I love Yu-Gi-Oh!. Whether it's the anime or the card game, I always find myself coming back to this franchise and its incredibly overpriced cardboard. It still exuded a charm I couldn't find anywhere else since my childhood. The franchise has gone through massive leaps and changes since its early inception. What started as a rather dark manga about a variety of simple death games, quickly turned into one of the most profitable card game franchises in the entire world. But the road it went through was not smooth and I don't think that is better represented than in this collection.

Any problems I have with this collection do not stem from how it was put together and the quality of life improvements. The game interface is incredibly charming and despite all of these games being from hardware over twenty years old, everything looks good. Is it primitive? Yes, but if you're a fan of the GameBoy and GameBoy Advance pixel art aesthetic, you'll be happy to know that these games are presented in high quality and look good. Unlike other collections, the pixels have not been smoothed out for a “clean” high-definition aesthetic. The music sounds very generic due to the original hardware limitations. Still, as a longtime fan, it's cool to see a lot of cards and monster designs be translated in this pixel art style and it's also great to get a glimpse of monster cards that, to this day, have never made their way over to the real world.

You can save anywhere and the built-in rewind feature is fun…even if it can let you cheat at any time. You can rewind the game to reopen card packs that don't contain your desired cards. If an opponent is giving you a hard time, rewind and try a different approach for some turns. You also get the option to play most of these games in different languages, allowing you to see how some of the names of these games might've changed between regions. Hands out my favorite addition to this collection is the digital manuals. They went out of their way to either scan or lovingly re-create the original game manuals for every single game in this collection. That is something that I don't see a lot of retro collections do and I hope that becomes the standard because there is so much charm and appreciation in old-school game manuals. Bringing those back to these throwback collections feels like something that should've been done more often.

There are two major problems with this collection making me hesitant to recommend it at the price. The first is that technically, a good chunk of the games in this collection do not play like traditional Yu-Gi-Oh!. Some of the games in this collection like Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Capsule and Yu-Gi-Oh! Dungeon Dice Monsters just aren't Yu-Gi-Oh! games at all. These spinoffs utilize the Yu-Gi-Oh! branding but the former is an action RPG while the latter is a dice board game. Most of the other games like the original Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters and its sequels came out around the time before the advanced format for the game fully established itself. The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game experienced different changes during its first couple of years. The company had difficulty settling in on a specific rule set. Therefore, these games utilize mechanics or ideas that have long been forgotten, and with good reason. They're not properly communicated and could lead to poor game balance. For example, there used to be an elemental system that acted similarly to what you would have seen in Pokémon.

You could argue that's part of why you would want to buy this collection because there is a novelty in going back to playing games that utilize these old mechanics. However, my second point of contention about this collection is that most of this collection is just playing the same game with slight tweaks and alterations. Does anyone remember Street Fighter II and how that game had multiple releases for a couple of years from CAPCOM where every release was slightly different from the one before it? Maybe the game had a tweaked character roster, tweaked mechanics, or an additional level or two. Before the era of downloadable content, if game developers wanted to add something to an existing game, they had to release the game AGAIN but this time with those additions.

A good chunk of the games on this collection are exactly that, slight retooling and releases of previous games. The only difference between Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters and Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 6: Expert 2 is that six has more characters you can play against, more cards, and slightly tweaked mechanics. But here's the thing, why would I play the first duel monsters game if I can get a better, technical experience by playing the sixth installment in that franchise? Maybe I could play online with some friends and relive our childhoods together but not every game has online play for some reason. That immediately lowered the value of this collection because the novelty of over a dozen games in one collection sounds great on paper until you realize that roughly half of this collection is just fluff.

Does that mean I don't recommend the collection? No, I still think it is worth preserving and acquiring to add to your collection, especially if you're a diehard Yu-Gi-Oh! fan. There is a novelty in revisiting some of these old games and seeing the evolution from how things were back in the 1990s until the early 2000s. It's solid as a collector's item but lacking as a game experience. I would wait for a price drop and see if physical copies will be available. Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection shows that it can be fun to revisit the past, but we also have to acknowledge that sometimes the past can be awkward.