For as long as I can remember I’ve always loved card games, be they involving standard playing cards at my grandma’s house or something significantly nerdier. As a child of the nineties I obviously gathered a big stack of Pokémon trading cards at school, but it wasn’t until the global phenomenon of Yu-Gi-Oh that I truly got hooked on battling with collectible cardboard. I have such a ridiculous amount of nostalgia for old school Yu-Gi-Oh, and that carries across to the video games. For those of us old enough to remember, the Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection will bring all those duelling memories flooding back, for better and indeed for worse.
When you boot up the Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection you’ll be greeted by fourteen Yu-Gi-Oh games to play, all of which were released on handheld consoles from 1998 to 2004. This means it’s a selection of exclusively Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games, all of which feature characters from the original anime. You’d better believe you’ll be summoning a whole lot of Dark Magicians to assert your dominance against other duelists, because there’s not a lot more you can do in early Yu-Gi-Oh.
I decided (as most will) to start by playing through the game in chronological order, which was a pretty wild experience. This is because the earliest games in this collection don’t follow the Yu-Gi-Oh rules we all know and love, and instead have removed effects from monsters and allow anything to be summoned for free regardless of its level cost. The phrase caveman Yu-Gi-Oh is thrown around in online communities when talking about duelling in those early days, but this is a step back from even that.
There are a lot of games in this collection that have this very basic duelling gameplay, which generally begin with you using a deck full of ridiculously puny monsters. Slowly but surely you’ll duel the same selection of four opponents to earn slightly stronger cards, but only if you draw the cards with higher numbers on them. I must admit it’s interesting to look back at how basic the earliest video games based on Yu-Gi-Oh were, but that doesn’t mean they’re fun to play.
Eventually after playing a few hours of each game though I arrived at a game I recognised: Yu-Gi-Oh! Worldwide Edition: Stairway to the Destined Duel. It turns out the first Yu-Gi-Oh game I bought as a teenager was the first good Yu-Gi-Oh game, which honestly still holds up today. Featuring the fully realised rules from the physical trading card game, starter decks with half decent cards, and tons of opponents to face, I could spend a ridiculous amount of hours with this particular game – and I did.
For those who aren’t familiar with Yu-Gi-Oh as a card game, I can’t really explain everything about the rules in this collection review. But on a basic level you and an opponent will take turns summoning monsters to attack each other and using spells and traps with various effects, all with the aim of reducing the life points of the other player to zero. There’s so much more to it than that, but especially compared to Yu-Gi-Oh in its modern form playing the games in the Early Days Collection is an accessible entry to the overall concept.
As well as battling, a key part of the Yu-Gi-Oh experience is crafting a deck of cards that compliment each other perfectly. The games in this collection all enable you to do this, although admittedly sometimes it’s a bit clunky to do so with lacking filter options. Like most issues in the Early Days Collection these generally smooth out as you reach the later games though.
Once I reached the point in my Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection journey that I recognised my first game, my enjoyment just kept increasing. I uncovered more and more games I remembered loving, and every one of them added more of my favourite cards. Some of these titles really shake things up too, adding the ability to walk around locations like the fan favourite Battle City, buy cards from shops, and eventually even save the world from evil card wielding maniacs.
If for some reason you ever get bored of playing old school Yu-Gi-Oh, there are a few games in this collection that feature no cards at all. Games like Yu-Gi-Oh! Dungeon Dice Monsters that features dice rolling and monsters you move across tiles, or Yu-Gi-Oh! Destiny Board Traveller which is a bizarre Mario Party type experience. I won’t pretend these are the most polished and exciting titles, but they are curiosities that are certainly a change of pace.
As much as I had a good time with Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection, as a collection it’s a little barebones. The extra features it contains are simple things like save states and a rewind function, as opposed to more fleshed out bonuses. Even the added online play at launch is limited to a single game, and it’s not even one of the best ones.
I’ve pointed out a lot of the issues I had with the Early Days Collection in this review, but despite every single one of them I had such a good time with this collection. I’ve missed old school Yu-Gi-Oh so much, and there’s a hell of a lot of it on offer here. Especially if you grew up on Yu-Gi-Oh games you’ll have a blast jumping back into this cardboard time machine, especially once you find the right title for you.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection showcases the earliest Yu-Gi-Oh games warts and all, and is a fascinating time capsule to open up. I cannot and will not deny that it features some bad games, but it also features games I put hundreds of hours in as a kid that are just as fun in 2025 as they were back then. If you’re looking for Yu-Gi-Oh nostalgia then this is the collection for you, I only hope we get a sequel with even more of the wonderful titles I loved in the next few years.
