Title: Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection
System: Nintendo Switch
Price: $49.99
Release Date: 02/27/2025

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Prelude

It’s a known fact that Pokemon was a big childhood moment for me, and nostalgia of playing the games and growing up with the TV show helped me get through the first rough parts of my life. However, another show also helped me a lot during those rougher times, and that was Yu-Gi-Oh! I reviewed the last major Switch entry to hit the States, and I found that title to be a pretty fun way to revisit the card game and teach myself a bunch of the newer gimmicks I had skipped in the years since I had any familiarity with it.

Still, even with newer knowledge of the modern era, I always preferred the classic era of Yu-Gi-Oh mainly for the fact that it was a lot more simple than the TCG we have now, and also because it had some pretty funny ways to cause chaos, before modern ban lists became a thing and patched up some holes. So when Konami announced a big Yu-Gi-Oh collection, and then Digital Eclipse was revealed to be behind it akin to the Cowabunga Collection for TMNT, I was pretty excited! Several of these games I had touched on in the past during my youth, but only a couple stuck around in my memory as games I considered good. Still, with thirteen games available to choose from, I was pretty excited to see the evolution of Duel Monsters games, baring some obvious omissions we’ll touch on later. So, did Digital Eclipse and Konami pull this off? Well, let’s discuss my 50 hour adventure with these titles…

Presentation

Starting up the Early Days Collection, you get a very simple menu with three choices. A very basic options menu for languages and for seeing the credits to the collection, the online mode with only a single game available as of now, and the games.

Here, you have fourteen titles all presented in a carousel as 3D boxes, from 1998’s Duel Monsters with the Toei Anime art intact, to 2005’s 7 Trials to Glory. Right away you might notice a few of the spines on the GBC titles were translated, but it doesn’t appear the boxes themselves were, and since you sadly can’t rotate these 3D models around on the game select menu, you can only see the back of these 3D boxes from a distance by peeking between the games. Considering how great the 3D box replicas were in Atari 50 and the Gold Master set, I’d have loved if Digital Eclipse let you rotate these game boxes here in a similar fashion, but I’m guessing that and the lack of a gallery option were both due to Konami not wanting them to do that.

Still, on this game selection menu you do have a few simple options! From enhancement toggles ala Cowabunga Collection (cheats allowing you to unlock every card in the game right away, or removing deck level limits for the games that have them), to being able to swap the regional variants for every single game that has them, there’s a few things to poke around with before getting into the actual games, where the actual Digital Eclipse charm sorta pokes through. For starters, the three GB-compatible games (The original Duel Monsters and alternate JP versions of DMII and Monster Capsule GB) allow you to choose between the GB/GBP/GBL options as seen in other recent Digital Eclipse collections, which is a very nice touch for these earlier entries.

Every included game also has some screen size and filter options available, and once again we have a very well done LCD filter that looks great for both the GB-GBA titles, though the Monitor filter is also a pretty solid choice, especially for docked play. You even have the instruction manuals available as a scanned option, and considering how a bunch of GB/GBC titles are translated here for the first time ever, so too are their manuals!

All of these new manual translations are very well done, being done from the Japanese manuals as a base, although you’ll only see a flattened box scan for games that already had original releases back in the day, so the new translations of DM1/2/4/MC will not have them. Otherwise, you also get two pages dedicated to that game’s boxart included with the instruction manual scan, and these boxart scans decide to keep the Nintendo logos not present in the game selection menu. Pretty strange choice, but that’s how they decided to go about it. Outside of rewind and the aforementioned enhancement toggles, there isn’t much else they added to the games themselves as QOL features.

So, how did the presentation of the actual games hold up? Well, you can certainly tell how fast Konami pumped these games out back in the day, since a bunch of the titles are rather similar feeling, mostly building on the prior installment. The original Duel Monsters on Game Boy has a very simple set of menus and battle scene, and by the time you get to Duel Monsters 4, everything just looks and sounds nicer, but you can still feel that original DNA from the first game present.

