If you were to try and narrow the entire range of TCGs out there down to the “big three”, you’d surely land on Magic the Gathering, Pokemon TCG, and Yu-Gi-Oh!. Of those three, Yu-Gi-Oh is the one that has relied the most on console video games to build the fanbase. Konami, which has always been the publisher behind those video games, has been… prolific with the property, to say the least, and thanks to that, we now have the Yi-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection.
This is a collection of 14(!) games, all set within the Yu-Gi-Oh! universe, and were released on the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, or Game Boy Advance. The earliest title in the collection is the original Game Boy’s Duel Monsters, and the collection takes you right through to 7 Trials to Glory: World Championship Tournament 2005. Not all of the titles in the collection are the traditional card game, and not all of them are particularly well respected. I think I might be the only person who loves Dungeon Dice Monsters, for example (I really loved Dungeon Dice Monsters and loved having an excuse to play that again), but it’s hard to deny that this is a genuine effort by Konami to represent the early days of its work with Yu-Gi-Oh! in one collection. As a nice bonus for series fans, some of the games weren’t released outside of Japan.
If only there was more work with the ports. The features are pretty thin, for a start. You get a couple of options for visual filters and screen sizes. There’s also a rewind button so you can “take back” a move if you didn’t like the result (we call that “cheating”, for the record). But that’s about it. Connectivity features are exceedingly limited, for a start. Duel Monsters 4 is the only title to currently support online play. More will be patched in later, apparently, but for now with most games all the trading and match play features simply return a “not available in this game” error when you try and select them. It’s not a good look given the social nature of trading card games (the “trading” bit there kind of gives it away).
An even bigger issue, however, is that some of the GBA games (in particular) are less pleasant to look like than they should be, with fuzzy text and some poor quality filters. It is possible to emulate GBA games well on Switch – Nintendo Online demonstrates that itself, but Konami itself has also done so with the GBA Castlevania collection. I’m not quite sure what went wrong with the emulation of these games.
Meanwhile, your mileage with the games themselves will be very hit-and-miss, and going back and playing Yu-Gi-Oh!’s early titles has reminded me of just how far these games – and trading card games in general – have come. In the early days of Yu-Gi-Oh!, victory very much came down to having more powerful cards in your deck than your opponent. If you have plenty of 2000 attack/2000 defence cards and your opponent only has 1500 attack/1500 defence cards then you’re going to win every time. What that means is that you’re in for a big grind playing those games, where you’ll need to play weaker opponents over and over and over again because with every victory you’ll get one new card, and through a lottery you’ll slowly end up with a powerful enough deck to take on the next tier of opponent. There is very little room to win with superior tactics, is the point. It’s all down to a case of those that have the strongest deck with the biggest numbers win.
There are some additional mechanics that are important to learn, most critically fusion, and it’s worth noting that these early Yu-Gi-Oh! titles don’t have tutorials. The developers have included the instruction manuals (which I highly recommend you do read), but those are also incomplete in learning Yu-Gi-Oh! so unless you’re already very comfortable with the card game and play it regularly you’ll need to go refresh your understanding of the game elsewhere. It’s also worth noting that outside of playing the card game, almost all of these titles are very… efficient. Most of them have a minimalist narrative (or, simply, none at all), or any features beyond building decks and playing the card game. That may or may not matter to you, but I’d like to think most people enjoy having some kind of context to the action, and in these early days of Yu-Gi-Oh! that didn’t really happen.
Finally, now that Digital Eclipse has pioneered the “digital museum” format with titles like Atari 50 and Tetris Forever, a retro collection that is really just a collection of old games isn’t good enough any more. Previous Konami retro collections have done some great things (such as the total remake of the arcade Haunted Castle in one of the Castlevania collections), but this is pedestrian. We didn’t necessarily need to have documentary interviews and the like, but art galleries or similarly small bonus features would have gone a long way to make this collection feel like a celebration rather than a ROM dumping ground.
Yu-Gi-Oh! has come a long way in the years since these titles, both as a card game to play (many might argue that it’s too complex now) and as something to adapt to video games. This collection is a lot of nostalgic fun to remember the simpler times, but is also important to understand just how limited these games are. It would be like if EA put together a retro compilation of its FIFA football games. Sure, you’d have a rush of nostalgic delight loading up the GBA game that you spent months playing back in the day, but it would only take one or two matches to realise that nostalgia has a habit of warping memories and not all classic video games are timeless. Some are. Konami’s Castlevania collections show that. I fully expect the impending Suikoden collection to be a similar story. These, however, are not.
