Reviewed: December 7, 2004
Reviewed by: Mat Houghton
Publisher
Konami
Developer
Konami JPN
Released: October 26, 2004
Genre: Strategy
Players: 4
ESRB: Everyone
1
2
2
2
2.0
Supported Features:
Can you beat a franchise to death with a single title? If not Konami comes awfully close with Yu-Gi-Oh: Destiny Board Traveler. Take all of your familiar Yu-Gi-Oh characters and turn them into pieces on a giant board game. Then make them roll dice that will determine not only how many spaces that they move, but also which monsters they fight with. Then throw in special powers for each character and let them duke it out to see who comes up the winner. Sound fun? Well, it’s not.
There isn’t any. It’s as simple as that. Konami put together a GBA party game, much like Super Mario Party or any other games of that ilk, based on Yu-Gi-Oh and then stopped there. All you can do is select which side of a die each monster is assigned to and then hit a button to roll the dice. Everything else is automatic.
Yeah, you can use your special power to mess with the other players, but that is in no way controlling. So you have one button to roll the die and then you just watch as events unfold. If that wasn’t bad enough you have to sit through all of the other player’s turns too so even if you are playing single player you have to watch through every step of every other computer player’s turn.
Just in case you’re holding out that the whole idea is strategy in what face of the die you put what monster on and when you use your powers, stop holding your breath. The die is only distinguishable by one face being the star face and every other one being a regular face. In essence you have no idea what monster you are going to face, what you’re going to fight it with, or even if you are going to fight at all because you don’t know what space you are going to land on.
On top of that there is a die roll before every combat that could either help or hurt you, and even then it usually isn’t enough to turn the tide of battle in your favor.
You’d think that a title based on a card game would at least go to the effort of making the cards look good, but again Konami would have gotten one over on you. The individual characters are distinguishable, and headshots are pretty good, but after that everything just deteriorates into a jaggy, pixilated mush. I could produce something better looking with Paint and a Heroin addict going cold turkey.
Yeah, if the rest of the title is so low budget that it’s barely worth the plastic the chip is housed in do you really think they went to any effort as far as the sound is concerned?
The one thing that I will give them is that the little phrases the characters say, mostly “My turn”, do sound like the voice actors from the cartoon, so there is at least some nod to coherency and is an appreciated touch, but that’s like finding an M&M in a pile of crap. Yeah they’re good, but do you really want to dig it out of there and eat it?
How long would you play a game that you have no control over, looks like it was produced for an Intellivision, and sounds mildly more appealing than white noise?
Yeah, I didn’t think so. Now realize the one flaw built into all the GBA link cable compatible games. If you want to play it with your friends everyone has to own a copy of the game. Now how likely is it that more than one person is unfortunate to end up with this in their system?
For the love of everything that you hold dear about your children do not buy them this for their GBA if they like Yu-Gi-Oh. Buy them cards instead, at least they’ll get half way decent art work and will have other kids to play with.
