When I was 10 years old, Yu-Gi-Oh was my life. For a brief moment in my life, I was addicted to it. I’d get a booster pack every weekend, I’d take my deck to school, I’d duel my friends during recess. The anime would air twice a day on Nickelodeon, and I wouldn’t miss a single episode. Finally, I consumed Yu-Gi-Oh videogames like a crack addict. Be it the ultra-dated but charming Dark Duel Stories to the absolutely amazing Dungeon Dice Monsters, if it had Yugi’s terrible haircut on the box art, I’d play it. And then I became a teenager, stopped caring about it, and moved on with my life. I never bothered going back to it, as the card game’s ruleset became more and more convoluted as time went on.

I am now 31 years old, and Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection is out in the wild. A collection of every single Yu-Gi-Oh game released for portables between 1998 and 2004, this was made for a very specific audience: millennials who were into the franchise back in 2002 to 2004. This collection was tailor made to grab my attention and hit my nostalgic bones like a Dark Magician boosted by Yami. I am now addicted to (old-school) Yu-Gi-Oh games, once again, as if I were still in 4th grade.

Dark Duel Stories features a more simplified ruleset, and is grindy as hell. But dammit, I love it.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection features a ginormous amount of games, and, sure, a lot of them are quite redundant. Most Yu-Gi-Oh games are actually updated versions of a predecessor, featuring a few more cards or enemies to battle, so nobody will judge you for spending most of your time playing two, maybe three games in total in this compilation. For the most part, you can put the games included in this package into a few different groups, as they share similar visuals and rulesets.

Our favorite Japanese guy with a Brooklyn accent.

The original Game Boy and Game Boy Color games (with the exception of the odd outlier Monster Capsule) were based on the original manga ruleset, before the card game was actually developed in the real world. As a result, the rules are a bit simplified, and more RPG-inspired. Sure, you still have to tribute monsters in order to summon Level 5 cards and above, but you can, in theory, destroy a much stronger card than yours if you have the right elemental advantage. Water cards beat Fire cards automatically, Thunder cards beat Water cards, and so on.

It’s very different, and stupidly simplified (most cards have no effects), but it’s still quite interesting. Those games all feature a level-based restriction on what cards you can put in your deck; each card has a cost, and you have a limit which can be increased by winning more duels. It’s grindy as hell, and it will demand a lot of your time, but it’s still fun, even if it has no relation to the card game we grew up playing (and loving, at least for a while). Reshef of Destruction and The Sacred Cards, released for GBA, also feature this ruleset.

Simple, basic, but it works.

From The Eternal Duelist Soul onwards, the other GBA card games are based on the first few years of the Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game ruleset. This is the kind of stuff I grew up on; no XYZ, Synchro, Link, Pendulum, whatever the hell else Konami decided to add over the past twenty years. More than a thousand cards in each game, tons of strategies, as well as really similar storylines (they are all based on the anime) and presentation. In fact, even if the later games in the collection feature a top-down RPG overworld presentation, the music and gameplay remain the same.

If you grew up with these games, then you already know how to play them. You may think you have forgotten how to do so, but trust me, muscle memory is a powerful ally. This is neat and all, but I do have to admit that this is a big issue in all of these games; there are no tutorials or ruleset explanations. I guess that Konami knew that every single kid in 2003 knew how to play the card game better than they knew math, but for newcomers with a morbid curiosity about what Yu-Gi-Oh is/was, that might be a big fat issue. In any of those games, you start a new save, get your deck, and are told to d-d-d-duel until you can’t anymore. 

More recent titles feature an explorable overworld.

Finally, the outliers, the games that aren’t based on the card game itself. There is a convoluted (and totally forgettable) Mario Party-inspired game in here, but the cream of the crop is Dungeon Dice Monsters. I have written an anniversary piece about it in the past, so I’m not going to act like a scratch record, but let me just clarify, once again, that this might be one of the most underrated tactical RPGs ever made, even if, admittedly, the game suffers from some serious issues, namely a terrible soundtrack and an overly repetitive nature.

That being said, having Dungeon Dice Monsters in this collection is a perfect palate cleanser after playing a more traditional card game for a few hours. It’s great to hop into a DDM match in between some serious Worldwide Edition sessions. Furthermore, thanks to savestates in each game (thank you, Digital Eclipse!), it’s easy to stop playing a game even if you’re in the middle of a match.

I’m gonna tell my kids this was better than Final Fantasy Tactics.

As for additional content, there isn’t a lot. Sure, there’s already a lot of games in this collection, with a good chunk of them having been localized for the first time for this collection in particular, but there aren’t that many extras. You have the opportunity to read each game’s original manual (those weren’t localized, however), and there are some additional cheats which allow you to unlock all cards (or dice, in the case of Dungeon Dice Monsters) right from the getgo, in case you don’t want to grind your way to the top. I think that is a smart move; I never bothered using it, but we don’t have the same patience and level of dedication we used to have as kids. If you can’t be bothered to grind for literal hours at a time for a specific card, this option feels like a godsend.

Remember how mindblowing it felt when you used a real life card’s code to unlock in a game for the first time?

Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection is a collection of games that appeals to a very specific niche of millennials longing for the good old days, but I can’t deny, I am that target audience, and I have been playing it non-stop for the past days. I don’t know if I’ll be able to. There’s no way to defend a lack of extras or some tutorials to help newcomers out, but when it comes to preserving a specific niche in Konami’s catalogue, as well as providing us with a near-endless amount of nostalgic fun, this collection is just outright magnificent. I can only hope Konami decides to remaster and re-release the console games from the same era as well; I’ll be playing them religiously, once again, if so.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection is available now on PC and Switch.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB and Asus ROG Ally.

A copy of Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection was provided by the publisher.