I have 600 hours in this game and have been playing it for nearly it's entire history and just realized I never did a review.
I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love this game.
BE WARNED the game was originally conceived as, and marketed as, a back to basics version of the yugioh card game, while the complexity of cards and number of mechanics had grown exponentially between 1999 and 2017, Duel Links promised to set back the clock to a simpler, slower, time, and thanks to being able to reorder when cards were introduced players could use cards that were printed too late to be useful in the TCG. However nearly a decade removed from release duel links has CAUGHT UP WITH the TCG and master duel. It's just as complex, and often the best decks in duel links are more or less the same as what was the best in the TCG only a year or two prior. If you hate modern yugioh, you'll probably hate modern duel links.
However I DONT hate modern yugioh, and I think duel links is a really interesting alternative to modern yugioh. Their are three competitive formats, Rush Duels which is are wholly different game that manages to have modern speed but classic simplicity, character duels, which is a pre constructed format where you play modernized versions of classic anime decks, and the main format which while very similar to the tcg still has some meaningful differences, the smaller deck sizes and skills still shake up deck building in interesting ways. Plus its all presented in a very fun and lively anime way, with overworlds, and characters as opposed to flat 2d menus. And theirs thousands of hours or / albiet questionable quality / single player content.
Elephant in the room duel links is expensive. if you choose to go the route of paying to build decks you can expect to spend upwards of 250 dollars on a deck, it's a gatcha so could be way less, could be way more. This is pretty normal for the TCG but way more expensive then Masterduel. And if you choose to try and be f2p it's possible, but for me takes about 60 hours of mostly mindless grinding per deck , and you're pretty much always going to have a slightly suboptimal version of the deck compared to people who've put in more time/money.
I was massively into the TCG in the early and mid 2010s, and got somewhat into masterduel when it launched, but ever since DL dropped its been my preffered way to play the game.
