YMMV / Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards

• Anti-Climax Boss: Yami Yugi isn't that hard, as a lot of his strong tribute monsters tend to clog up his hand.
• Awesome Music: Yami Marik's battle theme.
• Fridge Horror: The player telling Keith not to give up makes him take a huge level in competence, becoming the new leader of the Ghouls by the time of the sequel, Reshef of Destruction.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Darkness Approaches. Rather ironic, as the real-life card game version is considered one of the worst spells in the game, but there's no denying how utterly game-breaking the SC version is. It turns all monsters on your whole field face-down for no cost at all, allowing them to re-use their instant Flip Effects - a great many of which are clearly meant to be used once per card. One extreme example is Revival Jam, a card that copies itself when activated. Not game-breaking by itself, but with a single Revival Jam and a single Darkness Approaches, you now have four Revival Jams on your side of the field ready to pounce.
  • Hourglass of Life. It powers up every monster on your side of the field by 500 attack and defense points. Permanently. Not only is this a Game-Breaker by itself, but combine it with the above Darkness Approaches and Revival Jam tactic, and you now have two 2500 ATK and two 2000 ATK Revival Jams (not to mention the now 1700 ATK Hourglass itself) in practically no time at all. It is possible to, with the right combination of Hourglass of Life, similar attack boosts, and Darkness Approaches, get a full field of garden-variety monsters to over 4000 ATK, without ever needing any tributes. To call this a One-Hit Kill is an understatement.
  • The lesson of just how game-breaking these sort of attack boosts are is taught to the player very quickly via Witch's Apprentice, a card the player starts with. It works like Hourglass of Life, except it only powers up Shadow-element monsters. Which in itself is overpowered, because of how the game's Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors works. In theory, it's Shadow > Light > Fiend > Dreams > Shadow. The problem with this is that Dreams-element monsters are ridiculously rare, to the point where encountering one in the entire game is an event unto itself, making Shadow an unintentional Infinity +1 Element. And on the off-chance that you do encounter such a monster... well, that's what your trap cards are for. What's more, by the end of the game, most enemies are Rare Hunters using the field bonus that applies for most Shadow monsters, so you can whoop them with your own Shadow monsters.
  • Torrential Tribute, which instantly wipes out every single monster on the opponent's field the instant they try to attack with absolutely anything. And unlike the real-life game, where Mirror Force (a WEAKER version of said card, as it doesn't hit face-downs) was limited to one at the time, you can have three Torrentials in your in-game deck.
  • For that matter, almost any trap card in the game, because the AI is stupid enough to attack every time it has a chance to win that particular battle. This definition of "chance" includes your face-down monsters. All you need to do is the following: set trap, set monster, end turn, laugh as the opponent kills themselves, attack with all face-up monsters, and repeat until you have won the duel. Traps like Invisible Wire (kills anything under 2000 ATK that attacks you, which no enemy except the final boss can summon without a tribute), Acid Trap Hole (everything under 3000 ATK), and Widespread Ruin (just everything) make the game insultingly easy. To make matters worse, these cards have a deck cost that is absurdly low; deck cost acts sort of like your Character Level, determining the relative power of your deck. Widespread Ruin costs less than the local Goombas to put in your deck, and the other traps cost even less than that. Only Torrential has anything even vaguely resembling a real cost...which you can still pay at the very beginning of the game with minimal effort.
    • Trap Master is a humble-looking 500/1100 with an effect that creates an Acid Trap Hole for free. Now you can have an effective six copies of Acid Trap Hole, or even more if you supplement with the above Darkness Approaches. The AI will constantly walk into your Traps, losing monsters until they have nothing left while you can chip them to death with 500-ATK slaps.
  • Beckon to Darkness has a simple effect of destroying 1 monster the opponent controls, and will always go for the strongest one. Its very low cost makes it a staple even into the endgame.
  • Don't even get started on Cocoon of Evolution. Its duelist level requirement is really quite low - in fact, it's actually undercosted for a Level 4 2000 defender. You can have 3 per deck, 2000 defence, needs no tribute. After one turn, it evolves into Great Moth. Another turn later, and that evolves into Perfectly Ultimate Great Moth. 3500 ATK, usually only usable once you've already got two God Cards and quite overpowered. The only problem is that the game doesn't tell you it's an effect monster for some reason.
  • Ancient Lamp. While its moderately high level requirement means you can't use it until mid-late game without Level Grinding, it more than makes up for this with its ability to completely circumvent the level requirement system. As soon as it hits the field, it can summon La Jinn the Mystical Genie of the Lamp - whose level requirement is extremely high, and justifiably so. La Jinn overpowers every single non-tribute monster that can possibly be summoned by your opponents in the game - and the most common field effect gives it an automatic 540-point attack boost without you even needing to do anything, in a game where the 500-point attack boost from Hourglass of Life is a Game-Breaker, as listed above. And to cap it all off, it's Shadow element! Add a Darkness Approaches and a Witch's Apprentice, and with just 3 cards and no tributes you have not one but two monsters with 3340 attack, both of which are nigh-impossible to hit with Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, in just two turns. Wish your opponents luck, they'll need it.
    • For that matter, monsters that summon other monsters to the field are just really good, as unlike the real game, you don't need the monster listed in the card text in your deck in order to summon them. Not only does it allow you to swarm the field, it gives you easy access to tribute fodder for higher summon costs like 2 tribute monsters, rituals, and the God Cards. Doron^note makes another copy of itself, Toad Master^note summons a Frog the Jam, and Revival Jam^note also copies itself are some such cards.
  • The game has no phases, so you can freely summon, activate spells, and/or attack at nearly any point in a turn. This means you can sacrifice monsters, play a boardwipe like Dark Hole or Heavy Storm, and then summon a high-level monster and then attack into the now-defenseless opponent. You can freely sacrifice monsters for nothing so you can, for instance, take control of an opponent's monster and then get rid of it before they can get it back.
  • You can use The Inexperienced Spy or Monster Eye to reveal all the cards in your opponent’s hand and change them to face-up position, preventing him/her from activating the temporary effects of Effect Monsters. Really useful against enemies that use effects.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: A common criticism of the game is that it is too easy. The opponents have weak cards, and you get a lot of rewards and you can raise your Duelist Level and Deck Capacity very fast. You can clear this game in a single day even if you don't speedrun it, and the game doesn't even have a New Game Plus feature. The game's successor, Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction, fixed that problem, but took it too far.
• Nightmare Fuel: Arkana tells you that the loser of your duel with him will be chopped up. Even worse, to reach him you have to talk to an NPC who says that other people have been going to the card shop and disappearing, implying that he successfully killed other duelists.
• That One Boss: Odion and Yami Marik are the only hard bosses in the game, with strong base monsters beefed up by the Yami Field and debilitating traps and spells.

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