On the other hand, Monster Capsule GB is a completely different game, and has the best presentation of the GBC titles by far, with the overworld giving off a vibe akin to the many Pokemon-like games the GBC got flooded with in the late 90s, along with some incredibly catchy music. There’s also some story scenes present here, which is pretty notable considering the DM games on GBC are very light on anything resembling a story, and yet Monster Capsule decides to fully embrace the GBC and go have fun with it, feeling like a great 8-bit love letter.

Then you head into the GBA era, where the games get a bit weird, feeling both same-y to one another while also not at the same time. Dungeon Dice Monsters was a Japanese GBA launch title, and while it boasts impressive graphics out of the gate with strange, pre-rendered sprites, the music sounds like it could have come straight from a GBC game, and not a good one at that.

Thankfully Duel Monsters Expert 1 kicks things up a notch with a much more appealing 2D art style with a field that’s easier to understand, cards that look more like the ones from the actual real world game, and a soundtrack that’s pretty decent, even if it doesn’t manage to be memorable and still sounds very 8-bit. That’s probably why the localization for the game, Eternal Duelist Soul, mostly replaced the soundtrack and some visual elements with that from the sequel, Expert 2, which was a bit more catchy.

Then you get to the pair of DM7/8 in the form of Sacred Cards/Reshef of Destruction, which throws out the old formula in favor of a RPG-styled structure, with DM7 having some over world sprites that look a bit off-model, replaced by much nicer looking ones in DM8. Both of them have a simplified battle arena, but it still gets the job done on understanding what the cards do, and for showing off the field effects you encounter. The two games also share some OST tracks, which are a nice step up from DM5/6 and sound more modern and fitting for the platform.

Next up, we have the trio of World Championship 2004. World Championship 2004 easily has the most appealing presentation by far, but unfortunately this collection afflicted it with a nasty bug, which causes the game’s audio to stutter. This is infuriating, as WC2004 has the best OST of any game in the collection without a doubt, and it even gets some visual upgrades to the gameplay to add things like text on the actual cards when playing them. A very nice looking and sounding game that is bogged down by buggy audio emulation.

Destiny Board Traveler is a very weird looking spinoff that has completely goofy music, weird one-liners from the english dub’s voice cast, and a visual style that is just not helpful on the eyes, mainly due to how godawful the font choice is. I don’t know why the spacing on this font is so bad, but it makes it really hard to read what the text in the window says. Still, at least the sprites aren’t pre-rendered.

Lastly, we have World Championship 2005, which has a presentation not as great as 2004, but still a pretty big step up from where the series began, all things considered. The music is still rather good, the battle scene goes for a slightly angled perspective that doesn’t work as well in my book, but still benefits from improvements across the series, and you even have a RPG-style overworld mixed in again. All in all, this series evolved pretty well over time, but these games only really got the presentation perfectly done around World Championship 2004, save for the GBC gem of Monster Capsule.

Gameplay

As noted earlier, this set is slim on bonuses, but plentiful on content, even if a lot of these games feel rather identical. So, let’s take a look at the games in this collection, all of them, and see the evolution of Yu-Gi-Oh handheld games from 1998 to 2005!

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Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (GB)– The original Yu-Gi-Oh Card Game adaptation that started it all! Notably not the first Yu-Gi-Oh game, as that would be a Monster themed spinoff on the PS1, which is sadly not included here, nor is the fan favorite Forbidden Memories here. This is just a handheld set, and it all kicked off with Duel Monsters, which even predated the real Japanese OCG.

So how did a card game that only existed in manga and anime form in a very vague fashion translate to a full-fledged video game? By being a glorified version of War where your card will beat the other card if you have a higher attack value than the enemy monster’s current Attack/Defense points. You can throw down any monster in your hand as soon as they show up (still only one per turn though), and there are very few magic cards in the game (no trap cards at all), so if you happen to get a high attack card dropped by an opponent, that card can easily take you through most of the game if you play carefully enough.

