Crack open your Millennium Puzzle and prepare to roll some incredibly awkward polygonal dice, because this week on Play Comics we’re delving into one of the most bewildering spin-offs to ever stumble out of the Yu-Gi-Oh universe! We’re talking about Yu-Gi-Oh Dungeon Dice Monsters for the Game Boy Advance—a game so determined to turn Kazuki Takahashi’s trading card phenomenon into a dungeon crawler that it somehow forgot to ask if it should.
Joining us for this delightfully confusing journey through Dungeon Dice Monsters is none other than Marcus Stewart from Game Informer, who’s armed with the kind of gaming knowledge that only comes from actually playing this thing. Whether he’s here to defend it, destroy it, or just figure out what the heck is happening on a 240p screen, we’re thrilled to have his voice in the mix as we attempt to understand why anyone thought “card game meets roguelike dice mechanics” was the logical next step for the King of Games.
So lock your monsters in the vault, prepare your dice for rolling, and get ready for an episode that’s far less about card strategy and far more about watching two people gradually lose their minds over a game that inhabits some kind of strange liminal space between “ambitious experiment” and “fever dream at a game arcade.” The dice have been cast. The dungeon awaits. Our sanity? Well, that’s negotiable.
Learn such things as:
- Does the dice-rolling mechanic create engaging strategic depth or just mask random chaos behind a veneer of math?
- Does the actual Dungeon Dice Monsters storyline tie-in justify the existence of this video game adaptation at all?
- Does the very small mention of what this game actually is give young gamers their first instance of bait and switch marketing?
- And so much more!
You can find Marcus over at Game Informer in either digital or physical format or on BlueSky @marcusstewart7
If you want to be a guest on the show please check out the Be a A Guest on the Show page and let me know what you’re interested in.
If you want to help support the show check out the Play Comics Patreon page or head over to the Support page if you want to go another route. You can also check out the Play Comics Merch Store.
Play Comics is part of the Gonna Geek Network, which is a wonderful collection of geeky podcasts. Be sure to check out the other shows on Gonna Geek if you need more of a nerd fix.
You can find Play Comics @playcomics.bsky.social on Bluesky.
A big thanks to Piecing it Together and “Fun” & Games for the promos today.
Intro/Outro Music by Backing Track, who rolls dice to see which dice he should roll.
