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.

If we are talking strictly of the manga
continuity, you shouldn't even be here to direct
another tournament, Pegasus.

After Stage 1, you unlock Stage 2, which has six opponents: Three regular duelists (Mokuba Kaiba, Mako Tsunami, and Rex Raptor), and three of Pegasus’ goons (Para, Dox, and the Puppeteer of Doom). Stage 3 has stronger duelists: Weevil Underwood, Mai Valentine, PaniK, Bandit Keith, Seto Kaiba, and Simon Muran. I still think Kaiba should be given a special boss stage, but at least this time he’s on a higher stage and not lumped in with all the others in just one confusing place. Their defeats unlock Stage 4, the boss fight against Maximillion Pegasus, who must also be beaten 5 times. After the credits, the Dark Stage opens, and you will duel one of four possible adversaries: Yami Yugi, Yami Bakura, Shadi, or Ishizu Ishtar.

That last one is significant, as Ishizu appears several months before her proper introduction in the manga; Duel Monsters II came out the same month as Volume 14, which chronicled the Duelist Kingdom semifinals (Yami Yugi VS Mai, Joey VS Keith). Battle City, the tournament arc featuring Ishizu and her brother Marik, was still a year away.

Why are these four the Dark Stage opponents?
Easy. They all use a Millennium item.

New gameplay, new limitations

That was the “story”. Gameplay, however, is so different it feels like a whole other game. You still start at 8000 LP and a 40-card deck, but:

Alright! I got my Trap Card set, I got my
monster summoned, and I am attacking.

-You can play more than one card per turn; you’re still limited to Normal Summoning only one monster, but you can play Magic cards as well. Got a monster AND an Equip Magic to boost it? Go for it! Equips still boost a monster’s stats by 60%, while Fields boost the stats of all applicable monsters on the fields and in hands by 30%. Your hand can only contain 5 cards, and at the start of the next turn the game will draw until your hand is full. You can also play a whole turn without playing a card.

-There are no phases forcing you into a specific sequence of actions; you can attack, perform a Fusion, attack again, Normal Summon and play a Spell or a Trap, then attack again. The only element set in stone is that you end your turn by opening the duel menu and selecting the "End Turn" option.

The fusion, Bean Soldier? Just 1300 ATK.
Warrior + Plant. Very strong for the early game.

-Monsters still don’t have levels, so you can Normal Summon any monster without tributes.

-A Fusion counts as a Special Summon, therefore you can do one, or even many, on the same turn as a Normal Summon; however, you lose the ability to play monsters after your Normal Summon, so you have to do your fusions before them.

-Trap cards are introduced, with a single space set aside from the board. A set Trap disappears after use, but will also disappear at the end of the turn if it wasn’t used. Which sucks, if you ended up wasting a card because the AI didn’t do what you were hoping to counter. You can play another Trap while there is already one in that space, in which case the new one will replace the other.

-This time, a duelist instantly loses when they can no longer draw.

Warrior monster + Rock monster =
Minomushi Warrior. Buddy, you're gonna be
soooo useless by the time of Stage 3.

Fusion monsters are still created by playing a monster from your hand on top of one you control, but the method was streamlined. This time, Fusion monsters will usually require one material of a certain type, and then one of another type, with both monsters having ATK lower than the resulting Fusion would have. Some other specifics can be in play. As an example, some Fusion monsters are female, so one of their materials will be female as well; or maybe the material must be something specific, like a turtle or a kappa. If you can figure out which combos give results, then you can reliably bring out powerful monsters. There are so many possible combos that you’d need hundreds of pages (yes, really) to list them all. With this system, you can overlay two very weak monsters and end up with something far more powerful, that your deck couldn’t contain at that point (see below about deck building).

Imagine starting with two weak monsters, and making a creature that’s got 2000 ATK or more. In the early game, that’s almost a guaranteed win.