In order to even get to that point however, you have to beat each opponent in a tier five times each. The first section has four very easy opponents, so basically beat them five times for a total of twenty wins, and you move onto the next set of opponents, which is a wider set of foes you’ll have to take. Most notable about how the CPUs work in this game is the fact that their decks aren’t the same set of 40 cards, but rather a random assortment from a bigger pool of possible cards for their deck.

This means that when you hit the second tier of duelists, the difficulty goes all over the place. You could be stuck with low 1000 attack value monsters and Weevil could put out a Moth that would easily destroy you in one duel, while fail to use it in another. On the bright side, this means the rematches you have to deal with aren’t as tedious as they could be, but they still are incredibly repetitive, and eventually you’ll get better and better cards. If you end up pulling a really good one after defeating an opponent, that card can essentially become a win button, where now you’re the one with the upper hand, but on the other side of the coin, certain good cards are locked behind beating certain opponents a ludicrous amount of times, to the point I actually recommend using the cheat to give yourselves every single card if you hit a brick wall requiring a grind.

Annoyingly, I also encountered a nasty emulation bug in the game, where the in-game autosave just stopped working. I had to resort to save states to actually beat the game, since otherwise it just wouldn’t record any in-game progress after the midpoint of the second tier of duelists. I don’t know why this happened, but considering others have reported a similar issue and it isn’t present on the original cartridge, this is a very aggravating bug I really hope they fix. Even worse, this completely prevents you from being able to challenge the post-game boss since it requires a reset upon reaching the credits, and if the game can’t save properly, you can’t get that post-game boss unlocked.

Still, this one is very beatable without that, just incredibly tedious with the second half of the game having insane difficulty curves, and a very simple start to this set of card game simulators. Not a bad first entry, but definitely a game that hasn’t aged nearly as well as some other entries. Pretty awful progression bug, though.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters II: Dark Duel Stories (GBC)- Duel Monsters is now back, and now in color! And also with what might be the worst OST of any game in this entire collection, for some reason. Now trap cards are a thing, along with an elemental weakness chain. This means you now have more options to counter stronger monsters opponents can summon, and vice-versa, although the elemental weakness chain is a bit of an aggravating one.

On one hand, you could be dealing with an opponent with cards that you can’t possibly beat, and then you happen to have the counter type to their monster’s element, destroying them instantly to give yourself the opening you need to take down their lifepoints. On the other hand, you could summon the rare Blue Eyes White Dragon and a Kuriboh is now able to destroy it without taking a hit, so it acts as both a much-needed nerf from win button cards and a frustrating new thing the CPUs will use against you. You also have some cards locked behind ritual summoning conditions, meaning you can’t just throw out the Black Luster Soldier on a whim anymore.

Another addition to make things tougher in DM2 is the Deck Level system, where defeating opponents will raise your deck limit, allowing you to put stronger cards in your deck that otherwise wouldn’t be allowed to. This is essentially to stop yourselves from cramming a deck full of Raigeki and Tremendous Fire cards to win everything without a sweat, but it ends up being a lot more limiting here than it should be, since even good monsters with decent attack/def values are gated out by this system, and a ton of magic/trap cards are blocked as well, requiring insane amounts of grinding to even get one copy of the best cards in the game into your deck.

The early game isn’t so bad with this limitation, but the second and especially third tiers will make you pull your hair out dealing with opponents you’ll only be able to reasonably take down with the elemental system, so the enhancement cheat to just max out that deck level and not even think about it is a very welcome one here, and one I honestly recommend for this one more than the other GBC titles, since the latter 2 GBC card games at least balance it better.

Otherwise, Duel Monsters II is a very iterative sequel. You still fight people five times to advance across multiple tiers, you still duel opponents that can have decks made of a wide pool of cards, and you even have a new set of four post-game bosses to take on. Thankfully, the biggest sin of the original release was removed with the enhancements, since in the original version you had to rely on crazy low odds to change the dark stage boss fight to one of the other four post-game bosses. Now you can just choose the opponent and duel without having to play RNG with their appearance rate.

