The game's great art style and huge amount of cards is overshadowed by a crippling difficulty and a bad localization.
Since I accepted that I would never be able to watch anime in peace, I didn't even try to watch the Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's Tag Force anime, but I had read a few chapters of the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga so of course I thought I had enough to get started. I didn't at all, since 5D's Tag Force is a completely different world with completely different characters. But anyway, let's move on to the actual review.
At the start of the game, your town has two major events going on: the World Racing Grand Prix (WRPG) and World Tag-Dueling Grand Prix (WTPG). You, a Pokemon-like character wearing a hat, are going to participate in the World Tag-Dueling Grand Prix, so you have to (a) get a better deck than the horrible starter deck the game gives you and (b) find a half-decent partner to team up with.
The game's free-roaming sections consist of you walking around, using the town map, talking to people, asking them to duel, or inviting them to become partners with you (the better duelists mostly refuse). Here I must mention a fast-talking minigame - the character you're talking to will say something, and a minigame activates where you press Square and Circle to make lines that pour from Start to three segments - Bad, Good and Very Good - that judge how well you smooth-talked the character. You can also give them presents to make them happier and more likely to become your partner. If you ask them to duel, a game of rock paper scissors ensues and the winner decides who goes first.
The dueling is extremely complex and here the real problem of the game emerges: its inaccessibility to anyone but the most hardcore of Yu-Gi-Oh! fans. Not only are duels so difficult and long that someone who doesn't have unlimited free time would give up, the presentation is very troublesome. Every time a card is drawn, you're asked if you want to check its details or not. This is an annoying feature, considering you can check their details anytime anyway. Besides, all you need to know is how much the ATK and DEF is, and how to activate a special card, and off you go.
There are 3D animations of characters for drawing cards, attacking, etc. but they are not voiced despite facial animations, which is rather disappointing. The 3D models are good enough, though you only see them for a second at most in each animation. The duels, to reiterate, are extremely difficult. From the start, the game is crippled by the sheer difficulty. Your starter deck has extremely weak cards whereas all other characters have more powerful characters than you, and considering you have to duel to earn money to buy a better deck, and you will almost always lose duels, I'm imagining a good deal of gamers would be annoyed by now.
A lot of time has to be put into this game before you start enjoying it in the least. The tutorial itself can take two hours to get through, and understanding it can take an eternity. Rearranging your deck is a nightmare so you should just buy new decks. Duels are complex, but they are a little too complex to be honest. In tag duels, you have to watch the AI duel against itself, which is long and tedious and there should have been an option for skipping it. Even to form partnerships with better duelists, you have to run around a lot, and quite frankly I think not a lot of gamers will have the time or patience for that.
The localization is also pretty bad. The menus and dialogues have been translated well, but the tutorials and duels have so many 'Engrishms' it's hilarious. When a game tells you, 'you should made a Extra Deck' or a character's subtitles indicate that he is shouting silently, 'This will be a fine!', you know the localization team has been lazy with this game. There are errors in grammar and punctuation all over the duel animation's subtitles.
It's honestly very frustrating how this game is put together. If it wasn't so inaccessible for all but a handful of lifetime Yu-Gi-Oh! fans with infinite patience and time, it could have been the PSP's very own Pokemon. There's a ton of completely free DLC for the game - monster cards and whatnot - that can be downloaded from the game site, which is still up last I checked. The art style is just outstanding and the 2D graphics are some of the best on the PSP, with none of the jagged edges that mar so many other games on the system. All the characters, with their different mannerisms, are likeable when you talk to them. There is a huge amount of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards in this game, which should please any longtime fan. If Konami hadn't been its own worst enemy in some design choices with this game, or if it had actually been tested by a half-decent QA team, it would have been a howling success. But it's none of that. For anyone who loves Yu-Gi-Oh! and has a lot of time and patience of his or her hands, this game will do well. But for the majority of gamers, this is a title to pass up. And that is a very big disappointment, considering the promise and potential this game holds.