I've never played Yu-Gi-Oh! game in real life, but I bet this might be the closest it gets.

Yu-Gi-Oh! The Eternal Duelist Soul is the first Yu-GI-Oh! Game released for the GBA, after the release of the first instalments of the series for Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Playstation, most of them in Japan only.

At the very beginning you're asked to choose your starting deck, without knowing its contents, after which you're set for an endless succession of duels, each taking a calendar day.

Opponents are grouped in tiers, having to reach a certain number of wins to challenge players in the higher tier. Each of them have a different deck with a different theme to it and in some matches the game randomly throws some curveballs at you to somewhat alleviate the grind feeling, like games starting with a field card from the beginning. Nothing that makes the game any harder anyway.

Every time you win a duel, you're rewarded with a booster pack of 5 cards to improve your deck or expand your collection. Although the latter seems a bit pointless considering you get a single copy of each card once you beat Simon in the end game. You also receive a weekly booster pack without having to win anything, in case you're struggling.

In the weekends you're forced to play a game in match format (best of three) against a random opponent. At a certain point, some tournament matches are also scheduled in your calendar, giving you the chance to win the World Championship.

And that´s pretty much it, there´s no story or anything to keep you playing other than the card game itself.

I was personally fine with that. Having played Magic The Gathering at a semi-competitive level before, although simpler in my opinion, Yu-Gi-Oh! still has all the elements of your typical card game: probabilities, card advantage, tempo, etc… and it´s quite enjoyable, although not for everyone. However, is not a bad entry point into collectible card games in general, and a very good one for Yu-Gi-Oh! in particular, given that the card pool in the videogame is much smaller than the current one. Unlike MTG, Yu-Gi-Oh! does not have a rotation format and all cards in the history of the game can be played together, save for some limitations/bans on some cards.

Once an avid card game player, I enjoyed the game but couldn't shake off that repetitive feeling once you´ve played each opponent a few times and realise their strategies and weaknesses, and some of the design flaws are likely to put most players off.

THE GOOD:

• Yu-Gi-Oh! at its simplest and purest form faithfully recreated.
• Good to pick up and play.

THE BAD:

• Goes stale quickly once you more or less know your opponent decks.

• Very poor card balance, with some cards being clearly better than the rest, making most of the loot you get in booster packs quite useless early on. However, this is not the videogame's fault but a reflection of the card game status when the game was released.

• You can only have one deck at any time, so if you want to try a different strategy, you´ll have to write down the card in your current deck before you assemble the new one. And then hope the new deck is better than your previous one…

• When your opponent cards go to the graveyard by discarding or destroying face down cards on the field, you only get to see their colour (type) but have to browse the graveyard to see what cards he actually lost.

THE UGLY:

• The deck editor! What a nightmare that is! I am aware of the limitations for such type of game in such a tiny screen, but trying to put together a deck can be a complete faff. You have to open every card to read their effects!

• The CPU blatantly cheats when you play against the Computer opponent in the highest Tier, and knows the cards you set face down, not attacking them if it cannot kill them. It´s a very cheesy way to try to bump up the difficulty and is not even successful.

• The game animations are very slow and the duels drag longer than needed at normal speed. There´s the option to speed things up by holding the B button during the game, but better than that is to hold the R button before each duel starts to have that automatically for that duel only, meaning you have to remember yourself to do so for each duel. Why not having a settings menu in the start screen?

• Cards you swapped when side boarding stay in the main deck after the match without the game telling you!