Still, as the hardest entry of the GBC set, and one that feels a bit weak compared to the ones that would come after it, Duel Monsters II isn’t a game I’d say you should pick up this set for.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Capsule GB (GBC)– The lone spinoff of the GBC era, Monster Capsule GB is unlike any other title in the collection, with nothing related to card games or dueling opponents whatsoever! Here, you take control of Yugi, scaling up Kaiba’s Tower in search of Dark Masters, each in control of their own tabletop dice adventure!

To encounter these Dark Masters, Yugi must build up an army of Monster Capsules, obtaining them from capsule machines and engaging in battles against various people within the tower. These battles are strategy RPG fights with a 4v4 setup, with only one monster being able to move per turn. With how small these maps are, the battles end up going by rather quickly, especially when there are less than four enemies to take on, and upon clearing a battle against a CPU opponent, you gain star chips. The more star chips you gain, the more you can use for the capsule machine and to unlock the boss door leading to the Dark Master, where the RPG scenarios take place.

I don’t mean RPG as in the video game genre, but instead a tabletop Role Playing Game, since each Dark Master tasks Yugi with going into a scenario they envisioned, leading Yugi to explore a miniature world map, with various towns, sidequests and dungeons to take up, even including random encounters! Unlike most random encounters in a game, each area outright tells you the percentage of a monster spawn depending on the amount of steps, and each encounter is triggered by a dice roll. If the roll is above the percentage given, then you avoid the encounter, otherwise you fight a group of monsters in the usual SRPG setup.

All in all, these Dark Master areas are incredibly fun, and mixed in with the lobby floors bridging each Dark Master, Monster Capsule GB is a great hidden gem of a GBC game. The genre shift from the usual Yu-Gi-Oh card battling is rather appreciated, and being more ambitious than the four identical Duel Monsters games helps Monster Capsule stand out the most out of any of the GBC games. Definitely the biggest hidden gem on the entire collection!

Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duel Stories (GBC)- The first Yu-Gi-Oh handheld game the West got back in the day, and this happens to be the third in the Duel Monsters series. Very similar to the first two, but with a bit more balancing, and some new additions, as these games tend to go. Now as an added roadblock to throwing out powerful monsters right away, you have to tribute weaker monsters to summon them just like you would in the real card game.

You can kinda get around this through the new construction system, however, since you get card parts upon winning duels alongside the usual card drops, and you can mix and match top and bottom parts to create any combination of monster you desire, with some of them being incredibly broken compared to most of the four star monsters you can summon, as a few of these construction cards have lower deck costs and a higher attack value than most of the normal four star cards dropped by opponents.

The elemental system and deck level systems also return, with all the pros and cons they had in DM2, and the CPU difficulty is a bit more fair, only really ramping up with the final tier. Otherwise, you have the usual structure of these games, with several tiers of opponents you must beat five times to advance to the next one, rinsing and repeating until you beat all the fights. Now the post-game Dark Stage boss is determined by a password or the enhancement toggle, but otherwise this is more of the same, just with a bit more balancing thanks to the addition of tributing, and a construction mechanic that can help mitigate some of the challenge from the deck limit system.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 4: Battle of Great Duelists (GBC)- OK, Konami was just going nuts at this point. Released a few months after DM3 in Japan, Konami decided to rush out a fourth game in the same year, split it across three versions, and hope bundling it with some popular God cards would lead to big sales. Well, it sure did, but outside of some slight refinement the actual game isn’t anything to write home about, and that’s true for each of the three versions.

Yes, they did the Pokemon approach. Yugi Deck, Kaiba Deck, and Joey Deck are all different versions with their own different set of monsters you can use and pull, each limited to whatever the title duelist would be more likely to play. This means some cards are absolutely forbidden from being used or obtained in the other versions, and you were originally meant to trade with your friends to get all the cards, including the rare Egyptian God Cards, since beating the post-game boss didn’t actually get you the God card for your version!

