I recently got a new gaming laptop for school and have decided to use it for, well, gaming. Steam recently had a Konami sale including titles from Castlevania and Yu-Gi-Oh!. I have played Magic: The Gathering for about seventeen years but had played Yu-Gi-Oh! before that. I had started rewatching the original anime recently and because of that and the Konami sale, I decided to try playing Yu-Gi-Oh! again.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution (which I’ll refer to as Yu-Gi-Oh! Link from here on) is a trading card game and an interesting experience. The gameplay allows you to play through almost every major battle from each series. In addition to being able to use custom built decks, players can use the historical deck. The historical deck is built nearly card for card as it was in the show. The gameplay itself was pretty self-explanatory.

Although, when you don’t play a card game for over a decade and a half, you tend to be behind the times. I noticed this when I tried a challenge match and got washed out of it on turn five. I saw a bunch of cards moving, and I looked at my wife and said, “I have no idea what is happening right now.” It is a weird feeling to play a title that has passed you by.

I had not played a Yu-Gi-Oh! game since the Game Boy Advance or Playstation 2. At that time, they were plagued by weird bugs that would cause your creatures to be destroyed randomly. It made me wonder if we are ever going to get a Magic: The Gathering version of Yu-Gi-Oh! Link. But Magic: The Gathering has not really invested in a show like many other contemporary card titles which has caused a lack of character recognition within casual fans.

Additionally, Magic: The Gathering is so much more complicated and vast than any other card game. Yu-Gi-Oh! came to America in 2002 and has about 11,145 cards in their worldwide trading card database. Magic: The Gathering, meanwhile, started in 1991, and has over 27,000 cards if alternate arts and printings are not counted. That is a lot of cards and considering how Magic: The Gathering interactions can get complicated, the closest we might get to a Magic: The Gathering version of Yu-Gi-Oh! Link might just have to be MTG: Arena.

Card titles as video games offer potential players a great service. I paid ten dollars and can play with Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. If I wanted to play the decks I have on the game it would cost me over a thousand dollars and would be dated beyond practical play. They offer a great way for people to test a card game or develop skills without dropping obscene amounts of money. Magic: The Gathering is well known as being prohibitively expensive.

This was about as fresh of a look at a game as I can have. It makes me appreciate Steam sales that allow people to purchase titles for a great price. This gaming laptop has allowed me to play titles I would not have been able to on just my consoles. The laptop should also make it easier for me to write my Fresh Look column in the future, and I’m hoping to get some more reviews done. And if you were keeping track in my last few columns and wondering about my progress, I still have not beaten Final Fantasy XIII.