Summary
- A few of the games here are worth exploring, offering a neat look at Yu-Gi-Oh!’s history.
- Some games are newly translated into English, offering a fresh experience.
- However, notable games are missing, there’s no archival content, and some games are lackluster.
Yu-Gi-Oh! is a complicated game these days. Turn-one wins are common, while mechanics like Xyz, Synchro, Pendulum, and Link summoning have changed it beyond recognition since the early ‘00s.
It’s a faster, trickier game, but Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection tries to harken back to a softer, gentler time, when fusion summoning was the pinnacle of tactics and Blue-eyes White Dragon was an actual threat. Unfortunately, Early Days Collection is also one of the worst ways to experience this era.
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Early Days Collection brings together 14 games from the height of Yu-Gi-Oh!’s popularity, localising some into English for the first time, from the original Duel Monsters game from ’98 through to ‘04’s rather excellent 7 Trials To Glory: World Championship Tournament 2005.
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Every Game In Yu-Gi-Oh!: Early Days Collection |
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Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters |
Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 2: Dark Duel Stories |
Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Capsule |
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Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duel Stories |
Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 4: Battle Of Great Duelists |
Yu-Gi-Oh! Dungeon Dice Monsters |
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Yu-Gi-Oh! The Eternal Duelist Soul |
Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 6: Expert 2 (Japanese only) |
Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards |
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Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef Of Destruction |
Yu-Gi-Oh! Worldwide Edition: Stairway To The Destined Duel |
Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship Tournament 2004 |
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Yu-Gi-Oh! Destiny Board Traveler |
Yu-Gi-Oh! 7 Trials To Glory: World Championship Tournament 2005 |
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Your Move, Yugi-Boy
If nothing else, the collection is an interesting way to follow how Yu-Gi-Oh! went from an adaptation of a vague and undefined card game manga (where Dual Monsters wasn’t even the original focus), to a TCG powerhouse with its own rules and formats to learn. Seeing how mechanics central to the game these days were introduced and refined as the years went by is fascinating.
But Early Days Collection runs into the frequent retro anthology problem of most of the games not being very good by modern standards. The original Duel Monsters is a slog to play beyond the one-time appeal of seeing where the series came from, and things don’t start getting decent until around Duel Monsters 6, leaving a lot of the earlier games in an awkward position.
Though the early games were incredibly rough, the later Duel Monsters games are excellent. Emblematic of Yu-Gi-Oh!’s long-standing rivalry with Pokemon, they aped the top-down RPG style, but added enough of Yu-Gi-Oh!’s tactical depth to the combat encounters for them to stand out on their own.
The highlight of the collection isn’t duel monsters, though, but the spinoffs. Games like Dungeon Dice Monsters, Monster Capsule, and Destiny Board Traveler offer fresh takes on duelling, and haven’t been bested in the years since. While they can be fiddly to learn, thanks to that obtuse, no-hand-holding Game Boy game design, they’re different enough that I found myself sinking more time into the board-game-esque Destiny Board Traveler than I did any of the ‘real’ duel monsters games.
Why Is It Only Game Boy Games?
As it only includes handheld games, it’s missing a large chunk of major titles in YGO’s history, like the all-timers Forbidden Memories and Duelists of the Roses, or rarer games like Dawn of Destiny and Falsebound Kingdom. The decision to only include Game Boy games feels less like a curational decision for the sake of the anthology, and more like it’s taking the easy way out by only porting easily emulated Game Boy games instead.
Even from the games it does have, there are some eyebrow-raisers. It features all three of Duelist Soul 6 Expert 2, The Eternal Duelist Soul, and Stairway to the Destined Duel, which outside of the establishing story are more or less identical games. With 14 games, and most of them being rough around the edges, having three be virtually the same game is a shame, even if it is one of the strongest in the pack.
Compare it to other retro anthologies like Tetris Forever and Sonic Mega Collection Plus, which were filled with extra content to explore like documentaries, soundtracks, comics, and prototypes, and Early Days Collection feels incredibly lacking. Out of its 14 games, only one is available in multiplayer, and the only extra content included are scans of the manual.
I Summon Pot Of Greed To Draw Three Additional Cards From My Deck
I’m not entirely sure who Early Days Collection is for. For new players exploring Yu-Gi-Oh! for the first time, even the best games here are abstruse and often punishing. There’s nothing that will grab you if you don’t already love YGO. Every platform Early Days Collection is on also has Master Duel and Legacy of the Duelist which, while not a return to the era often called GOAT, offers a much smoother way to break into the game.
For older fans wanting a hit of nostalgia, plenty of these games don’t hold up to revisits almost 25 years later. With none of the usual gubbins we’ve come to expect from retro anthologies, all you’re getting out of Early Days Collection is having your rose-tinted glasses stamped on. Lacking in games, lacking in upgrades, and lacking in content, this feels more like a slightly heftier update for Nintendo Switch Online than a full ode to Yu-Gi-Oh!’s golden era.
Reviewed On PC
Digital Card Game
Strategy
- A few of the games are worth spending a couple of hours on.
- Some games are localised into English for the first time.
- A neat look at the history of Yu-Gi-Oh! if you have the patience for it.
- Missing major games from this period of Yu-Gi-Oh!.
- No extra archival material for fans.
- Some of the games here are just bad.