As a result, the actual game of DM4 is way shorter than the prior installments, with a smaller amount of opponents this time around, most of which are reused from DM3. To prevent the brokenness some of the construction cards could cause, a few of those became ordinary cards here, but you can no longer craft 2000 attack point 4 star monsters, sorry. In fact, even classic 4 star monsters with more than 1350 attack points have had their tribute requirements changed, with the entire game being rebalanced to put a heavier emphasis on tributing even to get a 1800 attack point card out.

Anything above 1350 attack just cannot be summoned without tributing now, which both balances the game slightly to prevent the flaws of the construction system, while also meaning you have to rely more on that oh so dreadful elemental system to get anywhere with tougher opponents, unless you manage to hold off long enough to tribute summon a monster, or pull off a rare fusion combo, which I did on complete accident with Baby Dragon and Time Wizard. This mechanic goes all the way back to the first DM game as well, but you’ll absolutely have no idea what fusions did what unless you looked them up, since the game sure as well won’t tell you.

Either way, DM4 isn’t too harsh once you get used to the new tributing limitations, and nowhere near as nasty as DM2 thankfully. In fact, it even is the game you can play online with other players right now, and it sure leads to an interesting dueling experience. All cards are available in this mode, so Dian Ketos and 5000 LP recovery, constant Acid Trap Holes, all the chaos of this game is available in full display when playing online, and I honestly can’t help but appreciate the insanity of it all.

It also helps that you can just eliminate all the nonsense of the multiple versions via the enhancement system to remove the version limitation on cards you can put in your deck, along with the Deck Level if that happens to bug you, so just pick a favorite character and go duel! It might not be as full featured as Dark Duel Stories, but it still leads to a solid and shorter dueling experience nevertheless.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Dungeon Dice Monsters (GBA)– If you go into this one for the first time without reading the scanned manual, as kid me did, you’ll be absolutely confused. Trying to pick out dice of cool monsters you think you need, then attempted to roll them to summon them, only to realize you keep getting random crests that do things you don’t know how to do, all while your opponent seems to effortlessly summon monsters to slowly approach on your Die Master.

I cannot explain this full game to you in the review, it’ll make it a bigger behemoth than it already is, but I can sum up the simple structure of this GBA launch game. Here in this adaptation of the Dungeon Dice Monsters game from the anime and manga, you must take on several tournaments of various opponents, building up your dice pool to become the champion of all of them! To do this, you have to make sure to have a balanced amount of dice with the same level, and then try rolling them in batches of three. If two or more stars show up, then you can dimension summon the monster and create a path towards the opponent’s dice master!

The higher the level, the tougher the summon, but throwing in higher level dice also has a strategic benefit, since they also have higher amounts of other crests. The crests are what you use to actually control your summoned monsters, with movement crests for movement, attack for attacking, magic/trap for abilities, and defense for guarding against foes. Thus, if you don’t build up a movement crest pool, you’ll be unable to move, while likewise if you lack any attack crests, you can’t fight enemies. Once that loop finally clicks, learning the other bonuses becomes a lot easier, and that’s where Dungeon Dice Monsters really shines! Build a path to your opponent’s dice master, guard your own DM, and try to take out the enemies before they take you out.

Otherwise, you just fight in tournaments, and these tournaments are all tournaments you must complete in full without a break or suspend option, unless you go with save states. The biggest downside to DDM is the length of the CPU turns. Out of any game in this collection, this was the one I really wished for a fast forward feature on, since the matches, while incredibly fun, are also so god darn slow when fighting opponents with tons of monsters becomes a battle of patience. Add in the fact this game originally had no option to suspend a tournament, and you can definitely see why this game was a pretty tough and a hard to approach spin-off for the longest time.

Still, even with the simple save state and rewind features of this collection, I couldn’t help but still try to take on some of these tournaments, and doing so had me get a much bigger appreciation for DDM than I ever had as a kid. Definitely the hardest and longest Yu-Gi-Oh game to get into in this collection, but one that is still a fun time, even with ugly pre-rendered graphics.