One change to monsters is the addition of Alignments. No, not Attributes; Alignments. Those aren’t quite like Pokémon typings, as they function more like basic rock-paper-scissors. On these two charts, each alignment instantly destroys the one it points to, no matter the stats of the monsters involved:

This table wasn't available in English.
So I wrote the names myself.

On one hand, it means that you can find an out against an opponent’s monster that’s too powerful, if you have a monster with the alignment strong against it. A 3,000-ATK, Light-aligned monster will die to a 500-ATK, Shadow-aligned monster. But the opponent can do the same; you can pull out a powerful monster, only to have it destroyed by the enemy, using the same alignment trick. The early duelists play tons of Forest monsters, which they will use to destroy your Wind ones.

But that’s not the most annoying part.

Ugh, the Deck Building

Early in my playthrough, I didn't have a lot of
cards unlocked obviously. But 2-Headed
(King Re) was an early savior, at 1600 ATK.

Another mechanic makes its debut in Duel Monsters II: Duelist Level and Deck Capacity. The point of this system is to encourage gradual progression through the difficulty offered in a Yu-Gi-Oh! game. This causes much more rigid deck-building, limiting heavily what you can use and when. You earn 3 points of Deck Capacity when you win (or 2 if you lose), and your Duelist Level is tied to your amount of Deck Capacity (You level up once at every 7 points of Capacity). Adding to this, all cards (Monsters, Magics and Traps) have a Deck Cost, meaning how many points of Capacity they take in a deck.

The catch? You cannot add to your Deck cards with a Cost higher than your Duelist Level. You start at Level 15, so your starting deck has cards with a Cost of 15 or less. Monsters’ Cost are equal to the sum of ATK and DEF, divided by 100 (rounded down if the sum ends in 50 rather than 00).

I can use cards with a Cost of up to 30, but with
40 cards and 505 deck cost, that averages to
about 12 Cost per card, or 40 monsters
with ATK/DEF that totals 1200 when added.

The Capacity you have never appears on the
screen when you look up a card; even with 1,000
Capacity, you wouldn't even be able to have a deck
full of monsters at the Cost of a Koumori Dragon.

Your Level increases more slowly than your Capacity, but fast enough that if you keep switching cards around to include your latest and best, you’ll run out of Capacity space. In later Stages, you keep earning better cards, but it gets trickier to add them and improve your deck significantly due to these limitations.

Quite a few Magic and Trap cards also have low Cost. Monster-destroying Trap Cards have low Cost, so they are an easy way to destroy a few bothersome monsters. All the Field Magics have a Cost of 20, which makes them easy to add.

You know what doesn’t have a low Cost?

The sucky Magics that destroy all monsters of one specific type on the field. They cost 150 and they’re not worth it since CPUs have randomized and varied decks, which dampens these cards’ efficiency.

Meanwhile, Raigeki was literally always in the
Starter Deck in DM1, and Dark Hole was
very easy to obtain.

Raigeki, Dian Keto, Dark Hole, basically every card with a truly powerful effect that can turn the tide of the duel your way. Those have a Cost of 200 to 255. 255 is the maximum Duelist level, though once you reach it you can keep earning Capacity up to the maximum of 9,999.

And the goddamn Equip Cards (which boost a monster’s stats by 60%) all have a Cost of 150. Which means that A) if you do add one to your Deck, it will take so much space that could otherwise be used for good monsters, and B) you can’t use them UNTIL YOU’RE LEVEL 150. So you can’t even use ONE of these until you’re way deep into the game.

That’s some fucking bullshit! Do you know what my Level was when I finished the game? 89! You will never get to use these cards unless you've already made so much progress that you can steamroll everything anyway! Why bother? If the level had been, say, 50 or something, that would have been a lot more understandable, it would have made these cards invaluable in the late game, where you WILL be needing them, but apparently, that would help you too much!

Card drops

This article is turning into a rant.

Not the best, but I'll take it!

