The influence of Yugioh in this anime is clearly obvious. The similarities were so blatant that it's understandable the writers decided to chose the parody route. They even had a Bakura lookalike character, for Ra's sake!
Now, the main problem this series has, in my opinion, is that despite being a series centered about a card game, the card game itself wasn't shown to be very fun.
Watching this series, I barely learned anything about the rules or the battle system, the only thing I could understand from it was the fact it used a mana system like Magic the Gathering. But even that wasn't very clear. Compare with Yugioh, that it actually takes it times to explain the constantly changing rules of the game, sometimes in great detail.
Also the monsters of Yugioh were very cool and varied: You have creepy monsters, cool-looking monsters and even cute monsters.
But the monsters from Duel Masters look all the same , and I was barely able to differentiate one from another. Also I think the characters merely summoned one per turn: They all looked like Digimon Mega Evolutions (But even the Digimon Megaevolutions had more varied designs) and due the limited CGI they were not able to do much, so the whole card game ended feeling boring and lackluster.
However, my older brother liked the series a lot, and often laughed out loud at the jokes and references made by the main characters. Just for that alone, I decided to give this a score of 6 of 10, since it made him very happy.
Now, the main problem this series has, in my opinion, is that despite being a series centered about a card game, the card game itself wasn't shown to be very fun.
Watching this series, I barely learned anything about the rules or the battle system, the only thing I could understand from it was the fact it used a mana system like Magic the Gathering. But even that wasn't very clear. Compare with Yugioh, that it actually takes it times to explain the constantly changing rules of the game, sometimes in great detail.
Also the monsters of Yugioh were very cool and varied: You have creepy monsters, cool-looking monsters and even cute monsters.
But the monsters from Duel Masters look all the same , and I was barely able to differentiate one from another. Also I think the characters merely summoned one per turn: They all looked like Digimon Mega Evolutions (But even the Digimon Megaevolutions had more varied designs) and due the limited CGI they were not able to do much, so the whole card game ended feeling boring and lackluster.
However, my older brother liked the series a lot, and often laughed out loud at the jokes and references made by the main characters. Just for that alone, I decided to give this a score of 6 of 10, since it made him very happy.