Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection review: It's never been a better time to Duel

When I heard Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection was coming, I was incredibly excited. It brought back memories of when I first played the card game and saw the anime. I remember going to Books A Million with my friends and buying the Pegasus starter deck. This collection will surely bring back some fond memories for Duelists all over the world. Some of the most iconic games are brought back, with handy quality-of-life features to make the games a little more accessible.

Because let’s be honest with ourselves — these games were a lot of fun, but they could occasionally be brutal and frustrating. You place one wrong card and the duel could essentially be over because you could never come back from that one misplay, or because you attacked the wrong creature. The Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection isn’t perfect, but it’s as close as it could be.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection brings together some of the best Duel Monsters games back again

The Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection features 14 of the best games from the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance era. That means no ridiculous cards from more recent sets like Cyberstorm Access. Sorry, Duelists, but that does mean you get to cast Dark Magician, so that kind of makes up for it, right? This collection features the following titles:

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Several of these games, I played for the first time! What a great collection (Image via Konami)

Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Game Boy)
Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters II: Dark Duel Stories (Game Boy/Game Boy Color)
Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Capsule (Game Boy/Game Boy Color)
Yu-Gi-Oh!: Dark Duel Stories (Game Boy Color)
Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 4: Battle of Great Duelist (Game Boy Color)
Yu-Gi-Oh! Dungeon Dice Monsters (Game Boy Advance)
Yu-Gi-Oh! The Eternal Duelist Soul (Game Boy Advance)
Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 6 Expert 2 (Game Boy Advance)
Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards (Game Boy Advance)
Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction (Game Boy Advance)
Yu-Gi-Oh! Worldwide Edition: Stairway to the Destined Duel (Gameboy Advance)
Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship Tournament 2004 (Game Boy Advance)
Yu-Gi-Oh! Destiny Board Traveler (Game Boy Advance)
Yu-Gi-Oh! 7 Trials to Glory: World Championship Tournament 2005

Every single game is faithfully recreated and emulated in one amazing collection. Most of them will likely feel at least kind of familiar to you, except for perhaps Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 6 Expert 2. That’s the only game in the collection that is Japanese only — for reasons unknown. Several games were localized for the first time, but this title remains in Japanese.

As I looked over the initial reveals, I was so happy with a few of these — in particular, The Sacred Cards and Reshef of Destruction. While I do enjoy just playing Children’s Card Games for the sake of it, having the story-focused games in the collection was a really pleasant surprise.

I enjoyed finally playing the Battle of Great Duelists Kaiba deck version (Image via Konami)

However, what I do like about this collection is that Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 4: Battle of Great Duelists was never brought to America before it and was localized specifically for this release. It was the biggest Game Boy Color game in Japan, which is nothing to sneeze at. With three “deck” versions — Joey, Kaiba, and Yugi — you get three ways to play.

All the games are available at the start — no unlocking, or spending any extra currency or anything to get them. If I could make any one complaint though, it’s a very minor one - there are some games that maybe could have also been here instead.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection neglects the console generation — though there may be a reason for that

Even if some titles weren't included, I'm a fan of what was on offer (Image via Konami)

This is called the Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection, after all. However, there was a PlayStation game that debuted — only in Japan — before the first Game Boy game, and that was Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Capsule: Breed and Battle. It didn’t do very well, which could be why it didn’t show up in this collection.

However, the 1999 Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories — which did amazing in America — is also not included in this collection. I have a feeling that if the Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection does well, we’ll see a second collection drop, similar to what happened with the amazing Castlevania collections.

There were a few games I was hoping to see, like Yu-Gi-Oh! The Duelists of the Roses, which is the first Yu-Gi-Oh! video game I actually played. Hopefully, my theory is right on this point.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection features several useful quality-of-life changes to not waste your time

Need to come back later? No problem! (Image via Konami)

Any good collection of retro games needs a few quality-of-life changes, that’s for sure. This one offers you save stats, fast forward/rewind, and perhaps the most useful of all — the manuals! That’s right, you can even go back and look at the manuals to learn more about the era and the specific game you’re playing. It was genuinely my favorite addition.

Those of you who like CRT scanlines can also adjust the filters if you’d like. It’s easy to hop into any of these games, stop what you’re doing, and come back later.

While the games in the Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection can be incredibly brutal if you mess up, being able to rewind and take back a foolish move is a game-changer. Finally, you can also swap to other regions of these games, if that’s something you are particularly interested in.

The Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection plays exactly like the classic games did - for good or ill

Sometimes you just fall behind, and there's almost no coming back without a board wipe (Image via Konami)

I love these games, don’t get me wrong, but if you mess up even once, you could easily lose an entire duel, or have no chance at all of coming back. Sure, that’s a part of card games, and I understand that; I’ve played more than my fair of decks that can go awry, like Eldlich or Exodia.

Being able to rewind does that make life a bit easier in Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection. You also have to remember that these games are old and can hence often be incredibly cryptic. Thankfully, there are tons of walkthroughs and guides out there for these games, so information is more readily accessible than it was when these were first released. That should be far less of a problem than it was in the 90s and early 2000s.

Final thoughts

Let those dorks online and offline that your deck has no bad cards! (Image via Konami)

Genuinely, the Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection is a remarkable collection that respects my time. It’s a huge collection of retro Duel Monsters games, and I just think that’s really neat. It’s also interesting from a historical perspective. Yu-Gi-Oh! players who are younger, or perhaps new to the franchise in general, can look back through time and see what the card game used to be.

That said, I think it’s an awesome collection, and though some of the games can be frustrating, I think they have also been faithfully re-released in a solid way. The quality-of-life changes don’t detract from the games and only enhance. If you’re a long-time fan of the anime or the card game like myself, this is a worthwhile investment.