Thursday, September 8, 2011

Retro Review: Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories (PS1)


Let me start this off by asking; Why the fuck did this game come in the typical two disc case? I always wondered that as a kid. Like maybe every copy I had of this game just happened to be missing the second disc. I was just left to wonder what kind of crazy adventures were to be had on that second non-existant disc.
At any rate, this was the first Yu-Gi-Oh! game I had actually played. It came out around the time the card game was actually being made. So I had no clue what to expect, was it the action packed duels found in the show? Was is the 6 hour 2000 Life Point battles? Nah, this game flipped the script on you.


Graphics: 4/10
The majority of this game is represented through walls of text and still images of the person you're talking to. Much like the older RPGs from back in the day. 




 
This is about as advanced as the non-duel graphics get. It's not awful or anything, but after about the 9857th pressing of the X button to advance text, it gets stale. I've never been so tired of seeing Joey (or Jono's) face as I have these last couple days playing this. The duel graphics are another thing.


This is the basic duel layout, we all know how to duel so I won't explain that. The cards don't look like the actual real life cards, but I'm okay with that. Everything you need is clearly represented right in front of you. When you attack another monster, you can press Square instead of X, and it'll go into this neat little animation. Your Blue-Eyes White Dragonfucka will battle that tiny little Kuriboh. All in lovely 3-D. This blew my mind when I was a kid.




For a 1999 PS1 game, the 3d graphics aren't that bad. Especially compared to some of the other games. (Spyhon Filter gets an honorable mention here). The battle animations usually end up being about the same, so you'll get tired of it before too long.

Story: 6/10
It somewhat follows the basic Yu-Gi-Oh! storyline, there's a few discrepancies here and there, but not enough to say that it has it's own story completely. All characters from the anime are there. Pegasus, Kaiba, Rex Raptor, so on and so forth. You start the game off in Ancient Egypt, you're some prince dude and you're really important I think. You duel with a few of the locals then some powerful wizard guys come in and wreck shit. They whoop up on your village so bad that you travel forward in time a few millenium. But, if you've seen the show you know how it goes. Millenium Items, Pegasus is a douche, Kaiba is a badass, Yugi is a fuck. Same basics.

Gameplay: 7/10
Like I said earlier, this game came out right about when the card game was being developed. So playing this is quite a bit different than the actual game you have today. The basic principles still apply. Monsters with higher attack kick ass, and monsters with little attack don't. Magic cards, trap cards, it's all here. But you can really tell they haven't figured out how they wanted the card game to work yet. For starters, you can only play one card per turn. That becomes a real nuisance if you need a rad Magic/Monster combination to help you out. It'll take you two turns instead of one. Every turn, you draw until you have five cards, this became easily exploitable against most opponents. Shitty monsters? Purposely use a few cards out of your hand for a failed fusion. You can have you best monster on the field and have a better chance of drawing the ones you want. I haven't tried this with Exodia, but I'm sure it would be killer for that as well.

There's no real sense of adventure or anything in this game,. All you do is read text, pick a location to go to, read text, duel, rinse, repeat. It's not hard to beat this game.

Music: 3/10
Alright enough music, but it repeats way too much for anyone to even care after awhile.

Overall:   5/10
The gameplay is the star player in this game. It's kind of like the '98 Bulls roster. They had MJ but who are them other dudes fucking around on the field?