Great game for young and casual fans, but completely bare new features and missing popular cards brings it down a bit.
Graphics:
Virtually the same as 2007, with a simple "game board" on the bottom screen and a virtual duel field on the top screen, showing the cards and monsters being played and battling in 3D. The DS has always mostly had "jaggies" with it's imperfect 3D graphics, but it really shows with Yugioh games. Not only are most of the graphics lackluster, but the monster models are sometimes odd as well, they don't seem to really represent the real monster in proportion correctly sometimes. Also, all of the monsters in this game only have a few very simple frames of animation, which means that once you stare at the monster for 3 seconds you'll have seen everything your going to see with it. Overall, the top screen is neat for a short while, but then you realize that they could have saved that space they used for the poor looking 3D models and added in a ton more cards that they left out that people really wanted to see instead, or fleshed out the new features a lot more. Other than the 3D models during an actual duel, everything else is simple 2D menus and pictures that are sharp looking and accurate to the series.
Sound:
Another area that shows Konami's laziness and lack of creativity. I've heard sounds in this game that come from the very first expert rules Yugioh game years ago (Eternal Duelist Soul for the GBA), and not just a few, most. Just like the card pool, most of the sound in this game are ported straight from previous editions, while only adding a few new jingles and tunes like dueling music and menu/option selecting. It's mostly very simple noises that just get old fast. Once you've played the game for a few hours and heard everything once, you'll probably just turn the sound off and play that way. That's not to say that the little rings and chimes aren't nice, but it's all you hear the entire time. Konami really should ditch the entire sound library for their handheld Yugioh games and make some new stuff, sound in a game isn't meant to be repetitive and force a player to turn it off, especially on a handheld game where every little thing counts in drawing the player in.
Gameplay:
Again, almost everything you do in this game is the same as the previous version of the game. Menu browsing, deck building, dueling, buying packs, everything is the same as '07. There are a few new features that add a slight bit of replayability though, such as Duel World mode. When you first turn the game on, you'll be prompted to select Duel World or World Championship mode. World Championship mode is just straight up dueling with AI opponents, but Duel World is a slight "story mode" affair (you can switch between these two modes very easily, simply by pressing B in the main menu of the mode you're in, you'll go back to the option to go into either mode). You start in the World of Grace, a simple screen with a jungle-esque background, and 4 or so monsters that you can duel. That pretty much sums up Duel World mode, sans the different backgrounds for each world (fire, darkness, desert and such). You unlock other worlds by "helping" other monsters being bullied by bigger monsters. You duel them and then a gate pops up with a guardian that you have to beat 3/5 times by completing challenge duels. These are basically where the "challenge" feature from 07 went in 08. You unlock something by beating every worlds' challenges, of which there are 5 in each, but you unlock the next world with just 3. If you beat any of the monsters in any world 5 times, you unlock a new AI to duel against in World Championship mode. In the end, you'll have a truckload of AI's to duel with, 13 pages with 6 duelists each, not to mention the ones you can download with wi-fi and the recipe duel mode.
Another new feature in 08 is the ability to Tag Duel. This is a feature that just became official for the real life card game in the TCG (there is still no official way to Tag Duel in the original Japanese card game, this is an English only feature in real life). The way this works is that both you and your partner share the same field and life points of 8000. Turns work as you might imagine, Player A goes, then Opponent A, then Player B, then Opponent B. Attacking is allowed on Opponent A's turn, since using 1 field means that you and your partner both have technically had a turn to prepare. Whoever's turn it is can use the field to his will, using your partners cards however you want, tributing, activating a magic or trap card, attacking, whatever you want. This sounds fun at first, but then looking into it further, you find that the AI makes a lot of terrible moves that usually ends up losing you both the game, such as tributing your hard-earned monster that you just got out for a normal monster that's got low attack points just because it can, or using Sakuretsu Armor on a terrible target like Sangan or Card Trooper early in the game. You also can't customize your partners deck at all, or make them use one of your recipes like in recipe duel mode. This makes choosing a partner very frustrating, even when you have them all unlocked, because they all use tribute monsters that you'd rather not see your monsters tributed for, and all use cards that end up hurting you. The bad partner AI and not being able to customize your partners deck really hurts this feature.
Another new feature is the Tournament mode. There are 3 levels to choose from, each higher level with harder opponents. It's an 8 player affair that plays down like a normal 8 man tournament style bracket. The opponent's are chosen at random, and you can watch all of the duels in the tournament in either normal speed or "hyper fast 10 second" mode. There isn't anything else at all to this mode, it's really very simple and straight forward. That's all well and good, but again, Konami felt that players shouldn't have any say in how they play it, because not only can you not choose your opponent's in this mode at all, but you can't choose to use your own recipes for the other 7 people either. So in the end, you end up playing 3 games (if you end up winning the whole thing) that are exactly the same as any other mode in the game. It's a nice feature, but the lack of customization kills the real replayability or possible excitement of the feature.
