Review: YU-GI-OH! EARLY DAYS COLLECTION is Fun Nostalgia with a Heavy Price Tag

At the end of February, Konami released the Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection on PC and Nintendo Switch. This collection offers 14 Yu-Gi-Oh! video games from the Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance eras in one package.

Plus, if you buy the physical edition for the Switch, you’ll get a Quarter Century Secret Rare version of Harpie’s Feather Duster in one of two artworks. Konami was kind enough to provide me with a PC code but all thoughts below are my own. If you want your own copy, you can grab it from your favorite retailers for approximately $50.

The Yu-Gi-Oh! EARLY DAYS COLLECTION commemorates the 25th anniversary of the Yu-Gi-Oh! Card Game and brings back iconic Yu-Gi-Oh! Digital Games originally released between 1998 and 2005.

The collection will include a save/load anywhere feature – a feature not available at the time of their original releases.​ There will also be support for online battles in Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 4: Battle of Great Duelist. After release, some titles will be updated to support online play.

Full list of games:

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (1998/GAME BOY)

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters II: Dark Duel Stories (1999/GAME BOY, GAME BOY COLOR)

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duel Stories (2000 JP, 2002 US, 2003 EU/GAME BOY COLOR)

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 4: Battle of Great Duelist (2000/GAME BOY COLOR. Includes online battles support).​

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Capsule (2000 JP/GAME BOY COLOR)

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Dungeon Dice Monsters (2001 JP, 2003 US and EU/GAME BOY ADVANCE)

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 6, Expert 2 (2001/GAME BOY ADVANCE)

• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Eternal Duelist Soul (2001 JP, 2002 US, 2003 EU/GAME BOY ADVANCE)

• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards (2002 JP, 2003 US, 2004 EU/GAME BOY ADVANCE)

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction (2003 JP, 2004 US and EU/GAME BOY ADVANCE)

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Worldwide Edition: Stairway to the Destined Duel (2003 JP, US, EU/GAME BOY ADVANCE)

• Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship Tournament 2004 (2004 JP, US, EU/GAME BOY ADVANCE)

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Destiny Board Traveler (2004 JP, 2005 US/GAME BOY ADVANCE)

• Yu-Gi-Oh! 7 Trials to Glory: World Championship Tournament 2005 (2004 JP, 2005 US/GAME BOY ADVANCE)

I have been very excited for the Early Days Collection to revisit these games. I played each one of the U.S. released games in some fashion when I was a kid. I remember some of the weird things inside these games such as type charts and focus more on RPG gameplay and less on being a simulator. They are wild.

In this review, I am going to do my best to not review the individual games, but more as a collection. My final note is that I played the Early Days Collection a little on my desktop but mostly on my Steam Deck with no problems. The system requirements are so low that I feel it would be more of an achievement if your device could not run it.

That’s enough dilly-dallying. The overall presentation of Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection is solid. When you boot up the collection, you are greeted by a spinning carousel of the games in chronological order.

Each game is represented by its box art and a flag icon to indicate the language currently set. You can press a button to change languages on any of the games, with one exception which we’ll talk about later. You then select the game you want and it loads up in a centered frame with a unique background per game (can be toggled off if you want).

Some of the backgrounds are actually pretty cool in my opinion like the Egyptian God Cards for The Sacred Cards. So far, everything’s a win.

Another win is that you can press a button (right trigger for controllers) to pull up a special menu to create or load save states, quit the current game and go back to the main collection menu, access the original instruction manual (extremely necessary for some games), toggle the background on/off, toggle different filters (as shown below: off, TV, monitor, LCD), toggle the frame size of the game, and for Gameboy titles you can toggle different color palates.

Being able to save at any point is always a quality of life feature that I love. I also like the variety of cosmetic toggles even though I personally don’t like the filters or color palates.

Meanwhile, if you press a different button (left trigger for controllers) you can rewind quite a bit. In a game like Yu-Gi-Oh!, I’m not a big fan of this as it feels more like cheating (this is a personal opinion, don’t @ me). This actually brings me to a feature I do wish the Early Days Collection had.

I wish there was a button I could hold or a toggle to speed up the games. A couple of games do have a way where you can hold B to speed things up, but I just wish I could apply a x2 or x3 general multiplier during most of the games.

A feature that I didn’t play around with, but is there is that you can cheat unlocks out from the start. Before you start a specific game, you can push a button to access the enhancements which will do things such as unlock characters and cards. If you’re in a rush to play top level decks then that’s great, but for my own enjoyment I didn’t bother.

Now I want to revisit something that feels like a bit of an oddity. Every game in Early Days Collection has been localized into a couple of languages except Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 6, Expert 2.

I understand that this game was modified and later released worldwide as Yu-Gi-Oh! Worldwide Edition: Stairway to the Destined Duel and that game is included, but it’s odd and frustrating to have a game included that is not truly accessible unless you can read Japanese. Why was this the one title not localized? Is it because of censorship?

Another interesting choice that the team made was how they handled online gameplay. At launch, the only title with any kind of online capabilities is Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 4: Battle of Great Duelist (I want to note there are three versions of this game with different starting decks).

We do know that online play is being planned for other titles in the collection, but I don’t understand why they didn’t have online play ready for more (or even all, would that be too crazy?) of the titles. Due to its limited capabilities and not knowing anyone else with the game, I have not bothered with trying out how online works.

I also want to note that there is no information available about whether or not there is crossplay between PC and Switch gamers which makes me believe that it is nonexistent. This is a very sad thing in my opinion. I feel very strongly that in 2025 crossplay should be a de facto feature (I do not actually know how easy or difficult it is to implement, so maybe it’s much harder than I imagine).

At the end of the day, I think what surprised me the most was how much I got sucked into The Sacred Cards and how much I was ready to just be done with games like The Eternal Duelist Soul.

For this review, I spent time playing each of the 14 titles for at least 20-30 minutes with the exception of Duel Monsters 6 because of the lack of localization where I bounced after about 5-10 minutes because I could not effectively play it.

Most players will spend probably less than 30 minutes on at least 50% of these titles. They will then spend maybe another hour on another 25-40% of the games before settling in and spending their time on about 2-3 of those games for several hours before calling it good.

There will be people who really stick to the various games and play through them all or even most of them as intended, but the vast majority of gamers will most likely only really stick with 2-3 games.

In my opinion, Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection is a fine museum showcase but with a few quirks that can (and should) be addressed. As a massive Yu-Gi-Oh! fan, it was fun to revisit these games.

It also gave me a hard pill to swallow that many of these games are not as good as nostalgia would have you believe. My opinion is that Early Days Collection is not worth $50. After a lot of reflection and thinking, I think $30 would have been a much more fair price tag.

With a lower price tag, my score would increase to about an 8/10 or maybe even 9/10. As it stands though, with still slightly rose-colored glasses, it gets the score below.

All that said, I would still love for more collections like this for the old console and non-Gameboy titles. If you’ve picked up Early Days Collection, sound off in the comments and let me know your favorite games to revisit. Maybe once more online options are available we should do a big streaming party.