Format: Advance
Genre: RPG
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami

Abandon all hope ye who enter. This game was on my personal shit list since decades past. I tried to get into this game long before I started up my challenge of playing every gameboy advance game released in North America. It was tremendously demanding on the "figure it out" scale. Not only that but the entire game is a bastardization of the 'Yu-Gi-OH!' series. The anime itself follows the story of Yugi Muto and his ascension to becoming the "King of Games". During the story, a character named "Duke Devlin" creates a rival game to popular "Duel Monsters" trading card game. Essentially "Yugioh" is "Duel Monsters" and this "Dungeon Dice Monsters" is a fiction rival game within the fictional world of a fictional game of an anime. Well, that brings us to today, where they decided that they were just going to make it into a real game and now we have this pile of garbage. Being based off of the original yugioh card game, means that they re-used the most popular cards in the series. Unfortunately, they didn't do all that much research or possibly didn't care at all. The "Dice" in this game are how you summon monsters to an isometric grid-based game field. The catch is that you can only move monsters on the dice themselves. Whenever you summon anything in this game, it "unfolds" the dice into a pattern of your choice, and there's a decent amount of choices. Since these are 6-side die, that means you need at least 6 panels to summon anything. Each "deck" in this game consists of 15 dices of your choice. Of course, you pretty much don't have any choice since nothing is unlocked at the start and in order to unlock anything you have to beat enemies in the tournament mode. In fact, you can't even free duel an enemy until you face them in a tournament. Beating an enemy nets you a random dice. Beating a tournament nets you some money. Here's the kicker though, all the good stuff in the shop costs THOUSANDS of moneys. To put it in perspective, if you beat every tournament, beat the game, and get the credits... you'll only have about 1500 moneys. A single exodia piece costs 30k. The karbonala warrior costs 3k. The millennium shield(which can't attack or move) costs 7k. This basically means you're more or less stuck with your starter deck or whatever you can scrounge up. Let's get down to the grittyness of the game though. 15 dice, every turn you roll 3 dice of your choice. Each player takes a turn rolling dice, and then making their moves. In order to summon anything you need to roll 2 of the same summoning star level dice. In other words, if you have a kuriboh and a penguin soldier and a medical kit, you would need to have both the kuriboh and penguin soldier land on one of their summoning stars in order to summon one of them. The medical kit is a level 2 star summon, whereas the others are level 1 star summon. The 2 star summon cannot be substituted in that way. The same applies for 3 and 4 stars as well. You need two of the same level stars to summon anything. Each dice have several properties, most being things like monster name, image, monster type, attack, health, guard-defense, level, special abilities and specialties(like flight or burrowing). Each dice also has these things called "Crests". There are 5 crests in all; movement, attack, defense, ability, and trap. Every time you roll a die, you automatically store any of these crests that you roll into your crest pool. In order to attack, you need at least 1 attack crest, in order to guard you need at least 1 defense crest, for every space you move you use up 1 movement crest, most abilities define how many ability crests they require, and I have no idea what the trap crest does. The goal of the game is to get one of your monsters over to the enemy player and attack him 3 times to reduce his heart total to 0. This may seem simple, but once you realize that the entire game is tilted on RNG, it becomes and absolute nightmare. Doing something as simple as summoning a level 1 kuriboh can be the hardest thing in the world when the die decide to just say no. You can lose an entire tournament just because RNG suddenly doesn't like you. The music was hit or miss. Credits after you beat all the tournaments. There's a lot to be said about how bad this game is, too much. Apparently there's also an additional set of tournaments unlocked after you beat the game.

Hot Tips: Penguin Soldier and Ryu-Kishin are great cheap swapouts for movement/attack crests.

All in All, the score of 4 is far too much for this pile of crap. RNG defines progression. Shop costs too high and ridiculously understocked. "locked in" style tactical game mechanics. Borderline retarded AI. Hidden Mechanics. RNG defines progression AGAIN. Bastardization of Source Material. Graphics are subpar. No story.