As I already stated in my review of Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links,
I’ve been a fan of the original Yu-Gi-Oh ever since it arrived in America through
the anime from Studio Gallop. When
Kazuki Takahashi wrote his manga about a kid gaining Egyptian magic and playing
games, he couldn’t have predicted the phenomena that it would become, let alone
that his little one-off Magic: The Gathering knock-off would be at the center
of it all. When Shonen Jump gets a hit
manga on their hands you’d better believe they’re going to merchandise that
sonbitch.
Inevitably that meant games across all manner of consoles,
in particular Nintendo’s handhelds. The
Yu-Gi-Oh Early Days Collection puts the first 13 (the marketing says 14, but
I’ll get to that) Nintendo handheld Yu-Gi-Oh games into one package and I was
hyped to get to both replay games I used to love and play games I never got to
before. The enhancements and new
translations made it all a big deal, but I swear you wouldn’t know just how big
a deal it was if you read the reviews.
I was going to get the collection anyway, but I’m
disappointed by the reviews of it I’ve read thus far. Regardless of whether I agree with them or
not, most give a general overview of the collection and come across as though
they only played each game for a little while before writing them off. Understandable, since there’s 13 games and they
only have so much time, but I’m of the mind that even if one were to recommend
the game, readers might want to know which games are more worth their time, how
many are any good, what to expect from each game in more detail and what the
cheats included in the collection can do to enhance their enjoyment.
The other sentiment I see is that it’s a collection made
only for the old-school Yu-Gi-Oh players and that the only people who will
enjoy the games are the ones nostalgic for them. I think that’s both a reductive way of
thinking and not true. There are games
in the collection that, even today, are a fun time, outdated cards or not. I would love for younger people who weren’t
around for them to experience some of these games and maybe get invested into
the card game’s simpler times.
I’m going to review the Yu-Gi-Oh Early Days collection more
thoroughly, less at the package as a collective whole and more the parts that
make it up so that readers can make a more informed purchase. I’ll look at every game in the collection,
give some context of where the source material was at the time of each game’s
release and some context of where I was at the release of some of these
games. I am writing this as a fan, but
I’ll try to keep the nostalgia goggles off.
