The second Duel Masters game to hit the Game Boy Advance, Kaijudo Showdown builds upon the solid basis of its predecessor and offers the same basic game play integrated into a better overall game.
A plethora of new features and improvements justify buying this sequel if you are a fan of the original, however the core of the game play, duelling, remains largely unchanged. There is now a choice of five different characters, each corresponding to a different kind of deck: fire, light, darkness, nature and water. After choosing your character the game kicks off with a short introduction. The story starts with your brother departing on an archaeological dig, he gives his Duel Masters collection to you as a farewell gift, and a pocket "gizmo" to stay in touch. The Gizmo doubles as the in game menu system offering stats, deck management, cool stuff, link, options, save/quit.
The stats option gives you an overview of the number of unique cards you have collected alongside your credits, passes, wins, losses and total play time.
Deck management does exactly what it says on the tin and allows you to manage your DM decks. You can carry up to three decks which you then manage here. One of these decks is the "active deck" which is used during battles. With 300 cards now available to collect and play with the task of collecting every card will last you for hours alone, fortunately you can link-up and trade cards with friends to get a little extra help. The link option also allows you to duel against your friends, a refreshing change from computer opponents and far easier and more portable than duelling with the real cards. Unfortunately the Nintendo DS does not support this so DS owners lose a great deal of what makes the game worth playing. After all being able to trade and battle with friends is what Duel Masters is all about.
The "Cool Stuff" option offers Gizmo Mail where you can read messages from other characters, G-books which provides helpful information, and Giz-site which gives you access to the Duellists Weekly fanzine. A great effort has been made to make the Duel Masters game a more involving and complete experience to better emulate playing the real game, trading the real cards and managing your decks. Of course with the whole hobby packed neatly into one Game Boy Advance cartridge (about half the size of 10 cards held together) it makes playing on the bus, around the house, and on your own a lot more practical and a lot easier.
“Link” gives you access to the aforementioned multi-player features if you are using a GBA. “Options” and “Save” are self-explanatory. Again, Duel Masters only allows you to save one single game to the cart, meaning any other family members or friends will have to buy their own copy to play without overwriting, or playing with, your save. Shame.
Back to the game itself. Just like the original the actual duelling game play is translated very effectively from the card game. The interface changes depending on which element the current player is using. The duelling system is turn based, requiring the player to choose a card to add to their mana and then summon monsters and cast spells if they have set aside enough mana cards of the same type. Each monster card has a summoning cost, a power value, and many have additional details describing what the monster can do in battle. Spell cards are similar only the spell effect is described and they have no power rating.
The duelling rules are easy to learn but hard to master, the game makes the learning and playing experiences easier by methodically going through the steps an restricting you to valid moves.
Graphics-wise Kaijudo Showdown is a slight improvement over the original, although this type of game is truly centred around giving you a way to play Duel Masters by yourself against computer opponents.
The rudimentary story line is nothing more than the glue which holds it together and brings the depth of card trading, competitions and a sense of achievement or progression. Of course many people will play the game through if just to collect every last card, this does not change the fact that Kaijudo Showdown is a fantastic “pick-up-and-play” game for those short bus journeys.
With it's tempting offer of more cards to play with and more opponents to beat Kaijudo Showndown is worth getting whether you bought the original or not. It is not possible to create an add-on for a GBA game, so Kaijudo Showdown makes a very pleasing effort to stand on its own as a full game – even though it is essentially just offering you more cards to practise and play with. The Gizmo is a nice touch and a great way of blending the in-game menu in with the game, and the developers have gone the extra mile to provide better picture representations of cards in their descriptions, and a whole new set of interface graphics when duelling.
Overall, Kaijudo Showdown is certainly a significant improvement over the original, something that not all sequels turn out to be. Any fan of Duel Masters should not be without it, but as more of us switch to the Nintendo DS the lack of wireless multi-player cuts out a significant portion of the game – fortunately the many non-player characters available to battle and trade even manages to make up for this.
Philip Howard
