YMMV / Yu-Gi-Oh! Nightmare Troubadour

• Awesome Music:
  • The Shadow Game music is awesome and frightening.
  • Card as Blade, the shadow duelist ambush music.
  • Duel of Destiny, the boss battle music.
  • Fantasy Dinner, the battle music for Noah and Gozaburo Kaiba.
  • Victory at Hand, the Beginner Tournament duel theme.
  • Risk Your Pride, the Expert Tournament duel theme.
• Difficulty Spike: After you beat the Beginner's Cup the game gets hard fast, especially in the boss rush before the Expert Cup.
• Heartwarming Moments: Several moments with Serenity invoke this. When a player meets her for the first time she will tell him/her that she started dueling like her brother. She also help the player get ready to the final play off and is enthusiastic about getting better as a duelist like her brother. She can ask the player to trade for certain cards and if the player accepts she cheerfully says that Joey will be jealous of her trade. When the player gets a draw against her, she smiles and tells you "Yay! It's a draw! I'll keep practicing so our next duel will be even more fun." Her enthusiasm also comes through in her letter to the player, with her expressing her joy over learning how to duel and how she can't wait to duel the player again.
• Game-Breaker:
  • This game was made back when the creation of the forbidden/ban list for the actual card game was still new. As a result, certain cards that weren't on the forbidden list at the time are still legal to use in the game, meaning any card that's a game breaker in the actual card game at the time, and still has its effects in this game, is a Game-Breaker here as well.
  • Given the time the game came out, Goat Control is a viable deck that can be pulled off in the game. For those unfamiliar with it, Goat Control revolves around using Metamorphosis on a Scape Goat token to summon Thousand-Eyes Restrict, which allows one to lock down the opponent while using the high-powered cards at the time to beat the opponent into the ground, all the while using hand control cards to keep the opponent from countering. While you won't be able to get the necessary cards to pull this off until the late game, once you do, you've pretty much won, as most of the A.I.s in the game won't know what to do in response.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • D.D. cards. Nearly every mid-to-late game duelist runs these things, and they're all damn Man-Eater Bugs on steroids. They all share the effect that the monster that destroys them gets banished, which will force you to run cards like Lightning Vortex in order to deal with them. Thankfully, the A.I. is merciful enough not to suicide bomb them into your strongest monster on the field, but they often end up dragging out duels far longer than they have any right being, and can allow the A.I. to stall long enough to get their combo strategy going and possibly turning the match around.
  • Scapegoat. Like D.D. above, all mid-to-late game duelist seem to run this card, and for the most part, it only seems to exist to draw the duel out longer than necessary. It creates four goat tokens on the field if you have no monsters on it, and nine times out of ten, you won't have more than three monsters out on the field at a time. To top it off, it has a nasty tendency to stall long enough for the A.I. to get their strategy going, which can be massively frustrating if you were one attack away from winning.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • While Joey's monsters aren't too difficult to deal with, his die rolls and traps are. He uses cards like Dangerous Machine-Type 6, Fairy Box, and Needle Wall, all of which can either destroy your monsters or reduce their attack points to 0. Winning against him can boil down entirely to luck.
  • Rebecca uses a stall/burn deck that works around Gravity Bind, which keeps any Level 4 or above monsters from attacking. Meanwhile, her Level 4 monsters' effects still stack, meaning she can use Fire Princess and Solemn Wishes to wipe you out, on top of the number of cards that slowly increase her LP as the turns go by. Rebecca also has Injection Fairy Lily, a Level 3 card that can increase her attack to 3400 at the cost of 2000 LP per battle when her deck is built around gaining LP. She also runs D.D. monsters, which makes attacking her face down monsters a very risky process, and also has an uncanny ability to topdeck into Lightning Vortex to wipe your monster zone clean. She's unlikely to beat you after you get your mid-game deck going, but all of this results in a very long, very tedious battle almost every time you face her. She's also the most common level three mid-game duelist alongside Ishizu, who you need to beat a certain number of times to advance the plot.
• Good Bad Bugs: While the packs are supposed to be random, certain packs of each set have a higher chance of giving certain cards than other packs in the set. As such, this allows one to Save Scum by buying all the packs of a set, resetting until you find the pack that gives the specific card you're looking for, then reset and repeatedly buy that specific pack until you get the card you're looking for. While it's a time consuming process, it helps save on DP for other cards and speeds up the flow of the game considerably.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Shadow duelists ambush you at night when you're moving elsewhere, with a creepy laugh sound effect and the screen shaking. If you fail to defeat them, your soul is sent to the Shadow Realm and you get a Game Over. This is even worse if you hadn't saved beforehand.