One thing I’m split on is the new card drop system. Like in Duel Monsters, each opponent’s drop pool has cards being given at a chance out of 2048 (as an example, if you defeat Yugi Muto, you have a chance of 45/2048 to receive a Time Wizard). This game has almost twice as many cards (720 instead of 365), and as a result every opponent has a larger pool of drops, so the odds were revised down. Drop rates were a little all over the place in DM1; here, they’re a lot more uniform. There’s always a few cards so rare you’ll be lucky to ever see them, but there are very few cards with odds significantly higher than the rest; everything else blends together, so you can never know what you’re going to get.

To compensate, whereas DM1 didn't open a screen showing you the card you had just obtained (which means that you had to go look it up yourself in the trunk), starting here each time you earn a card, its page opens showing you its stats, info, Cost, and so on, which will make it easier to judge and retrieve.

Maybe a nitpick, but with the attacking
card obscured and the claw marks gone,
the battle screen just isn't as fun as it was.

I complained about duelists in DM1 having rewards up to their 100th defeat; this game cuts down by still giving a specific card at every 10 victories against an opponent, but stopping at 30, after which these rewards cycle back (at victory 40, you get the card you got at victory #10, and so on). On one hand, no more insane grinding; on the other, very few of these victory bonuses are useful handouts. In DM1, opponents had Field/Equip Magics as early rewards, so you could build something decent. But no opponent here has a Field or a significant Equip among their three victory bonuses, so you’re left with hoping the RNG of the card drops gives you what you want to use. You need a Field Magic? Good luck, that’s odds of 30/2048, or 1.46%! it's not like there would be a point to getting Equip Magics early, considering the insane Level requirement…

Getting an extra card, one time out of a
potential 2048, is NOT worth it.

It gets dumber. The game generates a number when the save file is created. That number changes the game in a tiny way: It has one chance out of eight that the save file will include a cameo appearance by Yugi’s grandpa, Solomon Muto, who will give the player an extra card at the end of a duel. What are the odds of Solomon appearing after a duel, if you’re playing that one lucky save file? 1 out of 256.

What is that bullshit? You could play the game for years, and never see the guy even once, because you never get the magical number that makes him appear at all! And even if you did, you could beat the game in fewer duels than it takes to see him appear! His card drops aren’t even good enough to justify this rarity shit! What’s the fucking point? Why make that so needlessly rare? Why bother?

More annoyances (yep, this is a rant article now)

In other words, in the original, if this is the
screen you see after Pegasus, you might just
never see it change. You want to duel Yami
Yugi? Nope!

This game has a big thing with random chance and extremely unlikely odds, I swear. Okay, so let’s say this is the GBC version, you defeat Pegasus five times and access the credits. You then unlock a Dark Stage. Do you fight Yami Yugi this time? Maybe not! Your opponent is selected at random among four duelists: Yami Yugi, Yami Bakura, Shadi, and Ishizu Ishtar. Yes, there IS a chance after each victory that the Dark Stage opponent will change. What are the odds? 3/4096. Again, why fucking bother if the odds are so low? Even if you get lucky and the opponent changes, you may end up with one you’ve already fought; thus, the odds of you ever seeing and dueling all four in one save file are stupid low.

This game is a probabilistic nightmare! …There you go, that’s the clickbait title. 

If you ask me, it would be a lot more tolerable is the odds were, say, 1/128. Still low, but then you'd have a better chance of seeing the Dark Stage opponent change!

Okay, so there IS a destruction effect on a card
that is beaten in battle. But it sucks that I cannot
see the opponent until after the battle, and the
effect itself is so unremarkable that I just noticed
it from rewatching my gameplay recordings.

There are no cheat codes for that in the original GBC version; but the Early Game Collection includes “Enhancements” (basically cheat codes) for its many games, and those for Duel Monsters II include changing the Dark Stage opponent. Which is good, because there’s a Steam achievement for beating all four. (I have defeated them all, and Yami Bakura was the toughest. Shadi and Ishizu weren't as bad.)

