Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (1998)

Played on the Yu-Gi-Oh! EARLY DAYS COLLECTION on Steam.

I went back and forth on my opinion of this one, but I had fun overall. At first, I was put off by the fact that the game is wildly different from what I'm used to. No sacrifices for summons, being required to play a SINGLE card every turn, having no card limits, and not being able to just end turn and being required to either attack or go in defense mode. Despite how different the game is, I started having a ball when I realized that fusions are pretty flexible. In the standard game, I'm used to having fusions needing two very specific monsters in order to fuse two monsters. In this game, there are multiple different combinations to make different monsters, which was a blast to play with. I had a good time just having random combinations of monsters making flame swordsman and beating enemies that way. This served me pretty well up until the unlockable final boss, which kind of soured me on the game. Because of how the game works, it pretty much amounts to who can summon the monster with the biggest number first to control the match and this boss took that rule to the extreme. Pretty much each and every one of their monsters had ATK equal to or greater than my strongest monsters. It would have taken an insane amount of grinding in order to beat this boss legitimately, so I opted to use the "enhancements" feature to give myself every card just to beat him. Apparently the Steam version's password system doesn't work for this game anymore due to updates. I wish the final boss wasn't so insanely hard, but I had a good time fighting my way through the enemies before this battle. It is also pretty disrespectful how the enemy blatantly knows everything you have on your field though.