Yu-Gi-Oh! The Eternal Duelist Soul (GBA)– We finally have it, the first proper TCG simulator! No elemental system, no deck limits, just plain old TCG dueling. Proper Trap/Spell/Monster effects are all here and accounted for too, and this plays like the actual TCG as of 2002, for better or worse. You still have Forbidden/Limited card pools to deal with, but otherwise what cards you can use against the CPU are dependent on what cards you pull from packs, meaning you no longer get just a single card from winning duels, but five of them from packs.

The more faithful adaptation of the TCG leads to a much more enjoyable and addicting gameplay loop than the prior games, with duels that are way more strategic than the elemental matchups the prior, and a bigger card pool that adds more variety to the deckbuilding than previously. However, this is yet another game with the same structure of beating duelists several times to advance tiers. Thankfully, it isn’t five times per duelist anymore, but rather a slowly advancing amount of wins per tier, leading to a slightly less repetitive experience than before. Combine this with a much more enjoyable rendition of the card game, and EDS ends up being a pretty solid start to the GBA Yu-Gi-Oh simulators.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 6 Expert 2/WorldWide Edition: Stairway to the Destined Duel (GBA)- Why are there two games that are grouped together here? Why is DM6 a standalone game on the game select? And why is DM6 fully untranslated? Well, all those questions are summed up by the fact that this Worldwide Edition is indeed a revamp of DM6, and it even came out in Japan under the revamped title as well, also with every language available on one game cartridge. So for us westerners, this is the first time we got DM6, while Japan just got the same game again but with minor changes and balancing tweaks, including the removal of some cards.

Sadly, that also included the Egyptian God Cards, but otherwise you still have a pretty good pool of cards to choose from, so whichever version you go with, you’ll be in for a fun time very akin to EDS, with even a bit more flexibility than that game. DM6 is just here in the set untranslated since it’s different enough from this just barely to be included here for Japanese fans, even though I argue DM5 Expert 1 had the more drastic regional changes compared to DM6 and Worldwide.

Either way, in Worldwide/DM6, you fight a bunch of duelists again with the exact same UIs as in EDS, only now you don’t do a tier system. Instead, you’re playing in the Battle City tournament, and each day of the week allows for different duelists to show up on the map. Beat them, open a card pack, build better decks, and repeat as you progress the in-game days, unlock new opponents, and eventually stumble upon the Rare Hunters to face the final boss.

A rather repetitive structure, but one that I much preferred to the tier system of the prior games, as the pool of opponents you can take on this way is much bigger, rather than having to unlock a bunch of em through tiers. It also helps that like EDS, you have the occasional tournaments on the weekends to shake things up, along with some random events that could happen as you encounter a duelist, such as one duelist encountering their rival as you challenge them, or being ambushed by someone completely unexpected, leading to things not feeling completely repetitive as you progress.

Still, with this and EDS sharing so much of the same DNA, I can’t blame those who find the two to be pretty darn similar to bother playing through both in full, and only one being worth playing. In that case, I argue Worldwide Edition is the game with the slight edge over EDS, due to a better opponents pool and game structure, and not having to beat opponents nearly as often unless you want to unlock secret characters. All and all, another solid card game simulator.

Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards (GBA)- We have another Duel Monsters game, but we step away from the TCG simulators for a RPG adventure with elements from the first four Duel Monsters games. Now you take control of a kid living out life in Domino City, and partaking in the Battle City tournament, fighting against famous characters from the Manga. Yes, this is a Duel Monsters game using the same Deck Limit/Elemental system from the first four games, but now taking place in an RPG format rather than a list of opponents you beat over and over again.

You travel between multiple locations, dueling opponents on a whim by pressing the R button, while building up your deck capacity and getting new cards by beating opponents. The game as a whole is pretty easy, and not even the elemental system or deck limits really do much to put up a challenge, especially with how some cards are back to having simplified effects compared to the actual TCG. Just keep beating opponents, put a variety of elements in your deck, and not even high power monsters will stop you.