Card Pool:
One thing about 08 that I really like is that Konami didn't exclude any cards from the previous version. For the first time in a Yugioh game, they just took the cards from the previous game ('07), and added to the card pool from there. This game goes up to the newest set in the real life TCG, Gladiators Assault (GLAS), although it doesn't contain every card from the set, mostly just a lot of the most popular ones. It also contains a lot of the recent Japanese promotional cards that we don't have yet in the English card game, but it doesn't have as many new promo's as 07 had, which is a slight disappointment. Thankfully, the full complement of theme's cards are finally in full supply in a Yugioh game, and for the first time ever, you can play a Gravekeeper's deck with every Gravekeeper in the game. They also include every card for the new Cloudian and Gladiator Beast theme's, full Six Samurai support including Grandmaster of The Six Samurai and the new cards from GLAS, Harpies, Monarchs, Aliens, Crystal Beasts, all of this stuff is in here now. That may sound excellent, and it certainly is a very welcome occurrence compared to previous games, but as with Konami, there's always a very disappointing letdown to the initial happiness. With all of the new cards you get, there's a ton of other popular cards that are not in the game. Bazoo The Soul Eater, Legendary Jujitsu Master, Crystal Seer, Zombie Master, Volcanic Rocket, Deep Diver, Gemini Summoner, Desert Twister, Frost and Flame Dragon, Vanity's Fiend, just to name a handful of the cards people have been clamoring for yet haven't been delivered. Konami should learn that people will buy their new games regardless, new cards come out every other week that can be included in new games, and that's what will bring people back. It shouldn't be because they haven't been able to play Bazoo in a Yugioh game since 2006 and hope it's in the new game.
Also, it really hurts the game's early play that they give you such a terrible starter deck. They have a feature in the first Duel World's 1st world that lets you play with the 13 Structure Decks from Japan (the English game in real life didn't release SD 11 and 12 and went straight to 13) against another random Structure Deck, this feature personally makes me angry that they couldn't give players a nice starting point by letting them start the game with a pre-made structure deck of their choice with decent, and sometimes really good, cards in them. But then, that's what Konami's been all about from the start with their Yugioh product, teasing their fans with great and fun things, then yanking it back and not letting them have it at all, or at least with a high price. Casual fans will have fun with the many theme's presented, but competitive fans will get angry at the lack of the aforementioned cards, plus a few more I didn't name, not to mention the fact that there are a ton of useless cards in the game that konami hasn't removed that's space should've been used for the new cards.
Summary:
Overall, 2008, just like all Yugioh games, is just an extension of the last version. You buy the game to play the cards, everything else is gravy. The few new features are slightly fun in the beginning, but the lack of customization is both extremely frustrating and almost kills their replayability completely for the older crowd. The terrible starter deck you get in the beginning makes it hard to advance fast enough to hold interest in long spurts and will force most players with cheat devices to use them asap. The new cards are very fun to play though, and old themes are FINALLY fleshed out with full sets of cards for the themes. But the popular cards they left out make a lot of competitive decks like Zombies a lot less playable, and others like Seer Monarchs and Bazoo Return completely unplayable since their key cards are missing. The one theme konami HAS kept going from the start (with the possible exception of the 2006 edition) is the lack of creativity and effort it puts into making each game better than the last. There's only so much you can do with a straight forward card game like Yugioh, but the features in this game could be so much better, and it really shows that konami really doesn't care about the quality of their Yugioh games much at all, as long as they can ship another game out the door and make a ton of money from little kids. One thing that would have really helped this game is if they waited another 2 months or so and added a few more promo cards that haven't been scheduled for release until later in December and the first part of 2008.
Competitive:
This game is supposedly touted as the new software for the Yugioh Video Game Championships, but it really is anything but. The card selection leaves out a lot of competitive cards, instead giving us terrible ones not seen since the first few sets released way back in 2002/2003, and also has enemy AI that lacks any brains at all like always, so it's impossible to properly test out decks against good opponents unless you're facing a fellow human. Real competitive TCG players will most likely buy this game for the same reasons they bought 07, the promo cards that come with the game, and some random fun with less competitive decks.
This will satisfy casual fans (IE little kids) of the card game just like previous installments, and the lackluster new features will still get by with them as well since they don't have long attention spans anyway. However, older and competitive players, card gamers, and more serious video gamers will find that the shallow features and lack of some popular key cards makes this game get boring fast, or will at least settle them into the "same routine" feeling equally as fast. Not a bad game, really fun if you just wanna duel and don't care about other features and can accept the lack of some key cards, but just not enough improvement over 07 in ANY area to warrant a higher score, even though it's the best game in the series so far because it's the newest version with up-to-date cards.