Yu-Gi-Oh-No!: Yu-Gi-Oh!:Forbidden Memories makes no sense
Aptly named Yu-Gi-Oh! game feels like a fever dream from my childhood, a forbidden memory you might say.
At the turn of the millennia, Pokémon was massive. Card games, anime, video games and a rocking theme song.
But a challenger was coming, Yu-Gi-Oh!: Duel Monsters came out in the US alongside a card game that blew up. Pokémon was not standing alone at the top any longer.
In March 2002, Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories came out on PS1 the first of the Yu-Gi-Oh! video games to be released in North America to combat the booming Pokémon games.
I would count my cards while watching the show every day after school, and was hyped when I found out a game was coming out for my PlayStation that would allow me to play the game just like Yugi and the boys on TV.
What I got was a game that played nothing like the rules of the card game with mechanics so complicated that even on a replay during college I had trouble figuring it out.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories takes place in ancient Egypt and modern-day Japan in the universe of the TV show. For the first half, you are the pharaoh fighting off an evil force within your kingdom, and in the second half you are playing as Yugi in a Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament.
The mechanics of this game are so different from the card game that I would not really even call them the same game. To list a few, the video game requires you to have 40 cards and only 40 cards, there is a fusion mechanic that revolves around a typing that does not exist in the card game, and there are type bonuses while attacking and defending like in Pokémon that does not exist in the card game.
The fusion mechanic in this game was dictated by a random group of symbols assigned to each card. To fuse, you would number each card and they would try to fuse in sequence. If the fusion failed, this game was brutal, you lost those cards and had nothing to play. Especially if you tried to fuse more than one card. Cards one and two may fuse, but if card three doesn’t fuse with the result, you lose everything.
Again the computer had an upper hand with knowing how to fuse cards, and which ones fused together.
It truly made absolutely no sense and winning against the computer decks was an absolute grind. Coming by new cards was very difficult and building a deck with any type of cohesion was another task in itself.
This game came with two discs and the entire game was on the first disc. The second disc was the manual to the game because it needed a training manual to figure out.
One major plus that this game did have was, during the attack phase, if you were to press square on the controller the game would play a battle cinematic where the monsters truly fought just like in the show.
Unfortunately, without using the manual, the player is never prompted to use it. So if you did want to see the animatics, you’d either need to get lucky or care deeply enough to play the manual disc.
This battle animation mechanic made it absolutely worth it to me as a child to lose over and over again in a game I had no grasp of the rules in. To this day, I have never completed it, but that battle cinematic part of this game still stands out as a shining gem. The fact that it mimicked how the show worked was everything to me.
You could also enter your own cards in the game if you had the code available, but you still had to buy them from stars you earned from winning...one at a time.
The story of this game is really non-existent or completely convoluted, so this is all I am going to really say about it. There were just back-to-back duels, talking to Joey Wheeler and collecting cards. What more could you ask for?
This is not Yu-Gi-Oh! in really any way but it is still incredibly fun, and it is the beginning of the Yu-Gi-Oh! video games, which went on to be a great series on Game Boy Advance and other consoles (shoutout Duelist of Roses, Eternal Duelist and The Sacred Cards).
It is not a game I would really recommend anyone play, but it is a hilarious touchstone in an incredibly popular IP that if you ever get a chance to try, please do. If you beat it, or even really figure out how it works, please let me know.