All of this going on as you hunt down the locator cards, meet Marik’s Rare Hunter Ghouls, and advance the plot of Battle City, pretty much replacing Yugi for main character role and offering a slightly changed version of the story. This one’s a rather short game, and a fun little RPG experience that manages to bring back the DM 1-4 mechanics without making them feel like a drag, so I do appreciate this one as a nice change of pace from the usual structure of beating the same opponents

Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction (GBA)- What do you get when The Sacerd Cards was considered too short and easy by fans? An absolutely nightmarish direct sequel that stands out as the hardest Yu-Gi-Oh game of all time, and for all the wrong reasons. Too easy to grind your Deck Limit to a higher level in Sacred Cards? Well, all the opponents give you single digit deck limit increases and hardly any money, making the grind absolutely insufferable for using better cards here in Reshef. CPU opponents being too easy in Sacred Cards? Make all the CPUs in Reshef incredibly cruel, and even give them extra life points VS the traditional 8000. Oh, and you have to go back to your house to refill life points between every battle, so if you end up in a gauntlet of very hard CPU opponents, you gotta beat all of them with the same set of LP.

Yeah, it quickly became very obvious to me why I made no progress in this game as a kid, since even if you try your darnest to play fairly, the sheer difficulty and grinding required to even get anywhere makes this one a huge slog. Of all games in the collection, I absolutely recommend using the enhancement toggles in this game, since removing the deck limit alone does a lot to help with the difficulty, and adding one or more of every card in the game to your trunk helps you build decks to mitigate the pain of the gauntlets and relying on card drops.

Still, even with these enhancements, Reshef is a brutal game, but one with a more fascinating story than Sacred Cards, and an actual post-game to play around with, and it’s clear the developers tried to remedy some of the complaints from Sacred Cards, and they overcorrected by a long shot, though I am glad the enhancements in the collection help to make Reshef far more approachable than it was in its original form, and save states can even help for those nasty gauntlet fights. Seriously, dealing with 20000+ LP opponents will wear on you after a while, but Reshef still manages to be a rather intriguing game if you happen to get past the high barrier of difficulty.

Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship 2004 (GBA)– Here it is, the best Yu-Gi-Oh card game of the bunch, as we return to the TCG simulators! And unfortunately, plagued by the audio stuttering bug I mentioned earlier. That really hampers the experience in the Early Days Collection, but if you can get past that/if it gets fixed, you’ll have yet another Tier Based Duel Monsters simulator, but with immense polish and even more cards to choose from.

The next game would take a few steps back, thus making this my personal favorite of the set, since it’s the classic Duel Monsters format in perfected form. Yes, you’re back to tiers of duelists to beat again and again, and even have more duelists than ever this time around, with over 25+ to fight, each with their own specific archetypes, some of which are pretty darn clever, and will require specific counters to defeat.

Otherwise, this is the whole “Tier based Duel Monsters” structure, but at its maximum potential. More cards, lots of variety, tons of clever CPU decks, and lots to unlock leads to this being the longest of the DM games so far, but easily the one I had the most fun playing, albeit with the frustration of the audio emulation. Still, if any game deserves to have online play in a future update, WC2004 absolutely deserves it, and is easily my recommendation if you had to pick just one of the Duel Monsters simulators to stick with.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Destiny Board Traveler (GBA)– No.

OK fine, I’ll review this one, even if it ended up being the game I spent the least amount of time with. This is a Duel Monsters take on Sugoroku, which is just as obnoxious as it sounds. You and three CPU opponents run around a board, duel monsters occupying the spaces, and try to claim the spaces in a weird form of Monopoly, aiming to get a certain amount of star points in order to win the match.

