Duel Masters: Sempai Legends is designed to appeal to gamers who also play the collectible card game – Duel Masters even comes with five cards in the box for your “real world” deck. That being said, if you’re one of those people already into Duel Masters then you’ll love this game. If you are not in that category, then you may find the game to be a bit on the tedious side and one that does not serve as a good introduction to learning how to play the card-based original game.

It's my party and I'll cry if I want to...

Duel Masters gives you plenty of opportunity to take on computer-controlled opponents in deck duels. It also lets you manage your deck so that you can customize it to fit your strategy and style of play. And in case you need something to provide you with the motivation to play one duel after another, the game includes an RPG-like storyline as well.

In the game, you play a young duelist who awakens from bed on his birthday. Your primary concern, of course, is the quantity and quality of presents that you’ll be receiving that day. After a jaunt around the neighborhood partaking in one-liner, duel-obsessed conversations with the locals, you return home for your party and receive a super-cool card for your deck as a present. Unfortunately an evil man appears and steals your card just after you receive it, and the game becomes your quest to retrieve your card. This involves enlisting the aid of a super detective who will only help you a little bit at a time, and each time only after you go off and capture a medal at a Duel Masters tournament. As you make your way between the various towns where the tournaments are held, you’ll run into other duelists who will challenge you to duels to give you a chance to win more cards for your deck. If you haven’t guessed yet, you spend most of your time with the game playing duels. And like I mentioned earlier, if you’re a Duel Masters fan you’ll love it and if you’re not it will certainly become tedious.

If you’ve played Magic: The Gathering, then you will be able to catch on to dueling in Duel Masters in very little time as the games are very similar. You have a deck of cards that include power-generating mana cards, spells, and creatures to summon for battle. Although you can customize your deck before a game, the deck is shuffled and you can only hold five cards in your hand at a time which adds a chance element to the duels. On your turn you can place your mana cards into play to generate spell power for you or you can tap the power of your existing mana cards to cast spells and summon creatures. The spells are divided into a number of disciplines signified by their color – for example, black cards tend towards dark or evil magic – and you need to draw mana to cast spells or summon creatures from a card with of the same color. Ensuring that you have the right mix of card colors to power and cast your spells is part of the art of deck building. The object of the game is to summon creatures and cast spells to destroy the five “shield” cards of the other player and then to hit the other player directly. Each creature has its own special abilities and summoning the right creatures to stop your opponent while preventing your opponent’s creatures from getting through to harm you is a big part of the game’s strategy.

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