I imagine that many of you will already have heard of this franchise, but for those who haven’t, Yu-Gi-Tic-Tac-Toh is a globe spanning phenomenon of the Pokeman type. I’m not entirely sure where its humble Japanese beginnings were rooted – in a cartoon show, a collectible card game, or a video game, but now you can get all three, and much more besides. There are Yu-Gi-Tic-Tac-Toh comic books, t-shirts, duvet covers, action figures, backpacks, wallpapers, heck, I even saw some kid carrying a Yu-Gi-Tic-Tac-Toh lunchbox the other day.

The Second Abyss on the Left?

In terms of the video game series, I’ve lost count, but I think we’re at something in the order of 54 games now. It all started with a simple ‘Yu-Gi-Tic-Tac-Toh’ game, then there was a sequel in the form of the ‘Championship Edition’, then ‘Master Dueller’, and then the games began to become themed and titled around specific conflicts within the fictional world that the game is set in. This led to titles such as ‘Champion of the Gloomy Forest’, ‘War of the Frozen Peak’, and so on.

After this many games, well, as you can see, the titles are becoming pretty expansive. Game number twelve – ‘Battle of the Abyss’ – introduced us to its namesake, and game twenty-seven, after they ran out of impressive sounding geographical features, returned us to the same concept in ‘Invasion of the Second Abyss’. From there it just got worse.

There was a brief span, between games seventeen and twenty-one, where the developers attempted to solve the problem of a lack of impressive sounding geography by using less-impressive sounding locations. However, after titles such as ‘Curse of the Botanical Gardens’ and ‘Conflict at the Bakery of the Doomed’ proved unpopular, the decision was taken to start reusing the names of locations. The rest is history.

Tic-Tac-Toh!

The game of Tic-Tac-Toe, or ‘Noughts and Crosses’, will be well known to many. The challenge of competing against an opponent to place three identical symbols in a line on a three-by-three grid surely must be one of the simplest games in existence. Not in this case, however.

In the world of Yu-Gi-Tic-Tac-Toh (which is incredibly annoying to type, by the way, and so henceforth will be referred to as YGTTT), Tic-Tac-Toe has risen to become the most challenging and difficult game to play, and there are whole tournaments arranged for the best players to face off against each other, with big prizes available for the winner. These are watched by stadiums full of screaming fans, and millions more worldwide. In fact, it has become so much of a phenomenon that even the greatest of world conflicts can apparently be solved through a ‘duel’ of Tic-Tac-Toe. It doesn’t matter if you have a thousand tanks poised to cross the border against unarmed opposition – if their ‘dueller’ beats yours, that’s it, it’s all over.

Of course, with such high stakes, the game is far removed from the ‘scrap of paper and a pen’ challenge that you or I would be familiar with. Rather, these games are played on giant holographic boards up to a hundred meters square in size, with more than just simple noughts and crosses; the rules are far more complicated. Also, as per the tradition set up in one of the earlier games, the boards are no longer mere three-by-three grids, but three dimensional cubes of ‘larger-than-ever-before size’, with seven squares along each side, making a total of 343 possible spaces to play in.

Sound complicated? It should do. Long time players of YGTTT are going to feel straight at home right away, as they’ve been dealing with this increasingly complex layout for years, but first-time players are going to take some time getting used to it. The game does contain the obligatory ‘tutorial’ section of the plot at the beginning, featuring our hero, Yugo, waking up early in the morning and being forced to ‘battle’ his way to the breakfast table through his friends’ games of Tic-Tac-Toe remembering his skills as he goes. But even this leaves a lot open to experimentation and trial and error.

It’s Time To Duel!

To best explain the concept of this truly bizarre twisting of a classic schoolyard game, it is best to look at the first ‘for real’ battle in the game, following the tutorial battles in Yugo’s house. Yugo has to travel to the supermarket to pick up some groceries, in a typically subdued opening plotline style. Once there, he gets into an argument with a belligerent older gentleman over who should go first in the checkout queue. There’s only one way to sort this problem out – It’s time to duel!

One suitably impressive dissolve effect later and we are left looking at the battle screen. The holographic cube for the battle extends outwards, using some of the supermarket aisles as boundaries, and confused shoppers either run in panic or watch in awe. Fortunately, it’s quite a tall supermarket, so the cube fits just fine.

Of course, as per any ‘duel’ situation in a decent RPG, there is a lot of talking and threat making before any actual fighting takes place. This involves reading a few text boxes – disappointingly, there is no voice dubbing for the majority of the game, save for a few voice samples played within the duels themselves. A few topical insults involving breakfast cereals and sour cream dips later, and the duel itself begins.

Each player gets six noughts or crosses (depending on which side they play) randomly drawn into their ‘hand’ to begin the game. Attached to each of these are various effects or powers, the full range of which would be too wide to even attempt to cover here, except to say that every major duel played has an opponent with at least one trick that won’t have been seen in previous battles.