  • The duel with Gozaburo Kaiba is at the end of a long, difficult Boss Rush and gives you 20 turns to win before you automatically die. The sound effects for Final Countdown do not help.
  • The shadow duelist ambush music is called "Card as Blade" and features a Heartbeat Soundtrack.
  • If you win against Joey when Marik controls him, the Game Over message is nothing but his screams.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • You have to get cards through buying packs instead of being able to buy specific cards themselves, making getting cards you want a Luck-Based Mission. There are ways of Save Scumming for specific cards you want, but there's still a big element of randomness to it. As a result, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour to get your desired cards, and thus makes the early game a very slow experience.
  • Certain rulings in the game don't match the actual card game, which can cause some nasty Damn You, Muscle Memory! moments. A notable example is Metamorphosis. In the actual cardgame, Fusion monsters summoned through this can be summoned in either face-up attack or defense position, but in this game, they can only ever be summoned in attack position this way. This makes some strategies that might rely on a fusion monster being in defense mode completely worthless, since you can't switch them into defense position until after your opponent's next turn after summoning it.
  • Duelists will, over time, begin to unregister you if you haven't played them in a while. In a game where there are 23 registered duelists, multiple Shadow Duelists that can interrupt you, and a number of filler NPCs who just happen to have Duel Disks, it makes it a little bit harder to keep tabs on who everyone is when you're searching.
  • The Level Up system attracts quite a bit of ire in this game and Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Spirit Caller, its spiritual sequel, due to locking out most of the really good cards until late game, forcing the player to put up with a lot of "pack filler trash" until they finally have access to the packs in question. This is not helped by the amount of Forced Level-Grinding the game puts upon the player in the later stages of the game.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Despite the risk, Shadow Games can be very addictive as the 30 extra points from winning a duel makes grinding for experience easier.
• That One Boss:
  • Ryou Bakura is very tough early on, as he uses an Ectoplasmer/Call of the Mummy combo that lets him tribute monsters to damage you directly while keeping a fresh supply of monsters on his field to attack you directly. His second deck uses Vampire Lord and Patrician of Darkness, who can remove monsters from your deck and control which cards you attack. He also has Despair from the Dark, which has 2800 Attack Points, 3000 Defense Points, and can summon itself to the field if discarded from the hand or deck to the graveyard by an opponent's card effect, making mill cards like Needle Worm highly dangerous.
  • The boss rush against Leichter/Big 5, Mokuba, Noah, and Gozaburo. Big 5 uses a deck centered around Satellite Cannon, which is an annoying one-Tribute monster that cannot be destroyed in battle by any monster Level 7 or lower, and increases its attack by 1000 every turn, which then drops back to 0 once it attacks. Big 5 will keep Satellite Cannon in Defense position until it has several thousand attack, and then he will kill you with battle damage. If you manage to defeat Big 5, you are faced with an even tougher opponent: Noah, with his fairies. Noah plays many powerful fairies and backs them up with The Sanctuary In The Sky, which eliminates all battle damage with battles attacking a Fairy-type monster. The major problem with Noah, though, is his ritual monster Shinato, King of a Higher Plane. This guy has a whopping 3300 ATK/3000 DEF. So you'll just Set monsters until you get something to kill him? When he destroys a Defense position monster, you take Effect damage equal to that monster's attack. Gozaburo suffers from poor AI, but his duel is timed so you instantly lose in 20 turns, meaning you must defeat him in 10 turns or less. If he uses a Scapegoat card, you can lose anywhere from 1 to 4 turns.
  • The final possessed Joey fight is hard because you can't win or lose; you must force a draw using Ring of Destruction or Self-Destruct Button, both very situational cards.
  • Yami Marik is a difficult fight on his own, but is made even more difficult with how you must win using your Egyptian God Card—who is vulnerable to traps like Mirror Force. His deck revolves around debilitating traps and monsters with strange effects.
  • Yami Bakura. In his first deck, he uses a Destiny Board combo, which results in an instant loss after five turns if you can't destroy it. His second deck uses Dark Necrofear, a very annoying monster who's summoned by tributing three Fiends in the Graveyard. Her effect is that, once destroyed by a monster or card effect, she controls one of your monsters. And he has more than one. He also uses cards like Night Assailant, Bark of Dark Ruler, Mirror Force, and Sakuretsu Armor to destroy your monsters directly, Wall of Illusion to bounce monsters to your hand, and Spirit Reaper to shield himself from your attacks, making it dangerous to attack him or defend against him.

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