“YuGiOh! Master Duel,” the much-anticipated, long-overdue official YuGiOh! simulator is finally out. I have been playing it every single day since its release and am having quite a lot of fun. But I think that’s because I already love YuGiOh! as a game and not because “Master Duel” is such a masterpiece. There are certainly a few things that it gets right, but now that I’m writing this article and weighing the positives and negatives, I think the most I can say about this game is that I am cautiously optimistic.

Let’s start with the positives. The biggest selling point of “Master Duel” is its spectacular visual flair. Summoning a monster has never been more enjoyable: just like those flashy scenes you see in all the YuGiOh! anime series, there are animations for all the different summoning methods, my favorite being the one for “link summoning.” The monster you use for a link summon becomes this pure, red beam of energy that fills the “link arrow” of a metallic frame, out of which a link monster is summoned. For quite a few monsters, the game plays a special, close-up animation of their individual card art, which looks so smooth and cool. Accompanied by some hard-hitting sound effects, it’s an incredible fulfillment of the power fantasy all duelists have of calling down their favorite boss monsters of their favorite deck. But wait! There’s more. There are different duel fields and monster pets that are basically interactive and reactive parts of the game field. You can click on them for some cool effects or reactions. When either side takes damage, they would have their part of the field cracked and broken, and the pets would react in interesting ways. I really like how my “Pot of Greed” pet giggles and rolls around, for instance. Smug little creature, that thing. 

With “Master Duel” being a “free-to-play” card game, I was expecting it to have absolutely terrible monetization and progression systems, but I was surprised to find out how easy it was to get higher rarity cards, at least compared to “Master Duel’s” mobile counterpart “Duel Links” and even the real-life card game. (Three years ago, I wrote a review praising “Duel Links” for its card packs. Wow, was I dumb.) There’s a good probability of getting a few ultra-rare cards in just ten packs. The luckiest I got was seven ultra-rares, something that would never happen in “Duel Links” and the physical card game and probably other card games. With just the starting gems, the premium currency, and the ones earned in solo content, I was able to make a slightly inferior version of a deck that I use in tournaments in real life, perfectly playable and competitive. I also found out that the game has a generous crafting system: For every three cards, you can exchange a card of the same rarity. This helps you tremendously for rounding out the missing cards of your deck—you wouldn’t have to spend extra just to get one or two cards. Whereas in “Duel Links,” missing one or two cards can mean having to pull the entire box of packs, which may cost you several hundred bucks, with no way to just craft them. Insane.

So far, these are pretty good things about “Master Duel,” but the more I played, the more I became aware of its many flaws that overshadow them. The most obvious one is the fact that the game has no casual match-making—it’s ridiculous because this is probably the most basic feature of a multiplayer game. However, this wouldn’t be such a huge problem if there weren’t also glaring issues with all the other game modes. For ranked mode, I am disappointed with how it consists of only single matches instead of best-of-three’s. The latter is how actual, competitive YuGiOh! is played, and I think the way it should be played because game one is usually won by whoever goes first. And this is exactly what happens in “Master Duel,” making ranked feel coin-flippy and more frustrating than it should be. Another issue with ranked is the fact that you can only climb up to Platinum one on the ranked ladder, which I did in just three days since the game’s release. I have no idea why the game doesn’t just use the ranked system that “Duel Links” uses, which has Legend above Platinum and King of Games as the highest rank. After reaching Plat one, you are practically discouraged from playing, because somehow it is still possible to be demoted if you lose too many games. So you can be punished for playing a more casual deck, and you get nothing for continuing to try hard. This leaves you with two options: duel rooms and solo mode. 

Yet they are easily the weakest parts of “Master Duel.” Duel rooms are lobbies that a player can host and other players can join, but it actually takes so long for someone to play with you. Either the host refuses to play and just quits, or they are seemingly away from keyboard (AFK). And when I’m the host, I have to wait for several minutes before someone joins, and they might also refuse to play with me. Adding insult to injury is the fact that the UI for duel rooms is so clunky and poorly designed that I waste even more time finding matches. Duel rooms are simply the antithesis of fun, while solo mode is also a snooze-fest. It’s designed to teach new players how to play and tell stories behind different deck archetypes but fails on both fronts. The loaner decks they give you are nothing short of unplayable garbage that make you feel powerless and disconnected from the narrative, and the stories are presented in these sleep-inducing slide-shows that are asking to be skipped. If not for the rewards, I doubt anyone would want to touch solo mode.  

Despite what I said earlier about the ease of acquiring cards early on, after a few days, progression comes to a screeching halt—the difference is night and day. I get two hundred or so gems at this point doing all the daily missions. But the funny thing is most of these missions involve ranked play, which I of course don’t want to play anymore at this point. This issue with progression may be the biggest downfall of the game, as most players enter this dry period. They can easily go back to unofficial simulators that are completely free with all the cards readily accessible.

There’s a slew of other issues. The turn timer is way too generous at 480 seconds. The soundtrack is painfully mediocre, especially compared to “Duel Links,” which features a ton of amazing tracks. The UI is super bare-bones and unbefitting of an official YuGiOh! game. The rewards track for the duel pass doesn’t give you enough gems for a 10-pull, which takes one thousand gems. There are no emotes during matches, while “Duel Links” have all these cool voice lines for different characters. I get the feeling that the game was unfinished and rushed out of the door.

But it seems like the developers do want player feedback, as there is already a survey you can fill out (that gives a measly 50 gems.) All of these issues can be fixed with updates, and the game would improve drastically, so I remain cautiously optimistic. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I so desperately want this game to excel as a YuGiOh! fanboy that I’m willing to look past its many flaws and keep playing. My hope is that the game will eventually be so good, my friends will finally be willing to play with me, and I can beat the sh*t out of them.