueling) or survival (win a certain amount of duels with the same amount of Life Points kept in the previous duel).
The exciting thing with the game is that, the whole time, as long as you play, you will unlock more and more extra features, by fulfilling some certain requirements or by having some key cards on your deck.
Other items that increase the games good value are:
- Unlike other YGO games, this one really follows the officially rules.
- Unlike other games, this one has all cards from Legend of Blue Eyes White Dragon to Shadow of Infinity.
- Although this game contains some illegal and/or not released Kazuki Takashi cards, like Cathedral of the Noble, it doesn't exaggerate with these cards.
- Unlike other games, where you have to buy about 50 strange and different boosters which contain the cards in an irretating "connection" order (for example Duel Academys' "All the games equip cards in this booster"), Ultimate Masters follows the officially released booster structure order. You can buy every booster to Shadow of Infinty (I think, because just now I can only buy up to Ancient Sanctuary, but later cards exists in the game) and the card rarity is similar to the original boosters too!
- Unnecessary animations make this game really fast and therefore more entertaining. You don't have to spent half a hour with one duel.
- You only need 3 buttons to have total control of the game. The DS games are quite irritating with the touch screen function.
- If you download the Game as a rom game and play it on a GBA emulator, you can speed it up to 200% faster than usual!
Negative things that lower the value:
- This game has not so many bugs. Yet, sometimes I found myself in situationes when I actually should have won a puzzle duel, but then I didn't, because I seemed to not have done the puzzle in the exactly right order, even if my chosen order wouldn't have effected the duel specially. For example, in one puzzle, I had to get the ATK of a monster to 5000 by removing cards from my own graveyard. Each card I removed increased the monsters' ATK by 500 points. But it seemed that I had to select exactly special cards which were meant to be removed, even if it, theoreticaly, wouldn't matter exactly which cards I remove, because the monsters' effect is based on the amount of cards I remove, not special cards or card types. So I had to repeat the same puzzle all over to pick out the cards to remove from my graveyard.
- The chainquestions (messages which appear to ask if you want to chain to a card effect) don't appear as often as they should. For example, I happend to play Heavy Storm while still having Book of Moon face-down. Normally, I would have been allowed to chain to Heavy Storm and activate Book of Moon on an opponent monster before it would become destroyed.
- When activating destruction effects that target, the cursor always targets your own cards first, instead of your opponent's cards. That often results in mistakingly destroying your own cards, instead of the opponent's targets.
- The lack of animation can be either good or bad. Good because you don't want to see the same monster being summoned in the exactly the same way all over and over again. Bad because you want to see your cool monsters being summoned or to se how they battle. It's a matter of visual angel.
All in all, this game is really suprising me. I hope I will spent much more hours of fun with this great game. You definatly should buy or download it, it's worth the money/time! ^^