Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection review for PC, Nintendo Switch

I don’t think there has been a time in my life when trading cards or trading card games were not a part of my life. Even now, at the age of 35, I find myself at locals weekly, watching Twitch streams of competitive card play or even looking up news on the latest trends. The first trading card game I learned how to play was Yu-Gi-Oh! In the early 00s, I watched at my local game store as people battled it out.

It was at that moment that I got the itch. I could not afford those cards so I had to settle for the next best thing and get Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duel Stories. I was hooked from that point moving forward. The game at its current meta moves a little too fast for me, but I was happy when it was announced that Konami was bringing back most of these older handheld titles with the Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days collection. It unlocked a card chest of memories for me.

When you jump into the Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days collection you are met with a revolving menu of 14 games. The games cover all the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance era releases of Yu-Gi-Oh! Sadly, excluded from this collection were the PlayStation 1 games such as  Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories. I started at Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duels Stories and I was reminded of the vast difference of the early days. The rules are way different. You can play 1 card per turn and monsters are vanilla, with no effects on them.

You can also summon whatever you like without tribute or you are greeted by the characters of the show as you unlock them through battling in different locations. If you are victorious, you are given a card from their deck to add to your trunk or improve your deck with. Think of it as a time before time for Yu-Gi-Oh!  The Game Boy/ Game Boy Color Era games felt very barebones and repetitive, with nothing new to offer. The replay value goes down very quickly.

I gave a little more time to Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Capsule, Destiny Bond Traveler, and Dungeon Dice Monsters as all 3 were different from anything else offered in the collection. Monster capsule I gave the least amount of time to. Monster Capsule is a tactical strategy game where you deploy different monsters to move across a grid and gain XP by destroying your opponent’s monsters. Dungeon Dice Monsters you roll dice to summon and move around monsters on a grid. Destiny Bond Travel I had a bit of a tough time getting into. I could not for the life of me understand how the rules of that game went. I gave up on it as it was the last game I checked out.

The meat of this collection comes in the Game Boy Advance section of this collection. I spent hours playing the World Championship Tour 2004. This is the middle ground of the Caveman Yu-Gi-Oh era and the current traditional card game rules this game runs. The 3 World Championship games have slight improvements above each other but it is 2004 that unlocked and continued new memories with the game. The Eternal Duelist follows Battle City and was the first game to follow the actual TCG card rules and it is probably the closest thing to current-day Master Duel.  Sacred Cards & Reshef Of Destruction were the only 2 games to have fully flushed-out story modes.  In Sacred Cards you replace Yugi as the main character running around Battle City, and while it’s fun to place yourself as the main character, the game goes back to the Game Boy Era rules.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection comes with a neat feature that allows you to switch through all the international versions of each title. The presentation of the menus was clean and organized  There is a nice little library that comes with box art and manuals for all the titles. It does make me nostalgic for the days of vibrant box art. You have your standard save points as well as a rewind feature which I felt was very unnecessary. In the visual options you were given the options for filters so you can recreate looking at a Game Boy screen or better yet, take you back to a time when you were watching Yu-Gi-Oh! on a Saturday morning on Kids WB. I also tried the online function of the game from time to time, but couldn’t find any matches.

I would like to see more games be released in vintage collections like this. Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collections was a good attempt at preserving the past, but even with 14 games it’s filled with fluff and very little substance. If you are craving old-school Yu-Gi-Oh! and are a fan of the animated show, this collection is for you. I hope they will bring out a 2nd collection with the PlayStation family of games

Note: Konami provided us with a Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection code for review purposes.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection Nintendo Switch

Price: $46.05

26 used & new available from $29.99

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