Konami’s new Yu-Gi-Oh video game collection is a bizarre time capsule, containing the first efforts at translating the popular card game to a video game format. Some of these games don’t even directly relate to the card game: Capsule Monsters, Dungeon Dice Monsters, and Destiny Board Traveler are all more board game than card game. While some of these games might be familiar to long term Yu-Gi-Oh fans, a handful of them have never released outside of Japan before.
The first game in the collection is for the original Game Boy. This game epitomizes what is now jokingly called “caveman Yu-Gi-Oh!”. The basics of the game of Yu-Gi-Oh are present: monsters can be set in attack or defense mode, and the difference between two attack mode monsters is subtracted from the loser’s life points after battle. Here is where things get more complicated, or perhaps more simple. Trap cards, a staple of the card game, are entirely absent. Spell cards can be used, but using one substitutes for a summoning. Few outside of the famous “Raigeki” (which destroys all opponent monsters) are worth including in a deck. A particularly annoying difference is monsters cannot simply be left in attack mode. Every monster must either attack an enemy monster or defend. Monsters can fuse by overlaying on top of each other, but a failed fusion results in the original monster being replaced by the new one. The music is restricted by the Game Boy’s technical limitations, and one repetitive song plays on loop throughout the entire game.
Next, we come to the “Dark Duel Stories” games. The first Game Boy Color game, Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duel Stories was not released in America originally. However, its sequel, known in Japan as Tri Holy God Advent, was localized with the “Dark Duel Stories” name to Game Boy Color in the United States, possibly to avoid offending Americans with the grandiose religious title of the Japanese version. The Game Boy Color games are a significant improvement. The most significant of these is adding type advantages to make the game less reliant on “beat stick” monsters and adding an element of RPG style strategy. These games also add the tribute summoning mechanic. The absence of tribute requirements in the original Game Boy game allows you to summon a 3000 Attack Point beast like Blue Eyes White Dragon without sacrificing a weaker monster. The addition of tribute summoning and more fusions adds more balance variety to the game.
After Tri Holy God Advent (which has some unique features like custom card combinations but is otherwise similar to Dark Duel Stories), there are a unique trilogy of games. There are three separate versions of the fourth Yu-Gi-Oh game, featuring somewhat different card pools based on Joey, Kaiba, and Yugi’s decks. The basic challenge in each game from the Game Boy Color era is the same: defeat each duelist five times to advance to the next page of duelists. Win a duel, get a card. This can be slow and grindy, so these early games may be difficult to get into for modern players. Duels with even the weakest anime characters like Rex Raptor often progress slowly due to opponents putting up a high defense monster as a wall and waiting for you to run out of cards.
The Game Boy Advance era makes significant progress towards a more realistic portrayal of the Yu-Gi-Oh card game, but it’s often one step forward, two steps back. Some games like Eternal Duelist Soul, Stairway to the Destined Duel, World Championship 2004 and 2005: 7 Trials to Glory all contain basically accurate rulesets with multiple phases, no type advantages, and tournaments. For anyone wishing to experience the card game meta of the early 2000s, these games will provide hours of entertainment. The World Championship games even contain era-accurate rotating banned card lists, and were used in official tournaments in the 2000s.
However intermixed with these were games which reflected the unusual rules of the Game Boy Color era games, like the Sacred Cards and Reshef of Destruction. The Sacred Cards is an easy but fun card game RPG hybrid which covers the Battle City arc of the anime, but its sequel Reshef of Destruction is notorious for its difficulty. Reshef is a massive grind, forcing you to duel weaker duelists like Tristan hundreds of times to build up your “deck capacity”, an artificial means of limiting you from using stronger cards. Fortunately, the new collection includes features which allow you to cheat the games, like altering deck capacity and rewinding for up to sixty seconds to test fusion combinations.
People who never read the original Yu-Gi-Oh manga may be surprised to see that there are other games included here as well. Destiny Board Traveler is an attempt at creating a Yu-Gi-Oh party game akin to Mario Party, although it fails to explain the rules and feels minimally interactive. Capsule Monsters, the game Seto Kaiba’s brother plays in his first appearances, is a Game Boy Color game included here for the first time in English. Unlike other Color era Yu-Gi-Oh games, it includes an overworld and character sprites, resembling the Pokemon Trading Card Game released on Game Boy Color. This game and Dungeon Dice Monsters focus on monsters moving around on a grid and battling, similar to the experimental console games Capsule Monsters Breed and Battle, Duelist of the Roses, and Capsule Monsters Colosseum. Those early console games are not included in this collection, which may disappoint fans hoping to revisit PS1 relics like Forbidden Memories.
One other drawback is that one game, Duel Monsters 6 Expert 2, is only included in Japanese, although the somewhat different International Version is available in English. All the games include characters from the anime, and even manga exclusive characters like Puppeteer. These games are very much a product of their time, for good or for ill. Still, if you are yearning for a simpler era of Yu-Gi-Oh, before there were many different summoning mechanics and complicated effect monsters, this is the collection for you.
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