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.
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