Pros: Decent adaptation of the card game
Cons: Hard to get new cards, extremely frustrating and repetitive
The bottom line: Forbidden Memories is a good adaptation of the card game, but some serious design flaws keep this decent game from being a great game.
Yeah, so I'm a nerd. I'm 23, and I still watch Saturday morning cartoons. Pokemon is the obvious choice, but following my perennial favorite one Saturday morning last fall was a new Japanese cartoon named Yu-Gi-Oh!, and I've been sucked in ever since. Cartoons based on games (be they video or card) seem to find a place with me, so it's no surprise that I ended up becoming a rabid Yu-Gi-Oh! fan, quickly embracing my inner 12-year-old.

Naturally, like my prepubescent addicted counterparts, the cartoon only whetted my appetite. I wanted more. I wanted to play the card game. Of course, being a recovering Magic addict as well as a rabid game enthusiast, I was hesitant to get myself sucked into yet another collectible card game. Magic sucked away nearly all of my high school job's income, and I may be making more now, but I also need to be able to afford the rent on a monthly basis now. Based on that, I chose to go with the next best thing to the actual card game: Yu-Gi-Oh!: Forbidden Memories.

Basically, what Forbidden Memories provides is a slightly modified version of the actual card game with a storyline added in the background to narrate your progression to tougher and tougher opponents. The general idea of the card game is that you line up some creature cards in front of you, your opponent does the same, and the creatures pair off in an attempt to take the other out and hopefully do some damage to the opposing player in the process. This continues until one player or the other runs out of life points or cannot draw a card when they are supposed to. As far as collectible card games go, Yu-Gi-Oh isn't breaking any real boundaries.

Your role in the game is as the Egyptian prince who has been trapped within Yugi's Millennium Puzzle that he wears around his neck. Through Yugi, you must battle through a series of opponents in order to gather together all of the Millennium Items, which will allow you to return to your own time and defeat the evil priest who has taken over your lands.

That description is almost making Forbidden Memories seem like an RPG, though, which it really isn't. Unlike the Pokemon Trading Card Game for Game Boy, Forbidden Memories is extremely linear. Each duel leads directly to the next, and the story is contained in little snippets of dialogue that break up the matches. The emphasis is really on the card game itself, where it should be, and the story is really insignificant almost to the point that it gets in the way of the actual game.

Speaking of the game itself, it takes place primarily in two modes, Campaign and Free Duel. Campaign allows you to duel to advance the aforementioned story, and Free Duel allows you to challenge any opponent you've already beaten to a rematch. This seems OK at first, until you realize that you're spending a lot more time in Free Duel than in Campaign mode. The reason for this is that you're started off with a rather weak set of cards at the outset, and are expected to improve your deck in order to advance.

That wouldn't be an unreasonable expectation were it not a nearly Herculean task to gather the cards necessary to build a decent deck. Regardless of who you duel and how well you do, you get exactly one new card per duel victory, which is picked at random. Since a duel can take anywhere from five to twenty minutes, this is extremely slow going. There is one other way to get cards, which is be cashing in Star Chips that you earn through dueling to buy cards. the actual mechanism by which this is done is interesting, since you need a password printed on an actual card from the real card game (or, in my case, listed on the internet) to buy the card you want. Of course, since the maximum number of star chips you can get is five, and any decent card costs at least several hundred Star Chips, this isn't really a feasible way to improve your deck, either. At least if you could cash in Star Chips for packs of random cards, that might makes things a bit easier to swallow.

There is one other mechanism that Forbidden Memories features that does level the playing field a bit, in the form of fusions. Basically, what you can do is attempt to play two or more cards simultaneously, and, if they are compatible, they'll combine to make one stronger card. The net result is that even a deck of weenies creatures can still produce some heavy hitters. (I'll note that this feature is available in the paper card game as well, but requires a special card to activate; you can attempt a fusion with any two cards in Forbidden Memories.)

However, there are several big problems with this particular system. One is that there's no rhyme or reason to how creatures combine; the best you can do is trail and error, keeping track of what combines with what. The problem with that is that, if you're wrong, then you lose all but the last card you selected. Of course, the computer players have the entire list of fusions available to them and use it very much to their advantage, as if they needed one. Thus, without an exhaustive list of what combines with what, playing the game after the first few matches becomes nothing but an exercise in frustration.

Given all that, the general flow of the game becomes thus: Play Campaign until you lose. Play Free Duel for an hour or two to get some cards. Repeat. As an adult (or at least as close as I'm going to get), I got incredibly frustrated with the game, almost to the point of having airborne controllers. I can only imagine how frustrated an eleven-year-old would get with this game.

Audio-visually, there's not much to write home about. Everything's kept extremely simple. There are a couple of background music tracks that play continuously through the matches. They're not offensive, but if you decided to play a CD instead, you wouldn't be missing much. As for graphics, they're functional and not much more. The full card art for all the cards is available upon inspection, and the shrunken down versions (for cards in your hand) is easily recognizable. I'll note that there is an option in-game to see the two involved creatures battle in 3D. It's a novelty the first time, but given that the actual time it takes is so long, and that the graphics are below Pokemon Stadium quality, this is not a feature you'll be rushing to use all the time. The games take long enough as it is.

In all, Forbidden Memories is a decent substitute for the card game if you want to keep yourself to spending a finite amount of money on Yu-Gi-Oh. It is considerably more frustrating than the real thing, but can be fun nonetheless, if you're willing to put in some up-front effort in figuring out fusion combos. If you're over the age of twelve, you might be better off passing or renting. As far as parents are concerned, though, it might be a bit much for the kids as far as frustration goes, but if they need their Yu-Gi-Oh fix, and you're not willing to go into debt over it, then Forbidden Memories is the next best thing.