A quality game, but one of the most frustrating you'll ever play, with merciless difficulty and constant time-wasting.
There are to modes. Story mode and generic dueling. The story mode has a 3-D world you can travel, though you're stuck to the ground, and it follows the storyline of the 5D's TV show, which is really fun if you follow the show as you play the game. The graphics are amazingly smooth and high quality.
The mode has you doing many things, including racing. The racing is very underutilized, and I would have loved to see better courses and challenges. Sadly, you can only ride when the game wants you to, so wasting your precious points on new parts is useless. This game would have been so much better if you could ride any time.
Then, there are also puzzles, but those are evil and you have to reset them a lot (block puzzles). Another underutilized aspect of the game. Then, there are a few random challenges, like sneaking past guards, which will probably be so frustrating you nearly throw your DS at a wall because of how hard it is to sneak past them. Story mode is decent in every way, but the worst part is the unforgiving difficulty. You'll be starved on both cards and points, and the AI is VERY smart, and the opponents' decks are too good; I lose almost every duel because of how luck-orientated it is.
Getting points is another huge pain. The game doesn't give you enough, period. You have to constantly duel and hope you'll win, and there's nothing fun about it. A 30-minute duel will give you points for two tiny 5-card packs, though they're the same ones as real life. Sadly, some cards were taken out of them, so your Venom or other creative deck will not be very playable at all. Even if you have a card and want to use a password to get multiples of it, even then, you need to pay to get them.
The points system is a massive buzzkill and makes me want to stop playing the game altogether. Even WORSE, the pack glitch has been fixed. And let's say you've been in a huge, long duel for nearly an hour (this situation has happened to me multiple times already). Your opponent will go down in just one more hit, and you go for the final attack. Then the opponent just throws down a card to kill your monster and you lose the duel. You go home with nothing.
This will happen over and over again, and you will get screwed out of 10, 20, 30, or even 40 minutes of your life, and will give you crap nothing for it. On another note, the promos are complete trash and of no use to anyone. They're just a couple of terrible effects and stats monsters that can only be activated when you have no hand.
Furthermore, if you download a Ghost online (a person's deck to duel against), it will be automatically deleted after 24 hours. If someone's a glitch and runs out of the deck automatically and you get a million DP or something, and you love it because you can FINALLY get cards, you lose that. Konami has taken every effort to make sure you're miserable and can't get cards.
Overall, it's a decent game. Frustrating and unfriendly, but maybe it's worth it. Maybe.