22/40

By Charles - April 19th, 2026

Being a big fan of Pokémon, I have always been interested in trying Yu-Gi-Oh. When I learned about the Yu-Gi-Oh Early Days Collection, I thought it would be a good opportunity as the games start out simple and increase in complexity over time. While this game did turn out to be a good introduction to the Yu-Gi-Oh game, it's not a good game in itself. For those who don't know, this game was based on the card game played in the manga, and the real card game wasn't produced until later.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters

Game Boy, 1998

~$300 Sealed

~$10 Used

Other Releases:

Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection

Presentation

7

The pixel art on the cards is probably the best aspect of Duel Monsters. They all look fantastic despite the technical limitations of the Game Boy. There are a ton of cards and I never saw one I thought looked bad. Even the more abstract monsters are adapted well. All of the menus and character sprites have the same high quality. The battle UI is very clear and makes sense. The music is not great, with only a couple tracks that are nothing special. Even worse is the length of the animations. Your Life Points go down extremely slowly, which makes each individual duel take forever. Another issue is that you aren't shown which card you drew every turn.

The pixel art on the cards is awesome.

Controls

6

The controls are very responsive and I never felt like I was being held back by the game, which is important when I am playing down cards. Although there is no input lag, the actual menus are really annoying. You have to look through your cards/deck 5 at a time, page by page, and the game goes back to the title screen every time you win a duel. These issues were tolerable but made the game feel low-quality. I also didn't like how the game didn't give any indication of whether a Fusion Summon was possible. If you couldn't fuse, the other card would just get bumped off of the field. A whole UI probably wasn't possible on Game Boy, but some notice could have been made.

There are 16 characters to duel in total.

Content

3

There are 365 cards in Duel Monsters, but there's almost no point in mentioning this. Fusion Summons are the only real strategy in the game - aside from this, you just want to get monsters with the highest ATK and DEF possible. This leaves most of the cards as bulk, which aren't even valuable for completion since collecting every card is nearly impossible. Even if you exclude the event prize cards, you need to defeat all 16 opponents 100 times and win hundreds of Link Duels as well. If you're not on Game Boy, this is impossible. Playing with the cards you're given is more of the same. You must beat every character in a zone 5 times to reach the next one, but you will have to do way more since each zone is a massive difficulty spike. You are forced to duel the same characters over and over until you get cards with better stats. Once you do, however, the next zone becomes effortlessly easy.

Lower ATK Monsters become useless later.

Fun Factor

6

The skeleton of the card game is visible and what is there is very well made, albeit simple. This is more the merits of the original manga, however, not the game. I had fun building decks and optimizing fusion summons, but Duel Monsters got old pretty quick. I beat all of the opponents 100 times to see all of the super strong cards, and summoning Exodia was neat, but I wouldn't do it again. It took forever and wasn't fun whatsoever. The only fun I had was building a deck that I felt was ready to face the next zone. Once that happened, I steamrolled everyone until I was onto the next zone.

Menus for deck building are very clunky.

Worth the Time?

Worth the Money?

I would play until you are able to beat Yami Yugi. Duel Monsters, although simple, is a great introduction to the card game since it's just the fundamentals. Collecting everything isn't worth the time.

I think buying the original cartridge is a good purchase as a curiosity since it's very inexpensive. This isn't the game to buy the Early Days Collection for.

Screenshots from [Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection] © [Konami], used for review purposes.