While I did watch Yu-Gi-Oh! as a kid, it wasn’t until just a few years ago that I actually made an attempt at playing it. It was in the apartment that we lovingly dubbed The Studio, where Austin and I got into the habit of watching Yu-Gi-Oh! GX nearly every day while we worked. This led to playing a bit of Yu-Gi-Oh: Master Duel and even tinkering with our decks with cards we purchased from a local shop. If you’ve played Yu-Gi-Oh! for yourself, you probably already know that the tabletop game is not as glamorous as the anime makes it out to be. (Obviously.) Although we did have fun for a bit, eventually, the luster of the cards grew dull, and all that was left was my love for the shows. Which I still think are entertaining despite their shortcomings.
This brings us to now. I am back watching more Yu-Gi-Oh! and that means I need a companion piece to go with it. The latest entry in the Yu-Gi-Oh! video game lineup came out earlier this year. The Early Days Collection was a compilation of the first 14 games in the series that included everything from Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (1998) to Yu-Gi-Oh! 7 Trials to Glory (2004), some of which were never-before-released outside of Japan. Amongst those was Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards, which was originally released in 2002 for the Game Boy Advance. And that was just the companion piece I was looking for.
To set the stage, Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards is a Pokémon-inspired RPG-lite where you play as a friend of Yugi Moto and Joey Wheeler from the original show. Everyone is competing in the Battle City tournament hosted by none other than richboy Seto Kaiba. The premise is simple: every player is given a Locator Card, and you must duel others to acquire more. Once you have six Locator Cards, you qualify for the finale. However, there is more at play than just the tournament. In typical Yu-Gi-Oh! fashion, what starts out as a game of cards unravels to be a story about a cult (The Ghouls) led by a mysterious hooded figure named Marik, three Egyptian God Cards (of course), and the end of the world as we know it.
The city has a handful of points of interest to visit, meaning it’s not something you can get lost in, and it’s littered with players to duel. You can only get Locator Cards from key-named characters, but everyone else is fair game to train up. The game is pretty self-aware and, to its credit, it does have a few good jokes in there. To cover the basics, in each duel, both players put up an ante that the winner can take. This means the more you win (by either draining your opponent’s life points to zero or until they have no more cards to draw from), the more cards you are freely given. Winning also gives you money to spend at the in-game Card Shop as well as increases your Power Level. This reflects the total power of the cards you can have in your deck of 40 cards.
This is where we get into the way The Sacred Cards differs from the tabletop game. Some of the changes that the game makes to the formula, such as having 40 cards to a deck instead of the regular 60, are a good thing, allowing for card management to not be too overwhelming. Others are a bit odd, such as the Pokémon-esque type effects that mean underpowered cards can take out bigger ones if they have a type advantage. The list of changes goes on, from auto-triggered traps to summoning one monster on top of another, automatically sending the former to the graveyard.
By and large, however, I do find that this is a much more accessible version of Yu-Gi-Oh! that favors the player more often than not. In the tabletop game, there are distinct phases: Draw, Standby, Main Phase, Battle Phase, Main Phase 2, and End Phase. You can pretty much ignore that in The Sacred Cards, allowing you to use tactics that would be illegal or impossible. For example, about halfway through the game, I decided to look up a deck build. I used it for a while before mixing things up and making my own Fiend-type deck, but one thing I left in was Ancient Lamp. In the TTG, Ancient Lamp lets you Special Summon La Jinn the Mystical Genie of the Lamp during the Main Phase. In The Sacred Cards, you don’t even need to have La Jinn in your deck to summon him to the field.
Next, I want to briefly talk about how I played through The Sacred Cards. While I could have driven to my parents’ house, dug through my old stuff, picked up my Nintendo DS Lite, and blown the dust off my GBA copy of The Sacred Cards, I decided to emulate it instead. I recently picked up an R36S, reset it, and loaded up with only the games that have been sitting on my backlog, like this one, and I think it was a key part of why I enjoyed my time with it.
Don’t get me wrong, the fundamentals of everything I said above are functional in any version of the game. The difference here is that emulation allows a few benefits that expedite some of the slower (more grindy) aspects of the experience. For instance, there is the save mechanic. You save in The Sacred Cards by going home and interacting with your computer. This also means, no matter where you are in the game, if you lose, you will be sent back to that last save. With an emulator, you can drop a save whenever you want (even in the middle of a battle) so you can load back easily and try again without much fatigue.
This also meant I was more willing to tinker with a deck on my own instead of sticking to the one I found online, leading to a more satisfying victory in the end when Marik finally went down. I was okay with going in with an experimental card combo because it wouldn’t cost me as much time to try again if it didn’t work. Plus, thanks to speed-up, some of the more tedious parts of the game are also shaved off, making the game a bit leaner. I think this is a case of a game that, while I am sure I would have found it fine if I played it back in the day when my DS Lite was my main gaming console, I like it more now due to the way I experienced it.
The Sacred Cards took me about seven hours to beat, though I’m sure a lucky player more willing to engage with the battle systems could run through it faster. Initially, it was just a game I booted up to keep myself off my phone. A short distraction here and there. I picked it up occasionally throughout the day and chipped away at it instead of doomscrolling as one tends to do. However, by the end, I was quite amused by the narrative it presented. There are no real surprises here, and any Yu-Gi-Oh! fan can predict the broad strokes of the plot quite easily, but I think the game does a great job of tying the player into the pre-existing world. For a short moment at the end, it really did feel like you were a small part of that world and that your paths briefly crossed with Yugi Moto for one short summer.
If you want to experience Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards for yourself, you have a few options. You can pick up a copy on the Game Boy Advance and play it natively or emulate it. You can get Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection and play it on your Nintendo Switch or PC via Steam. While it is a $50 title, I do want to highlight that the collection features time rewind (letting you retry a play you might have botched), the ability to save anywhere (just like on an emulator), and a digital gallery featuring original game box art and manuals for preservation. For fans looking for more of a challenge than The Sacred Cards, you can try the sequel, Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction (2004), which is also included in the collection.
