If playing against an artificial intelligent opponent isn't your thing, you can also go head-to-head with another player wirelessly, assuming the other player has his or her own copy of Nightmare Troubadour. The wireless two-player support is pretty standard, letting you stage matches and trade cards with other players.
At the end of both puzzle matches and regular duels, you're rewarded with points that can be spent on booster packs at the local card shop. You're immediately shown what cards you received in your booster pack upon purchase, but to actually use these new cards you'll have to go into the deck-editing system and add them to your live deck. The deck- editing system isn't as transparent as the actual card game, and there are a lot of options for how cards are displayed and sorted. It can take a while to figure out how to move cards between your live deck and your chest of reserve cards, let alone to make out what, exactly, it is that you're looking at.
The game's look, in general, isn't particularly striking, and it usually opts for functionality over visual panache. When you're in the overview of the city map, the lower screen looks like a typical municipal map, while the upper screen displays a simple painting that gives you a general feel for the neighborhood you're looking at. You'll see a decent-looking drawing of your opponent before you go into a match, but for the rest of the time you're just looking at a card table. The biggest effort to add some sparkle to the visuals comes in prerendered 3D versions of the card monsters, which appear in the upper screen. Frankly, these models don't look nearly as good as the card art that they're based on, and it doesn't help that their animations are limited to some choppy wiggling. The sound is equally pedestrian, cannibalizing nearly all of its menu sounds and innocuous background music from whatever centralized sound library Konami uses for all of its Yu-Gi-Oh! games.
In addition to Nightmare Troubadour's sensible use of the touch screen on the DS and its helpful tutorials, the biggest factor working in its favor is that Konami hasn't already churned out a half-dozen other Yu-Gi-Oh! games for the Nintendo DS...yet. But, even if Nightmare Troubadour weren't the only game in town, it would still be an acceptable choice for those just looking for some decent card battles for their DS.
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