Ah, my youth. Has it really been so long now that I’m only 32 years old and am fondly looking back on my early 20s and calling it my “youth”? Hmmm, perhaps I need to get out more. But I suppose as you get older it’s easier to look back in increments of 10 years in the past instead of 20 or more. Or not. I’m a strange one in that I have a photographic memory, yet it tends to be selective. At times I can tell you things I was doing at three years old easier than I can recall what I was doing at 27.
Anyway, before this turns into a history lesson about yours truly, back in the early ’90s I was turned onto the Magic: The Gathering card battle game. Everyone I knew was playing it, and for me it was the first kind of geeky game that wasn’t video game-based yet also wasn’t Dungeons & Dragons (or something of that ilk) that I had ever gotten into and actually enjoyed. Much money was spent on extra packs of cards for the damn thing. It was an addiction. And my collection wound up being a modest deck falling just shy of 700 cards before I finally gave it up and sold it all on eBay. But I had friends who had collections that numbered in the thousands, their lust for Magic was so insatiable.
Of course, the video game market eventually had to get its hands on this craze. And of course, I went right out and bought the Magic: The Gathering game on the original PlayStation. But the game sucked because it wasn’t at all like the real card game. You didn’t take a turn and watched what happened. Instead you kept taking turns and things kept on happening over and over unless you re-clicked on your cards to make them behave differently. It was all very confusing and not much fun. Closer to the real thing was a PC, but it was dulled by cheesy FMV actors and things of that sort that plagued many a PC CD-ROM game back then.
So basically if you wanted the real thrill you had to play the actual game. And of course, there had been dozens of other card battle games that sprang up in Magic‘s wake that tried to capitalize on the craze. And of course this royal bloodline led to such kiddy variations in the form of the hopelessly annoying Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! franchises that are still cranking it out. Magic itself is still going on and on, too, but I haven’t played since I gave it up long ago and couldn’t tell you a thing about it anymore.
So the other week I was in Target once again and sifting through their clearance game pile when I happened across Duel Masters. It had originally been marked down to ten dollars but had been discounted even more to $4.98. I turned the box over to see some goofy Anime characters duking it out with cards and their respective creatures and figured that five bucks was worth taking a chance on, and that I had easily blown much more money on many other games that wound up getting resold.
Now I knew nothing previously of Duel Masters and was hoping like hell that it wasn’t going to be another annoying Anime thing that was rooted in Pokemon-style goofiness. I’m not an Anime fan, save for the wacky Totally Spies! cartoon, and I’ve certainly never been a fan of Pokemon. That’s my nephew’s generation’s game, not this guy’s. No, sir.
The basic premise of Duel Masters is that there is some wacky parallel universe where the creatures from the playing cards actually exist. Some bad guy types want some kind of crazy control of these things like they always do, but their plans go awry and pieces of various creature cards have been scattered about. It’s up to you to find these pieces and restore harmony once again before the baddies do it first. There’s also a race of elders who are imploring you to get busy on this task, etc.
So you get to pick from a selection of kiddy characters that are each somehow directly related to the greater inherent magic within this whole enterprise. These big-eyed wonders represent fire, water, light, dark, and nature, much like the base mana elements in Magic. And if you play Duel Masters in Story Mode, you can play through each of the characters and unlock all the cards along the way. Perhaps the weirdest thing about this title is that playing Duel Masters is all these kids seem to do. So in essence this game is art imitating life imitating art… or something like that. “Everyone’s playing it, Mom,” seems to be the underlying theme here. Hell, even the librarian is well versed in dueling, it’s not just the geeks at the card shop! Oh yeah, you’ll be visiting the card shop a whole lot to duel and buy new cards and… man, it’s just like I remember back in the good old days!
And much to my surprise and delight, Duel Masters is just like playing Magic way back when as well. It features a nice, easy to understand in-game tutorial that allows you to skip the game manual completely. Once I got through that, it was all second nature. In Story Mode, I picked Rebecca who was mainly versed in the water elementals portion of the game deck. Soon enough, I was kicking other little punks around with my mad duelist skills! Winning their cards, adding them to my deck and making more powerful decks to further my cause!
I just couldn’t stop playing…
And I’m still playing the damn thing. Duel Masters is obviously one of those overlooked gems that got lost in the shuffle. For someone like me who gave up dumping money into the actual card games, this beauty is an addiction untold. Except I’m telling you now, of course. Atari and High Voltage have made the most perfect card battle game on a console or computer system yet. And that’s saying quite a bit. The nice thing is that they just kept it to the core essentials that make the real deal so appealing. No fancy control twists or dulled-out gameplay after a few rounds. Just simple, addictive turn-based action that will have you spending hours at a time in front of the good old TV.
Duel Masters also features a regular Duel Mode as well as an Extreme Mode that is a continuous train wreck of card playing madness. Perhaps the nicest thing about playing against the console is the AI itself. You can beat one character like mad one time around and then you can go back later if you like and play again and get your ass handed to you. That’s a nice touch, making Duel Masters unpredictable, lending it infinite replayability.
So there you have it. A five dollar game that turned out to be one of the best and most fun I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing. Thank God I’m older now, though. In my “youth” not so long ago, I probably would have started shelling out for real Duel Masters cards and draining my bank account faster than I could handle. Hey, wait. I just remembered something. This PlayStation 2 version also came with a little booster pack of real cards. Hmmm. Someone take my credit card away, please.