Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy Of The Duelist: Link Evolution Becomes The First Game In The Series To Get A “Teen” Rating

Ahead of its release on Switch later this year, Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy Of The Duelist: Link Evolution, has become the first game based on the franchise to be given a “Teen” rating, at least according to the ESRB Website.

This “Teen” rating is quite unusual given the game’s status as an updated port of the original Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy Of The Duelist game. This is because when the title was originally released in 2015, the ESRB gave it a more tame E10+ rating for Playstation 4 and Xbox One.

So what changed? According to the ESRB website, the bump in rating comes down to several cards that depict “characters getting bitten, slashed with blades, or struck by arrows”, “small blood drips or splatters”, and “suggestive material/nudity”.  As Yu-Gi-Oh cards are often heavily censored in the West, some are speculating that this could mean Link Evolution uses the uncensored Japanese card artwork, which would explain the comments made on the ESRB website. That said, we will likely have to wait for the official release to find out for sure.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy Of The Duelist: Link Evolution will release for Switch on April 25 in Japan, and sometime in Summer 2019 for the rest of the world.

UPDATE (10/04/2019): Apparently, Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy Of The Duelist: Link Evolution is not the first Yu-Gi-Oh game to get a “Teen” rating from the ESRB. Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links also received a “Teen” rating from the ESRB, but this game does not appear when searching for Yu-Gi-Oh games on the ESRB website for some reason. The content of the article has since been updated to be slightly more accurate.