Yu-Gi-Oh GX: Spirit Caller, also known as Duel Monsters: Spirit Summoner, is the first TV series “GX” video game, and the second Yu-Gi-Oh video game on the Nintendo DS. This new installment is definitely better than the first DS Yu-Gi-Oh game, Nightmare Troubadour, but is it better than the original GBA games? Maybe Konami should take two steps backwards.

The Yu-Gi-Oh franchise is all based around a Trading Card Game, featuring monsters with a certain attack, defense, and sometimes effect or skill. The object of the game is to destroy your opponent’s monsters, and to take down their “life points”. Life Points are a certain number describing how much “health” you have. You can take down these Life Points by attacking with your monster’s attack. There are also spell and trap cards to make the game more interesting and challenging.

Instead of playing as a memorable character from the TV Series, you create your own customizable character. The only bad thing about it is it would be hard to animate for each different character while your walking around, waiting to duel. Instead you are a “marker” who you drag around the screen. In the old GBA game series, you ran around as Yugi Moto, the character.

Gameplay is somewhat fun and entertaining, at least for a week. The card games are exciting to play, but very repetitive due to the fact all events happen by defeating the same guy three or four times. The graphics outside of battling are anime style drawn, looking exactly like on the series. Inside of battle, it is very scrappy and busy. The monsters look very choppy and messed up, and the game buttons are just a mess scattered around the place. Yu-Gi-Oh is too complex of a card game to fit on a small DS screen. This is the reason Pokemon stopped their Card Battle games way back in the GBC era. The music is well fit into the scenes, making scary music play at an abandoned dorm, and forest music when you play a magic card to make a forest environment. Much of the soundtrack is from the anime show.

The storyline of the game is very unclear, and hard to play through. The only way to encounter all of the story mode events, is to either get help from someone else, watch the GX series (because all of the events in the game are exactly like how the TV series progressed), or randomly walk around and duel until you trigger an event.

Overall this game is OK, but not the best Konami Yu-Gi-Oh game ever. After a few hours of playing, the whole game becomes repetitive and meaningless. Unless you are a die hard Yugi or GX fan, I would suggest spending the $30.00 or less on real cards, or buy Yu-Gi-Oh 5D’s Stardust Accelarator: WC 2009. There the graphics get even worse, but at least there’s more than dueling: it mixes Yu-Gi-Oh with an RPG, and Mario Kart.

5.8