I just described the entirety of this game, with extra board types and linkage maps being unlocked if you win matches with certain characters, but otherwise you just do the same darn thing, with a few more unlockable characters being available if you use the enhancements. (since the original cheat codes to unlock them in-game don’t seem to work in this rerelease) Each character has their own unique super power, with some being outright broken compared to others, and there’s no way to disable these abilities during the game.

Add in the fact how this was clearly designed for multiplayer, and with no way to fight a human opponent due to the lack of local or online multiplayer options, and Destiny Board Traveler is just a big dud in the collection. A weird curio for sure, but nothing worth playing nowadays.

Yu-Gi-Oh! 7 Trials to Glory: World Championship 2005 (GBA)– Lastly, we end on the final Duel Simulator, taking a few steps from Sacred Cards/Reshef by adding in an overworld map, along with the day by day system from DM 5/6, and being yet another TCG simulator, this time with a gimmick of rotating banlists. Every new in-game week, certain cards become limited or forbidden, so if you have those in your deck you need to swap them out. Otherwise, the main goal here is to just enter in tournaments, build up your deck, and defeat duelists on the street to build up DP to buy newer cards.

When it comes to the actual dueling, I found WC2005 to be a little bit underwhelming compared to 2004. The overworld structure just doesn’t feel that great here, and the game as a whole is weirdly sloppy compared to the prior installments. CPU opponents often use the same set of flip monsters to stall out duels, some strategies the CPUs pull are rather lackluster, and there were some moments where I found the CPU to be outright dumb, or play a card that just didn’t want to work. You can also duel Dogs and Cats on the street, which was pretty funny.

The game does thankfully pick up the challenge in the tournaments, but compared to the polish both Worldwide Edition and WC2004 had, WC2005 felt like a step back, trying to mix elements from older games and just not nailing the execution. Still, it’s another solid card simulator with tons of content to experience, but in terms of the pure dueling experience, I found WC2004 to have the edge, mainly due to the variety of CPU opponents and letting you jump into duels way quicker than dealing with the overworld and using DP for tournaments/packs, along with not having the rotating banlist to fiddle around with.

Conclusion

In conclusion, The Yugioh Early Days Collection is a fun pack of many, many Yu-Gi-Oh card game simulators, with dozens of hours of content and a peek at a fascinating evolution of the TCG’s video game representation. From a game that outright predated the real card game, to a very competent if sloppy simulator right before the Duel Monsters era ended and the GX one began, this is a ton of dueling action in one set.

While the game or newcomers to the series, I find this collection a lot tougher to recommend. A lot of these games feel incredibly samey, and in that case, you’re better off sticking with just a couple of the TCG simulators, and appreciating the spinoffs like Monster Capsule and Dungeon Dice Monsters for what they are, and I think you can still get dozens of hours of content out of the spinoffs alone, and sticking with say, Worldwide or WC2004 is more than enough to learn the basics of the game and earn an appreciation for dueling.

Nevertheless, getting the gem of Monster Capsule GB fully translated, along with the other GB era titles, and having the excellent trilogy of EDS, WW, and WC2004 included do lead to some standout titles I feel anyone can enjoy. The Yu-Gi-Oh maniacs will enjoy all the other games, (Well, except for Destiny Board Traveler), but otherwise they end up more as relics of the time, since you only need to stick with the newer games if you’re wanting to avoid repetition.

I really wish Digital Eclipse had more of their usual historical aspects in this collection, since otherwise as of now, it just feels like a very nice handheld collection of Yu-Gi-Oh games, with not much else to it. Add in the fact two of the games are bugged in some way, one of which destroys the audio of the game with the best OST, and this collection definitely could have been a lot better. If it wasn’t for the sheer quality of Monster Capsule GB and the length of some of these games, I’d honestly find this tough to recommend as a whole.

Thankfully, the games do the talking here, and I find some of these games are absolutely worth everyone’s time. If you happen to click with one of the GBA simulators and want more of that action? Well, there’s only around several more games mandating you win a hundred duels each to go through, so you’ll be kept well busy for a long, long time.

I give Yu-Gi-Oh: Early Days Collection an 8 out of 10.