I won’t be alone in being a millennial who has trouble confronting my past self. Unlike past generations we don’t have the luxury of burning our diaries in the dead of night, because so much of it is pasted online for the world to see. So it’s interesting occasionally to go back to the very beginning, and to experience the cultural artefacts that influenced me before the internet extended its corrupting tentacles.
Emulation is a wonderful thing, and having the entire library of a console at your fingertips is a temptation it’s hard to ignore. It was in this spirit I fired up Yu-Gi-Oh! The Falsebound Kingdom, which I remembered as an epic adventure with stunning graphics and deep, multi-genre gameplay, as I wouldn’t have put it when I was nine.
Oh dear. Well, it’s certainly epic in the sense of being huge, although it’s less an elegant 12-course dégustation than the equivalent of devouring a barrel of gruel. The creature models aren’t bad for 2002, it’s true, though they really lose something cycling through the same eight attack animations and five background locations.
Looking at these games through an adult eye, you start to probe questions that didn’t arise at an age when you unquestioningly accepted the reality put before you. Why has a series famed for its card-battling mechanics decided that it suddenly needs to become Pokémon? Why are all the maps…
