Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection: Duel Monsters II: Dark Duel Stories

The first Yu-Gi-Oh! dueling simulator was a bit of a mess, but some of that could be excused from the game releasing while the manga’s first tournament arc wasn’t over, the mechanics weren’t set in stone and the card game as we know it now did not exist yet, and being on Game Boy meant much smaller data storage space.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters II: Dark Duel Stories (not to be confused with the next Yu-Gi-Oh! game, also titled Dark Duel Stories) was released on July 8th, 1999 in Japanese only. We get to play it freely and in English thanks to the Early Days Collection released in February 2025. With more space in the cartridge and a stronger system, surely this new installment improves on the first game, right?

...Hey, that box art is just reusing the
Volume 10 cover art!

The New Tournament

Ahhhh! Color!

Just like Duel Monsters I, this game is a dueling simulator split into stages containing multiple duelists. You must defeat every opponent in a stage 5 times to unlock the next. This makes some sense, since you are drip-fed cards to improve your deck; you only receive one card at each victory against a CPU opponent, dropped from that opponent’s pool of rewards. This justifies having to beat every opponent repeatedly, since you wouldn’t otherwise gather enough cards to stand a chance against better opponents.

The plot? Just a different tournament beyond Duelist Kingdom, again helmed by Pegasus. Who cares, really.

The Stage 1 opponents (Yugi, Joey, Bakura and Tristan) are laughable; I went through those 20 duels without editing my deck once. They’re basically a tutorial. None of them ever use monsters with ATK higher than 500. Enemy decks are once again randomized out of their personal card pools, with some cards having higher chances to appear than others. Opponents cannot fuse their own monsters, nor use Magic or Trap cards.

However, they can still destroy your monsters
if they get lucky with Alignments.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection: Duel Monsters I

Back with another themed month, and I return to the well of Yu-Gi-Oh! Except, this time, I’ll be focusing on older games. In February 2025, Konami released the Early Days Collection, which contains 14 (technically 16) games from the earliest of the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise. I already covered one of these, The Sacred Cards, in the first year of Planned All Along, which leaves 13 games to cover (technically 15; you’ll understand why I say that, but not until next year).

This volume had the duel against PaniK,
also known as the Player Killer of
Darkness in the original Japanese,
because the manga was edgy like that.

I figured that I would start with the shortest games (according to How Long To Beat); but the four I’m planning to cover this month, I’ll do in chronological order. I’m opening today with the first game in the entire collection, the original Duel Monsters, released for the Game Boy on December 16th, 1998. Several of these classics had never been officially released in languages other than Japanese before, so it’s a chance to discover them and experience the start of a legacy.

Technically, it isn’t the first Yu-Gi-Oh! game ever released (the actual first was based on a lesser game from the manga’s history, Monster Capsule), but it is the first to feature the card game that would then take over the anime and be the sole focus of every following series. When it came out, the manga itself was at its tenth volume, in the middle of the Dueling Kingdom tournament arc. Barely halfway in, not even in the finals. The duel against Pegasus is still far. The timeframe in which this game was made explains a lot about it. For starters, the characters we meet and duel are only the ones we have seen in the manga pages up to that point.

However, it’s most notable in gameplay, with duels obeying the, um… elastic rules of Duelist Kingdom. I’ll get there soon enough.

The OG Duel Simulator

Choose your fighter Duelist!

Before the game starts, Yami Yugi tells the player to input their duelist name. It’s not important in the Story Mode, but it is a screen name for dueling and trading with other players using a Link Cable (remember, this was the Game Boy era).

Story? What’s that? When the game begins, your first screen shows the mugs of Yugi Muto, Joey Wheeler, Tristan Taylor and Bakura Ryo. We can surmise, based on the background showing a large boat, that we’re on the ship taking our characters to Duelist Kingdom. Each of these four will say the same thing: If you want to proceed, you’ll have to beat them all five times. Why five? Shouldn’t one be enough? Nah, not here.

Okay, back to that pin about gameplay. The card game as we know it didn’t even exist yet. The cards at the time were the Bandai OCG, a short-lived version that ended in 1999, when the actual Konami card game began and overtook the former in popularity. As a result, early Duel Monsters video games had the bare minimum to base themselves on, gameplay-wise. All they had was the Duelist Kingdom rules (which would later be streamlined for the second tournament arc, Battle City). Also, take into account the hardware limitations: A Game Boy cartridge could only contain a maximum of 4 megabits of data, and the game had to be designed to account for the tiny screen.

