Some of my most cherished early videogame memories are of playing Yu-Gi-Oh games as a grade schooler while understanding about 10% of the rules. I tried to revisit the game once I was older, but found its head-spinning, combo-centric gameplay a mite too head-spinning and combo-centric. I liked Yu-Gi-Oh because I could play Dark Magician and he looked really sick, and there were big numbers on his card, but the modern whippersnapper’s Yu-Gi-Oh has added all these layers of complexity that my geriatric mid-twenties brain can’t reckon with. What I really need is a videogame where I can relive the glory days in peace; or better yet, fourteen of them.
If you’re a luddite like me or just a nostalgia-riddled superfan, you too might get a kick out of Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection, a collaboration between Konami and videogame documentarians Digital Eclipse. It spans the early history of Yu-Gi-Oh!’s forays into a digital space, emulating a variety of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games. It might be hard to picture now, but there was a time when Yu-Gi-Oh! was as ubiquitous as Pokémon in comic shops and on middle school cafeteria tables, with every kid in the know craving a Duel Disk and trying to make sense of Yugi Matou’s weird purple hair spikes.
Back in its heyday, this popularity scored it a number of straight-up digital adaptations, as well as RPGs and even board games that take the concept and run with it. Not every game on offer in the Early Days Collection is a firecracker, but there are some standouts that haven’t been accessible for over a decade at this point, and some which are available outside of Japan for the first time.
Perhaps the most notable standout is Eternal Duelist Soul, a straightforward card battle simulator for the GBA that adapts the rules pretty faithfully and lets you go head-to-head with a bunch of AI-controlled characters from the anime, collecting cards as you rack up wins. It’s the one I’m most interested in returning to after sampling the smorgasbord of games on offer, but I was also fascinated by Dungeon Dice Monsters, a bizarre board game spinoff involving dice pools and a 50-page instruction manual.
Admittedly, the collection feels a bit quantity over quality, with a lot of the other games getting mixed reception in their day and faring no better now, but it’s a massive slice of Yu-Gi-Oh! from a simpler time, which is sure to find its niche.
As far as the feature list goes, it’s rock solid and pretty standard if you’ve played Digital Eclipse’s other retro buffets. There’s customizable borders, cheats, time rewinding, save states, a digital gallery with some deliciously old-school artwork, and a small suite of visual screen filters in case you want to pretend your OLED monitor is a CRT displaying an emulated version of a GBA game on your PC. How retro!
There’s also online play, but so far it’s only for one game: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 4: Battle of Great Duelists (if you’re curious how many times the word “duel” appears in these games’ titles, the answer is 10 times). It makes some sense: you don’t want to split what will probably be a modest playerbase over a dozen titles, and Digital Eclipse has shared that multiplayer will be added to other titles over time, but it’s a bit disappointing that most of these games have a head-to-head mode and only one of them can be played online. It makes it sting all the more that local multiplayer is cordoned off when it does appear, meaning that if you do want to replay some of the old games’ versus modes as they would have functioned back in the day, you’ll have to track down a Game Boy.
Beyond this, the collection's biggest downside is simply that it doesn't not Yu-Gi-Oh! in its videogame prime. This skips over 2001’s exceptional The Duelists of the Roses—and home console games in general, for that matter—and with its lack of tutorialization and archaic mechanics, is a poor gateway to the card game compared to Duel Links or Master Duel.
The collection is robust, runs well, and delivers exactly what it says on the tin. If you’re motivated by nostalgia,or just want to play a legacy version of the card game online against friends, you could do a lot worse than the Early Days Collection. But if you’re looking to dive into things for the first time or play a bunch of excellent card-battler RPGs, you’ll be better served elsewhere.
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