If you grew up watching Yu-Gi-Oh! and spent way too much time arguing about card rulings with friends, The Sacred Cards is basically that childhood fantasy in GBA form. You start off in Domino City, running into familiar faces like Joey with his terrible luck and Kaiba being… well, Kaiba. The story loosely follows Battle City, but with enough twists to keep it interesting.

Deck-building here feels more forgiving than some of the later games—you’re not drowning in 10,000 cards right away, so you can actually experiment without feeling overwhelmed. I stuck with a warrior-heavy deck early on, but good luck resisting the urge to throw in a Dark Magician once you pull one. The duels themselves are classic early-2000s Yu-Gi-Oh!—none of that pendulum summon nonsense, just good old trap cards and hoping your opponent doesn’t have Mirror Force.

It’s not perfect (the AI sometimes makes baffling moves), but there’s something weirdly satisfying about beating Weevil’s insect deck with a stack of poorly drawn normals. If you’ve got nostalgia for this era of the franchise, it’s a solid time.