YMMV / Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Spirit Caller

• Awesome Music:
  • The music for when you're losing a Shadow Game is so catchy some people deliberately lose LP during Shadow Games just to hear it.
  • Dark Zane/Jinzo's Theme is just about the most famous thing from this game, and for good reason too.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The Obelisk blues are the first real taste of serious and competitive decks. Which you'll likely need to build or tweak existing decks to counter.
  • Inverted with the girls (with the exception of Alexis) whose decks are sub par. Being only slightly better than the Slifer Reds but not as challenging as the Ra Yellows.
• Game-Breaker:
  • This game was made during the mid-era of GX when certain cards that would later be hit with the ban hammer weren't yet and, as such, are either limited to two or one, or completely unlimited. One of the cards that would fall into the later set would be the infamously amazing Solemn Judgement. It's an extremely rare pull from its pack, but taking hours to Save Scum for a playset of it is totally worth it, as you then get to watch the A.I. hopelessly flail about while you proceed to negate any of their attempts at pulling off a combo.
  • Elemental HERO decks. Since this game was made before archetypes became a thing, Elemental HERO cards are more synergized than most other decks in the game.
  • After completing the main story you're allowed to use banned cards. They are still not allowed in multiplayer of course.
• Good Bad Bugs: The pack glitch. Apparently, whoever was responsible for the code for buying packs en masse did a horrible job of it; there's a fairly easy way to buy all or all but one of the packs in a set for the price of a single pack. This can potentially mean that you're buying 51 packs for the price of one. It should be noted though, certain versions of the game have this glitch patched.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Raizou Mototani. His first deck, Life Shaver, is a very annoying Stall/Burn deck. It takes too much of your time to beat him because your own options for cards are very limited at that point in the game.
  • Late game, it's Atticus Rhodes's second deck; a very efficient skill drain deck combined with non-spellcasting area and a slew of 1900 atk 4-star beaters with other nasty trap cards like Justi-Break. Given how the average Spirit Caller deck is very effect monster oriented, he can utterly dismantle you with little difficulty.
• That One Boss:
  • Dark Zane, or Zane after he flipped his shit. Matches with him go one of two ways, you steamrolling him, or him steamrolling you with his Chimeratech OTK deck. You can lose this battle easily if you get a bad hand. Worse, Dark Zane is a shadow duel and he can't be registered, so you can stumble onto him while spirit hunting in the post game. Lose to him, and it's game over.
  • Abidos The Third, but not for his monsters, but rather his game counterpart is loaded with a lot more rare cards to help his strategy.
  • Titan. He uses a deck the boils down to Random Number God on steroids. All his monsters have effects that can negate your monster effects and destroy them, or destroy any monsters that attack his. While it's supposed to be a double edged sword kind of deck, Titan has an uncanny ability to get nearly all of his rolls in his favor, resulting in any of your attempts to gain an edge against him falling flat on your face. Really, no matter what deck you're playing, duels against him boil down to how generous the RNG feels like being, and more often than not, no matter how much you prepare for him, he will get his RNG based shenanigans going no matter what.
  • Kagemaru. You must duel him 3 times in a Sequential Boss battle, and he'll use a different Sacred Beast focused deck in each duel. All 3 of his decks are well built to summon each Sacred Beast it's themed around, and come with powerful support and destruction cards for tearing apart his opponents. Worse, you can only progress in the next stage of the boss fight by defeating him after he summons a Sacred Beast, so it's possible to lose while you're stalling for him to play one.
• That One Level: As mentioned in Difficulty Spike, dueling the Obelisk Blues enough to be registered for the first time can be quite a hassle. Not only are their decks far better than most of the other students you've fought, you are still fairly limited in the cards you can use against them. Add in the fact that their decks rely on annoying stall and burn strategies to win and it becomes all the more frustrating.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • You have to buy cards through packs instead of being able to buy specific ones, and unlike Yu-Gi-Oh! Nightmare Troubadour, you can't Save Scum to get specific cards since all the packs are random, making getting the cards you want a complete Luck-Based Mission that can take hours of resets to finally get one card you're looking for. It's so bad, that not only are people okay with others abusing the pack glitch in their playthroughs, a few people even go as far to say that the pack glitch is the only way to make the game playable period. The worst part is, certain versions of the game have patched that glitch out...
  • Leveling up after a certain point can get really tedious. EXP for each level up increases drastically with each one, and most duelist barely give anywhere from 80-100 EXP for each time you beat them, and by around level 10, the EXP needed to level up is around 2000+. Combine this with a lot of duelists just loving stall/burn decks, and chances of unlocking the late game packs with any viability for the main game are unlikely.
  • Spirit Hunting is tedious. You have to get lucky and hope one of the icons you find in the overworld map isn't a duelist you haven't registered. Also, recruitment for the spirits is abysmal and in the post game, you can risk running into Dark Zane, and if you're not prepared for him, you can easily get maimed by his Chimeratech OTK deck.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Extremely likely unintentional considering the gap in release, but the bridge of Obelisk Blue Duel Boys from about the 43 second point until the song end sounds a lot like Fozzy's hit song from 2017, Painless.

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