The elderly gentleman plays first, placing a cross in the middle square of the grid. In this case, it has the power that any symbol placed next to it will have half of its normal hit points. Yes, that’s right, the noughts and crosses in this game have hit points. To demonstrate this, we have Yugo place a nought in a square next to the cross. The little counter in the corner of the square indicates that this particular symbol had two thousand hit points, but because of the effect of the cross next to it, this is reduced to just one thousand.

This is where things get interesting. The symbols have varying levels of hit points, and these can be altered or reduced by the effects of other symbols, either directly through symbols that ‘attack’ or ‘defend’ others for certain amounts of hit points, or indirectly, through a wide array of cards that have all kinds of both supporting and debilitating effects.

For instance, in this case, the nought that Yugo placed has the effect of reducing the hit points of a selected adjacent symbol by one thousand. The cross that the gentleman played in his first move had only five hundred hit points, so using the effect of the nought on this cross will reduce its hit points to zero, causing it to be ‘destroyed’. This means that the symbol is removed from play, and put into the gentleman’s so-called ‘symbol graveyard’. This is all accompanied by bright and colourful pyrotechnic effects on-screen as the nought launches a barrage of fireballs at the cross, which explodes into many pieces and fades away.

This, in itself, is a rather simplistic example of the play that goes on during the ‘duel’ sections, with many cunning and fiendish strategies possible given the wide array of symbols at your disposal. The computer opponents are also fairly clever as well, displaying some fair strategies at time, although most will rely on a fairly limited range of tactics given the symbols they have available, which are usually themed around a concept – tough, brutish types will have a lot of directly attacking symbols, while the wise old professor will have a collection of support effect symbols designed to wear their opponents down through strategy.

Graphically, these battles are well played out, with lots of overblown effects splashing themselves across the screen. It may be an overly complicated game of Nought and Crosses, but it is a very pretty overly complicated game of Noughts and Crosses. Symbols becomes more powerful and more graphically pleasing as the game progresses, with some basing themselves around various creatures that can stomp around the board, some around weather effects that loom ominously over the various parts of the duelling cube, it really is obvious that the designers had a lot of fun putting this part of the game together, and because of that, even given the complex nature of the duels, it becomes difficult not to appreciate that on some level.

There’s A Story In Here Somewhere

Of course, once the gentleman is defeated and Yugo takes his rightful place in the supermarket queue (rather than the pair of them being thrown out for causing mass panic, as you would expect) the plot quickly becomes less mundane than mere trips to the supermarket. On his return, Yugo enters his house to find a mysterious shadowy figure waiting for him. It is relevant at this point to mention that YGTTT fears no cliché, and seems to actively revel in involving as many as possible in its convoluted plot.

The figure explains that it is a manifestation of a being who wishes to claim domination over the world, and so it has been sent to destroy Yugo and remove him from its master’s path. After saving the world literally dozens of times, the villains of the world of YGTTT have finally begun to figure out that Yugo is usually the one who is going to stop them, and so tend to attack him as step one of their plans. What they haven’t figured out yet is that, rather than playing around with manifestations and minions, if they really wanted to finish Yugo off before he causes trouble, they should send along a master ninja or other such trained assassin.

Even worse than this, of course, is that an untrained manifestation tends to talk a lot about its master, especially once defeated, and this is exactly what this particular manifestation does after one quick Tic-Tac-Toe battle. In a fairly brief monologue it is explained that a powerful Tic-Tac-Toe master is planning to launch an attack on the world in general, starting with Yugo’s hometown, and that this attack will be launch from – you guessed it – the Second Abyss on the Left. This sets up the general plot structure for the game, and it never stretches itself too far to try and provide shock twists – most players will see them coming long before they actually happen.

Obviously, Yugo is none too happy at the news that his hometown is to be attacked, and so he and his troupe of not-as-good-but-actually-still-pretty-decent dueller friends set out to travel to the Second Abyss on the Left and put a stop to the mysterious villain’s nefarious schemes. So begins the story that will lead players from duel to duel for roughly thirty or forty hours of gameplay.

O or X?

This game does present something of a puzzle. It’s quite linear, it’s unsurprising, it’s overcomplicated, and it’s part of a greatly over-merchandised franchise. But, somehow, if you can dig far enough into the duels and ignore the lack of plot depth, it does begin to become fun to play, perhaps even slightly compelling, as each duel leads to greater powered symbols being unlocked, with even flashier graphical effects.

As such, it is difficult to simply dismiss this game out of hand, but also difficult to afford it any great level of acclaim. If you have played any of the other Yu-Gi-Tic-Tac-Toh games and enjoyed them, then you are likely to lap this one up. Otherwise, if you’ve enjoyed role playing games in the past, more for great battles than deep and convoluted plots, then it may be worth trying. If not, then you might want to avoid being drawn into this one.

Try it, you might like it.

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