One of the most striking elements of Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection, which celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game, is the sheer number of Yu-Gi-Oh! video games that came out between 1998 and 2004. The Early Days Collection includes 14 games just from Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance titles, some of which have never previously been released outside of Japan.

Over half of the games in the collection belong to the Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters series, despite increasingly convoluted names: Duel Monsters (1998), Duel Monsters II: Dark Duel Stories (1999), Dark Duel Stories (2000), Duel Monsters 4: Battle of Great Duelists (2000), The Eternal Duelist Soul (2001), Duel Monsters 6: Expert 2 (2001), World Wide Edition: Stairway to the Destined Duel (2003), The Sacred Cards (2002), and Reshef of Destruction (2003).

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

Most follow a similar formula of beating duelists in battle to unlock new areas and cards. The first game in the series was released before the official Yu-Gi-Oh! card game, so its rules are based on the manga instead. As the Duel Monster series progresses, the in-game dueling rules begin to slowly resemble the real-life trading card game more closely, but it isn’t until the fifth entry, The Eternal Duelist Soul, that we see a full alignment with the actual card game rules.

Then, we revert to a simplified version of gameplay in the last two games, The Sacred Cards and Reshef of Destruction, which also added an RPG element that allowed us to walk around an actual environment as we duelled our way through town.

For anyone who has played the official card game, the most baffling mechanical difference in some of the Duel Monsters games might be the alignments system, where monsters of one type are super strong against another. We were surprised when a normal summon with 300 attack points could automatically defeat our seven-star, two-sacrifice summon with 2500 attack points just because it had a thunder alignment against our own monster’s water alignment.

Put bluntly, the official Yu-Gi-Oh! card game is much more strategically engaging than the chimeras present in many of the Early Days Collection. We’d argue that the card game hit its full stride shortly after many of these titles were released (and then overcomplicated itself into oblivion a few years later on, but we don’t have to get into that). There’s a simple joy in collecting as many cards as possible just to revel in how cool the artwork is, but as tactical games—which many of these titles bill themselves as—there’s not too much to entertain.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

That is with the exception of two later games included in the collection: Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship Tournament 2004 and Yu-Gi-Oh! 7 Trials to Glory: World Championship Tournament 2005. These can be taken as additional titles in the Duel Monsters series, as their Japanese titles indicate, but they might also be considered members of the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship series. Either way, they offer a strategic experience much more similar to the actual card game. Gameplay still mostly involves challenging others to duel, but collecting new cards and putting together decks is so much more engaging since we actually got to purchase and open packs.

While we respect the commitment to the original gameplay, the user interface for much of the collection feels clunky and overwhelming. Getting through a single turn in many of the games was often tedious, let alone trying to change what was in our deck vs our overall collection of cards. This improved a little as the release year of the games increased, but not by much.

A major criticism for many of Konami’s Yu-Gi-Oh! titles when they originally released was that they didn’t do much to teach series newcomers how the card game actually worked. That remains true with this collection as a whole. On the one hand, many of the ready-made target audience are probably those who either played the card game or the video games themselves previously. Yet, we can’t help but feel that the collection might have been a great opportunity to introduce the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game to a new group of players.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Of course, not every game in the collection is duel-centered. The Yu-Gi-Oh! series has inspired numerous game variations throughout its history besides its massively popular card game. Dungeon Dice Monsters (2003) is based on a board game of the same name. Without having any previous experience with Dungeon Dice Monsters, we found this one particularly difficult to understand. It felt like a game that could be really interesting if there wasn’t such a difficult learning curve.

Destiny Board Traveler, seemingly Konami’s take on a Mario Party-type game, was disappointingly hard to jump into, as well. The art style is really cute, but the in-game text is outrageously difficult to decipher. By the time we figured out how the mechanics worked, we weren’t having any fun.

Meanwhile, Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Capsule, originally only released in Japan, offers a twist on turn-based tactics in the Yu-Gi-Oh! universe that’s both whimsical and easy to understand. With our friends magically transformed into dolls, we’re tasked with collecting and training monsters in capsules. Fights unfold on a 2D battle map where our monsters face down various opponents in a goofy, chess-like showdown. It certainly isn’t the best tactical game of all time, but it marks a worthwhile addition to the collection.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

Developer Digital Eclipse included some quality-of-life elements in the collection as a whole that tie everything together rather well. These include the ability to save at will, tweak gameplay rules like removing deck limits, and rewind time. These features help take the edge off the already mentioned interface frustrations for these older games, but not enough to remove our suffering altogether.

What we did love to see was the preserved box art and original instruction manuals for each game. We opted to play each title with the lovely background border behind the game screen, but players can notably adjust the screen size, filter, and border using the collection’s universal pause menu.

Conclusion

The Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection stays true to its sources and brings a little piece of history into the modern age. Unfortunately, dull mechanics and often unwieldy UI plague many of the games in the collection just as they did on first release, although amidst 14 titles, it would be impossible not to have a couple of winners.

For us, Monster Capsule and the two World Championship Tournament titles shone through beautifully. Although the included games are certainly imperfect, we recognise the intentionality behind the collection’s curation and feel that it’s an excellent time capsule of the origins of the iconic Yu-Gi-Oh! Series.