"Over the Nexus" is over-the-top fun.

User Rating: 8.5 | Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's World Championship 2011: Over the Nexus DS
When the first "Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's"-themed DS game, "Stardust Accelerator", was released in 2009, it has gotten an "average" reception. "Reverse of Arcadia", when released in 2010, was slightly better than its predecessor. Is "Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's World Championship 2011: Over the Nexus" better than both its 2009 and 2010 predecessors? Absolutely. Is it the greatest game ever to be released? Not quite, but it's close. Still, not only does this game put "over" in "Over the Nexus"--it also puts "over" in "over-the-top fun".

When you begin the game's Story Mode, after a couple cutscenes showing the characters to face later on, you wake up in Crash Town, dreaming of participating in the World Riding Grand Prix (WRGP). After Klaus, your apparent grandfather/guardian, wakes you up from your fantasy and tells you to give up on the whole "Turbo Dueling" thing, he says that Nico and West, two siblings who are also your friends, are looking for you. After meeting up with them, West challenges you to a duel. It's nothing too surprsing, seeing as this always happens in games like this. And, of course, you'll decide who goes first/second with the traditional "rock-paper-scissors" game, right?

Not really!

For duels happening in Crash Town, instead of the above mentioned game, a five-piece set of controls is placed before you. Your job is to hit all of those controls before your opponent. If you do just that, you'll go first. This is a good thing; not only does it provide the player with a hand-eye coordination challenge, but it's slightly, if not completely, accurate to how Crash Town duels start in the anime itself.

For Turbo Duels that occur in Neo Domino City's stadium, happening much later on in the game (more specifically after the game's completion), you still decide who gets to go first or second with "rock-paper-scissors", right? Wrong again! For such duels, you have to race your opponent to the first turn. If you're truly the "Master of Faster", then you get to go first. As with the above, it's good because it's slightly accurate to the anime.

Another feature that is accurate to the anime, thus still making the game good, is the duels that occur throughout the WRGP. Once it's your turn to Turbo Duel, some cards will be placed before you and your opponent, and you and your opponent will have a different (but sometimes same) amount of Speed Counters. Unfortunately, all of this isn't done at random, and you won't actually see much of "Turbo Duels" performed by your teammates. Just some riding and card-battle-related sound effects. That's pretty much it. Furthermore, it seems that the only time you can experience this is in the Story Mode itself, which can be disappointing.

What makes this such a good game is that it introduces Turbo Duels and Tag Turbo Duels for World Championship Mode. In fact, Tag Turbo Duels are introduced in the game, period! If only its two predecessors would feature these two kinds of duels for both Story and World Championship Mode. If they did, then they would be more popular than they are now.

As much as this game has really good features, it also has features that are not as good. For starters, in the duels themselves, the 3D sprites are removed from the bottom screen, and makes the Duel Field look similar to that of what was seen in GBA games. Those who have grown to the predecessors and their 3D sprites will be slightly annoyed by this. But, in most cases, this feature for "Over the Nexus" makes the duels themselves go faster; so it all evens out.

Animations for the summoning of certain monsters still exist (i.e. Dark Magician, Red Dragon Archfiend, Jinzo, etc.). Unfortunately, the music for such animations is slightly altered to make it sound close to 8-bit music. This can be pretty irritating, especially when the Earthbound Gods are summoned.

At the Duel Runner garage, when you log on to the simulator, you'll see this one Duel Runner game mode known as "Survival" (also known as "Battle Royale"). This game mode is most likely not a "recommendable" kind of game mode, for two reasons. One, because it can be distracting when trying to collect items that pass by you while avoiding the bombs your opponents fire at you. And two, it can be pretty frustrating when you collect a certain number of items and then losing the game, thus also losing the items you have collected. Fortunately, there is only one time where you have to do this, and that's in the Story Mode. Afterwards, you do not have to experience "Battle Royale" mode ever again, unless you decide to start a new game, with or without existing data.

Overall, this game is not even close to being a "bad" game. At the same time, it is not the "best" game, either. But with its new features, both in Story and World Championship Mode, this game would most likely be classified as the best of the three 5D's games to be released for the DS. And yes, I'm saying "the three" because the 5D's anime is pretty much over, so we may not be seeing any more 5D's-related DS games coming out. But thanks to "Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's World Championship 2011: Over the Nexus", we can re-live the best moments of 5D's with a game that'll provide almost anyone with hours of fun.