Cheating AI, broken rules, and battles that slow the DS to a crawl. This could have been the best, but it's all a mess.
'Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's Stardust Accelerator – World Championship 2009' is another in the long series of World Championship games from Konami. The focus is on the trading card game 'Yu-Gi-Oh!' Let's assume you're not one of the six people left in the world who actually still care about 'Yu-Gi-Oh!' and I'll explain. 'Yu-Gi-Oh!' the trading card game is a game in which you battle with monsters to try and destroy your opponent and support your monsters with magic and traps with a variety of effects. It's a pretty standard TCG, all things considered and it can be buckets of fun if you like that kind of thing.
The game offers two modes to play in: Story Mode and World Championship mode. World Championship mode is simply duel after duel with a selection of opponents. There are three to begin with and more are unlocked later. Additionally you can unlock a tournament mode, Two-on-two duels and the brand new Turbo Duels.
To unlock more duellists and special modes in World Championship, you need to play the Story Mode. This is the biggest step forward in the franchise as it is the first time you could actually call the game an RPG. The plot loosely follows the first season of the 'Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's' cartoon series and much like its cartoon counter-part, the story is weak, generally dull but at least it's not about going to school.
Another of the latest and greatest additions to the series is the inclusion of motor bike racing. There are a handful of races, chases and time trials you are forced to go through in the story and generally they're easy, if you can manage the poor controls. After you complete one of these you can go back and replay the track as a race or time trial but the rewards are too small to make it worthwhile.
So mostly you'll be playing cards and that makes sense in a game about playing card games. But the problem starts here and let me say that I wanted to like this game. Sometimes I did like it. I tried as much as I could to enjoy it. But the first sign of trouble was when I saw the list of forbidden and limited cards (That is, the cards you can't use or can only have a few of in your deck) and noticed that several cards that had been forbidden for a long time were suddenly legal again. These were cards that had previously been considered too game breaking to be allowed and so they were nixed and new versions were made that kept things more balanced.
Then I noticed that these previously forbidden cards were suddenly very important cards for making a deck that's worth playing with. So of course they're even more difficult to get than ever before. At least for the player they are. Finally I noticed that almost every opponent I came across had at least a couple of these overpowered cards in their deck.
It's a bold move on Konami's part to move away from traditional ideas like balance, a difficulty curve and fairness. But as much as I appreciate departure from gaming norms and experimentation with the medium, the game is still broken and it's rubbish!
About forty hours of playing later, I'd managed to beat the story mode and found I'd only unlocked a fraction of the cards, duellists and duelling modes possible. So I was eager to unlock more. There's a lot of replay value because of how much is there and how many people you can face. Despite a lot of gritting my teeth, I pushed on.
The final straw came when I was duelling a character called Akiza. Without going into the boring detail, I'll explain. I got into a situation with this character in which I realised that the AI knew what my face down card was. To put this simply: The game was cheating and there was no denying it. Now it could be that this is part of the story. This character was supposedly a witch and just maybe that's how she knew what my cards were. But even if this is part of the story, that **** will not fly.
'Yu-Gi-Oh! 2009' brought a lot of features to the game that could have made this the perfect Yu-Gi-Oh! game. But clearly Konami had to fire anyone with any sense during the financial crisis. Probably about the same time they let Hideo Kojima off his leash. In the end the game is broken and it almost turned me off the whole 'Yu-Gi-Oh!' card game. And if you're wondering about any other features of the game that I haven't mentioned, just assume it sucks.