Yu-Gi-No!

What am I doing here? Am I in a fever dream? Why am I listening to the gamerip to a Yu-Gi-Oh!-game that was released in Japan in 1999 and only in 2002 for the PlayStation in the rest of the world? Nostalgia? Nope, never played it. Famous composers? Nope again. Was the music recommended to me? Not that I know of. So what am I doing here? The answer is obvious: I don't know.

Somehow this spin-off of the popular trading card series snuck into my collection and even though I enjoyed watching the TV version and actually played the 2004 PC triumvirate Yugi the Destiny, Kaiba the Revenge and Joey the Passion , I never came across this game. Not an oversight, as Let's Plays on YouTube have revealed to me. Well, at least that's no reason not to listen to the music ... right? But it is!

The score

If the words PlayStation, licensed game and unknown composers haven't set your alarm bells ringing yet, you should know by the time you hear the word Gamerip that we're in for some uncurated music snippets. We are presented with 58 of them, which are either a few seconds, 1:50 or three minutes long. Nothing wrong with that, you might think, but the album proves us otherwise.

As is usual for a turn-based strategy game - which is what most card games are - the music is primarily intended as a loop. The three composers I am less familiar with, Naoko Ishii, Waichiro Ozaki and Hiroshi Tanabe, deliver exactly that: highlight-free scene descriptions that would probably have served as background music for lengthy dialog in some JRPGs. Here, however, it is the main component of the score ... and unfortunately that is not enough to impress.

I could go into more detail now, talk about the fact that we move between stereotypically oriental and funky jazzy modern tones; that the music is sometimes calmer and sometimes more upbeat ... but isn't that true of pretty much every score? And for what? Has anyone missed this game in my review collection? Apart from the hardcore fans, does anyone out there know it at all?

That's why I'm keeping my review as generic as the creators did with the music, by saying little with many words. There's absolutely nothing worth mentioning here, and even the aforementioned players from back then are unlikely to remember any of the tracks. Save yourselves the 2.5 hours of life - or 30 minutes if you (like me) skip before the first loop.