Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection: Dungeon Dice Monsters

Most Yu-Gi-Oh! games are all about the franchise’s card game. Those began appearing early in the manga’s pages, and it only took a few books before the story shifted to focus on tournaments. However, before those, the manga had several tomes in which Yugi’s alter ego played various games, against many opponents. The early days were DARK; Yugi’s first Shadow Game had someone almost stab themselves for a game about picking up bills with a knife. In another, he burned a criminal to death.

As far as game tables go, I think those in the manga (for
Duelist Kingdom and Dungeon Dice Monsters) make more
sense than the giant arenas from the anime.

Then, there was Duel Kingdom. Shortly afterwards, there was Battle City, which ended up with rules much closer to the real card game. However, between the two, a short arc introduced another game of Kazuki Takahashi’s making: Dungeon Dice Monsters (shortened DDM). Created by Duke Devlin (Ryuji Otogi in the original Japanese), an aspiring game maker whose family sets up shop near Yugi’s home, the game features monsters appearing when dice are deployed on a field. I will explain much more in due time.

These odds are looking good!

There was also a whole thing about a disfigured man in a clown mask, an intense desire for revenge, and arson, but that’s because the manga has always been ballsier than the anime.

Dungeon Dice Monsters was eventually adapted into a physical board game. It never quite caught on, probably due to the complexity of the system that demanded a full board to play as well as the associated dice – not quite as simple as just playing with cards! It also got an adaptation on the Game Boy Advance, released in North America on February 11th, 2003 (though it came out two years earlier in Japan), and a rerelease in the Early Days Collection.

What IS Dungeon Dice Monsters Anyway?

Try not to get yourself cornered.

I’ll open by explaining the game, its rules, and its mechanics. As the name indicates, this game trades cards for dice. The board is made of 13X19 squares, with players on opposite sides. Each player has a pool of 15 dice, which will be the ones they roll. Each player has a figurine named the Die Master in front of them; this figurine starts with three hit points.

Dice sides are called Crests. There are six different  types: Summon, Movement, Attack, Defense, Spell and Trap. Every die has a different selection of these Crests – as an example, a die may have one or two Attack Crests, or maybe none! The only Crest guaranteed to be on every die is the Summon type. Dice have levels ranging from 1 to 4, and the lower the level is, the more Summon Crests it will have.

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.

VGFlicks: Free Guy (Part 4)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

Guy VS Dude

God damn, that section title alone is making me crack up.

The bridge is built, all the player characters are gone, and Guy will be free to cross the water towards the island of Life Itself. Keys, on his way out of Soonami, activates a program on his laptop that activates livestreaming to every screen that was playing Free City. The whole world will be watching this climax.

Dude, (I can call him that, that's literally his name),
your face doesn't fit your body.

The world, including the game's biggest streamers, are
watching the Reynolds VS Reynolds battle.

Meanwhile, Dude’s upload has completed. He is introduced punching Guy in the face. Dude was the work of Antwan, when he was remaking Blue Shirt Guy so Free City 2 could capitalize on the bank teller’s sudden popularity. The end result is, of course, not Guy at all. A buff bodybuilder (the body of Aaron W. Reed) with a blue shirt tattoo on the left pec, blond hair, and Guy’s face shoved where a face should be. Like a deepfake that doesn’t quite convince. And it looks like Antwan put all his efforts into the looks, because Dude is a complete dummy. His catchphrase is “Catchphrase!” and his speech lines are incomplete. He’s ridiculous and scary at the same time. In short, he fits right in within a movie that stars Ryan Reynolds.

We see plenty of scenes from the game itself. Especially
as the climax is livestreamed to the world. We are, however,
never explained how the game, with nobody playing it, has
camera angles that change so the world can watch properly.

A quick thing I haven’t mentioned yet: Not only are we getting the live-action movie, but anytime we’re watching through a real-life player’s screen, we ARE seeing the same events in CGI, with the same level of detail as we’ve gotten accustomed to with stuff like GTA or Fortnite – these scenes had to be animated too! It’s one of the things we don’t quite think about when watching it, because in the story, these scenes are from a video game – but there had to be a TON of work to make all the players and NPCs look exactly like they do when the inside of the game is shown to us in live-action.

Dude punches Guy away, causing our hero to lose his glasses. However, Buddy comes by to help Guy! But Buddy is suddenly very interested in Dude. And starts playing with the Dude’s pecs, causing the latter to punch Buddy to the ground. He falls next to Guy, and then Dude picks him up again to toss him away, before giving his doppelganger Guy a beating. …Yes, I am using these characters’ silly basic names repeatedly on purpose.

I try to imagine Shawn Levy directing this bit. "Okay Aaron,
you gotta let Lil Rey Howery play with your pecs while he
acts like he has never seen anything like them. For an
uncomfortable twenty seconds. 3... 2..."

Hulk Arm VS Captain America's Shield. Sure, why not.

A key element is that Free City contains tons of nods to other franchises and video games. The hidden signification is that Antwan is incapable of creating something himself, so he takes whatever he can and shoves those things in his games. Who cares if they don’t fit. However, we are never told why all these things are still allowed to appear in the game; is Soonami striking deals with other studios and franchise owners to get the rights to add these things in? I mean, what’s next, a game that has characters from literally everything out there, like KPop Demon Hunters, Regular Show, The Office, Adventure Time, South Park, Harry Potter (AGAIN!!), Danny Phantom, The Simpsons, Scooby-Doo, Gorillaz- I’mma stop the joke there, we all know I’m talking about Fortnite by now. In hindsight, the numerous additions to Fortnite feel like they were predicted by Free Guy and the number of video game references that make their way into the film. Earlier, Guy is seen using a Mega Buster from Mega Man.

VGFlicks: Free Guy (Part 3)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

I’m Not Real??

And he is being told this in the one place where he can see
all the ways in which players are rewarded for mistreating
him. Ouch.

Millie goes to tell Guy everything. She takes him to the multiplayer lounge, which he couldn’t access previously, to explain the artificial nature of this world – and of Guy himself. As an NPC, he’s little more than setpiece decoration, and players are encouraged to mistreat him whenever they can. The weight of the revelation leaves him heartbroken and crushed, and he leaves even after Millie explains about the imminent shutdown of his world.

I guess swimming in that ocean is out of the question, huh.

Not fair! I wanted him to make me laugh, not cry!

Seeking further confirmation, Guy heads off to the beach. He tosses a rock at the ocean and sees it disappears into the out-of-bounds barrier. Failing to get through to any other NPCs, Guy goes to Buddy’s place for a chat. The security guard doesn’t quite grasp the part about not being real, but he says that this moment, where he helps out a friend in a funk, that’s real no matter the circumstances around it. Buddy might be one of the silliest characters, but he’s got all the best moments of emotion in the film.

It is hilarious to me that in this movie, Ryan Reynolds plays
someone who doesn't (or barely) grasp the concept of a
fourth wall.

This helps Guy a lot, and so he enlists Buddy’s help. They sneak into the player safehouse, and get in easily because Buddy is friends with all the security guard NPCs in town. The safehouse’s owner arrives, and Buddy threatens him with his work firearm. The player character, portrayed by Channing Tatum, is ecstatic at meeting Blue Shirt Guy. Tatum is RevenjaminButton, the player followed during the Oners in the intro, and has this lengthy scene as well, so his role is greater than a cameo. The character is played by a streamer who speaks monotonously; the character is more animated than him. Guy easily gets his video just by asking nicely; though he does mention Millie's name in the discussion. The streamer tries to ask for things in return, like having Guy say his stream catchphrase. Or, uh, other awkward stuff.