Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel Review For Xbox Series X

Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is an online card game developed by Konami. I've played an unhealthy amount of time on this game; at one point playing it for around 40 hours straight, and many more hours outside of that session.

This review will explore the various aspects of this game from Game Modes, Difficulty, gameplay, accessibility, and overall impression. This game is a 1v1 online video game, So here is my review of Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel for the Xbox Series X and PS5 as I’ve played it on both and they run extremely similarly.

Game Modes:

This game offers 3 main game modes with a 4th one coming soon but I’ll focus on the 3 released and give my thoughts on each one, they are:

Ranked Duel - Ranked Duels are pretty much the competitive scene in this game where you go up tiers in the season the more you win all the way up to platinum tier 1. Personally, I enjoy this game mode quite a bit, however, there is a problem when it comes to turn length, that it’s way too long in my opinion. You'll see people in this game take ages for their turn because they play like 30 cards in one turn. However, for duels where people have normal decks, it’s a lot more fun.

Free Duel - Free Duel allows you to set up a private or public lobby for players to join and spectate, some people will have larger rooms so multiple people can have separate tables and vs each other, whilst others will set up rooms for only 2 people so they can play with their friends. I find this game mode to be the one I play the most so I can vs my brother or my friends. The lobby seems to last a long time as well, there were times I was able to leave the lobby and turn off my PS5, I was able to play the next day with the setup lobby ready to go right off the bat. I think this is probably the best game mode of them all because you can learn to play and refine your decks with the people you enjoy playing with.

Solo - Solo mode is basically the “Campaign” of this game, where you duel through various different themes of decks and unlock each deck as you go along, for example, if you do the “Monarch” solo mode you’ll unlock the deck shown in that mode after you complete a certain amount of it. I personally think that this game mode is pretty fun, however, you are forced to use the themed decks to unlock things even if you don’t like or aren’t good at that theme deck at all. It would be preferable to be able to use the decks you create to go through these campaigns however that’s just not how it is.

Difficulty:

This game is pretty easy overall to learn, however, to get good at this game takes a lot of time learning the endless possibilities you have available in deck construction and the many different things you can do, which is why as you play you’ll tend to refine your decks as you go along, but this game can be enjoyed by people of all ages.

Gameplay:

The basic premise of this game is you have a deck between 40-60 cards of monster cards, spell cards and trap cards with varying abilities. Each player starts off with 8000 life points and the aim of the game is to reduce their life points to 0, there are other ways of winning such as specific sets of cards giving that effect or if you make the other player run out of cards in their deck but overall most people opt with the 0 life points option. I personally love playing this game, have done so ever since I was a kid and many many others feel this way as well about Yu-Gi-Oh!

Accessibility:

In terms of accessibility options this game is extremely limited, and the only options you can really change is the volume of the game, the card text size which is a really good option for a card game to have, and turning vibrations on and off, surprisingly this game does not offer a text to speech option. But hopefully, more accessibility options can be added for this game in future updates but I guess we will have to see.

Overall Impression:

Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is a fantastic game and probably the best one that has come out in a long long time, fans of the Yu-Gi-Oh! The Power of Chaos trilogy will enjoy this game thoroughly as it has a lot of the same feel. Hopefully, in the future, they include more visual effects for more cards and find new and exciting game modes such as 2v2 duels for example. I will definitely continue to play this game for a long while I believe because it’s extremely fun and save data is transferred across all consoles. I think they definitely need to reduce the time it takes for turns by quite a lot and honestly believe the exodia cards should be banned so certain players can’t win on turn 1 but that’s just me. But overall this game is really great.

And there you have it, my Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duels review for Xbox Series X/playstation 5. Tell us your thoughts in the comments below. And if you have any questions about other aspects of this game that I haven’t touched on then they can be answered in the comment section as well

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