Kirby's Dream Land 2

It was a nice day in Dream Land… UNTIL THE NIGHTMARES CAME!

Oh wait, I think I got this wrong. It was a nice day in the Rainbow Islands… UNTIL THE NIGHTMARES CAME!

No, wait, not quite it yet. It was a nice day in the Rainbow Islands… UNTIL KING DEDEDE SHOWED UP!

Um… No, that still doesn’t sound right. You know what? I think I’ll be better off explaining the game. Kirby’s Dream Land 2 is the third overall platform game in the Kirby series. Released on the Game Boy like Kirby’s Dream Land, this one pushes the limits of what could be achieved at the time with the portable console. Not only does it feature Kirby’s copy abilities from Kirby’s Adventure (a limited number of them, only seven), it’s also much longer (a little over 30 levels) and features a new gameplay mechanic: the Animal Friends.

Yep! Unhappy with giving us everything we wanted, the folks at HAL Laboratory give us even more! You see, when he defeats a mid-boss, Kirby frees from a bag one of four animal friends. There’s Rick the hamster, who’s great on land; Coo the owl, for all you people who have a strong urge to fly but nowhere to fly to; Kine, who sucks on land but is excellent underwater, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering it’s a sunfish; and Gooey, who appears only in a bag if you already have the animal friend who’s supposed to be in that bag. The first three are equipped to Kirby when he goes to them after freeing them; they have their own life bar, thus they provide six additional health points should you use either of them. They also put their own spin on Kirby’s seven abilities, resulting in no less than 28 different possibilities. Gooey is a special case, he refills one point of Kirby’s health when he appears in a bag. And he does it with a kiss. Oh yeah, Gooey’s a real ball of concentrated love. He doesn’t look the part, but that’s what he is.

Kirby's Dream Land

It was a nice day in Dream Land… WHEN THE NIGHTMARES CAME! …Oh wait, I’m burning the steps. Nightmares don’t come around until the sequel. There were no nightmares in the first Kirby’s Dream Land.

With still five games to review in Kirby’s Dream Collection, I decided to switch things up a bit. I noticed that if I don’t review the Kirby games much faster, with at least one in every review cycle, I’ll need to catch up on them later, and I don’t want that just yet. I also noticed that I had less and less Nintendo DS games (so much so that I have almost twice as many Wii games left to review now), so my old schedule wasn’t working anymore. For a while, I was using this reviewing schedule:

1 movie or 1 TV show -> 2 Nintendo DS games -> 1 Wii game -> 1 WiiWare or Virtual Console game -> 1 Top 12 list.

It will be replaced by this:

1 movie or TV show -> 1 Kirby game from Kirby’s Dream Collection -> 1 Nintendo DS game -> 2 Wii games -> 1 WiiWare or Virtual Console game -> 1 Top 12 list.
Note that this order can be changed a little, though it should always include all of these parts. Really, the only major addition is the review of a Kirby game in each cycle of reviews, and 2 Wii game reviews instead of 2 DS games.

Now that my announcement has been done, it’s time to move on to the actual review.

And that was BEFORE the copy abilities!
Will anything ever be able to stop this pink hero?

Kirby’s Dream Land was released for the Game Boy in 1992, which means Kirby is about as old as I am. It makes me feel all kinds of weird to know that I’m the same age as an all-copying puffball with a high-pitched voice. Although, contrary to popular belief, Kirby was not always an all-copying puffball. (And since the Game Boy games couldn’t contain recorded voice clips, he didn’t have his high-pitched voice either.) However, he already had his special talent: A vacuum mouth. And the ability to inhale and spit out almost anything in his way. As the cute little book packaged with the Kirby’s Dream Collection Wii box states (the one I'm holding on this review's title card), this is all done by the press of one button. Quote from the book: “By removing an enemy from the field and giving Kirby something to attack with, this simple combo blends defense and offense perfectly for a novice player.” Kirby can also jump (kind of a prerequisite for a platformer, don’t you think?) and fly when you press Up. What’s more, when he flies Kirby inhales a lot of air, which he can then spit back like he would do to an enemy he inhaled. No enemy to inhale in sight? Take flight, land and throw that air!

And don’t ask me how he does that. The physics of Kirby’s anatomy are mind-boggling. I tried to ask some scientists, but Neil DeGrasse Tyson rejected my interview, stating that this wasn’t his domain. Maybe an astrophysician wasn’t the right person to ask that question to. I’m dumb like that sometimes. And no, I am not asking my question to Matthew Patrick.