The game’s ups have actually turned the game more down.
Game design: The game takes place in ancient Egypt, over 5000 years prior to the original. You are a young prince who seeks freedom from his regular duties and have some great interest in the Shadow games, card duels that were played at that time. You will basically battle opponents (that strangely bare great resemblance to the original characters) in a duel.
You will be reading dialogues from other characters with their images displayed on them. The artwork motion and the artwork themselves look great.
The series decided to make its 3D root. While it is true that there are 3D elements the duel itself isn’t exactly in 3D. In fact the only 3D figure is the board from where you place your cards, the monsters themselves remain as card figures.
Game play: The rules of the game are pretty simple. Each combatant has a number of life points, your goal is to wipe out your opponents life points by using your cards, the one that reaches 0 loses. You will have to make full use of monster, magic and trap cards. What is different in this game however is the addition of elemental effects. This is probably some attempt to make this game more like the Pokemon cards games. This however caused the game to have major flaws, as you would not know which monster to take out, even extremely powerful monsters can be easily destroyed once you have a monster with the right elements, and you will have to memories which monsters have which elements as they don’t have any indicator or symbols that can help us tell which elements they have, or which element its strong or weak against for that matter. As a result you will continuously lose every single duel until you just get fed up with the game.
Sound: There are no voice casts and the music is very limited and repetitive, not to mention that its totally not impressive.
Yu-Gi-Oh Forbidden Memories is an experiment that totally went wrong. The few game play changes caused the game to become utterly frustrating and not fun to play. There were also not enough 3D figures (or none at all). From the release of Pokemon Stadium for the N64 you would think that this game could have had monsters come to 3D, as the Playstation CD rom should have been capable of holding lots of 3D figures unlike the N64 cartridge.
If you are a very forgiving Yu-Gi-Oh fan you most likely want to continue playing just to see how the story progresses, if you are completely new to the Yu-Gi-Oh series or just have a slight interest you would be better off avoiding this game.