The Game Boy Color version could trade with other copies of Duel Monsters II: Dark Duel Stories, or with copies of Duel Monsters 1, using the Game Link Cable. In fact, some cards in DMII can only be obtained by taking them from DM1. You could, once again, duel other players through this feature. Communication Battles reward more Deck Capacity – 10 points if you won, 5 if you lost. After a duel, the winner takes a card from the loser’s trunk. These features are not yet available in the Collection.

You wanna dd a specific card? This list has all
the 8-digit codes for the game.

Another new feature is Password Mode. You can input the 8-digit code found on a physical OCG card available in this game, and a copy will be added to your collection. The stupid downside? To use the machine, you must have at least 600 Deck Capacity, and it costs 50 Deck Capacity and 1 Duelist Level to use, so you’re hindering yourself if you choose to use it. Alas, that makes it the only reliable way to get exactly what you want, since relying on the drop RNG makes it unlikely. Oh, and you lose the Capacity and Level even if the code input fails, by the way!

The last addition to this game is Ritual Monsters and Ritual Magic cards. The latter cost 0 Deck Volume, while the monsters cost 255 – yep, you can’t play them unless you’re at the maximum level the game allows. To summon a Ritual Monster, some of which can NOT be obtained any other way, you need to play the Ritual Magic for that monster… while you have THREE specific, named monsters on the field. Oh, fuck that! It’s so stupidly complicated for no good reason, and the opponent has every opportunity to destroy any one of those three monsters before you can gather them, if not with raw power, then through Alignments. It takes four cards in the whole deck to summon one monster; a massive waste of resources. The worst part? If you use a Ritual Magic without having the specific three monsters on the field, that card erases itself from your Deck AND Trunk. You want to try again? You need to re-earn the Magic card first. Seriously, WHAT THE FFFF-

-FFFFinal words

For GBC-era, this is indeed beautiful art.

Ughhhhh. To me, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters II: Dark Duel Stories is the perfect example of a game where the devil is in the details. If you enjoy it casually just to get to the end, you’ll find a serviceable (if, at times, annoying) dueling simulator that improves upon its predecessor in a couple of ways; it hinders your progress badly with a whole new deck-building system, sure, but other additions balance it out. The alignments make it so that no monster is undefeatable, Traps can give a fighting chance against some adversaries, being able to play multiple cards in one turn can make a real difference, and the difficulty curve is improved by the CPU opponents being split more evenly across Stages (though the last ones are a pain in the ass). Looks-wise, the pixel art is gorgeous and the addition of colors makes all the card art and duelist headshots look very nice.

That said, several decisions regarding Deck Cost, Magics, and summons, are baffling. The Ritual monsters are a novelty, and the proper way to summon them is so impractical that it’s best not to bother. Equip Magic cards being unusable until you’re Level 150 (you can finish the game without even getting there), when Field Magics only require Level 20, that’s ridiculous. The game is also much slower than Duel Monsters I, it feels like it’s taking an extra second when you are performing just about any action. It feels soooo damn slow.

The rewards stop after the 30th victory against one duelist, after which they cycle; but those rewards are almost nothing but monsters, when some deck-aiding Magics and Traps would have also been welcome. Everything else is up to chance. Then, the game has other chance-based features that are so unlikely to happen you are left wondering why they were even included. We’re not talking about Shiny Pokémon here in terms of rarity, but it’s damn close! Difference being, Shinies are purely cosmetic. The nutty chance rates here are for gameplay elements that can genuinely impact the game, for God’s sake.

That's gonna be an easy duel I think. Well,
I need the training for extra Cost in order to
actually do decent against the Dark Stage.

Let me end this long review by saying that I can sort of understand some of the issues, since the franchise was still fine-tuning itself and how to operate in the world of video games. I really hope that when I try later games in the Duel Monsters series (likely next year), there will be major improvements to the formula. One example I have is that I've read ahead and, in Dark Duel Stories (AKA Duel Monsters III), Level and Capacity are gained much faster to compensate for the high cost of some cards. But for now… Ughhhhh, I could tolerate playing II: Dark Duel Stories casually, and to the end, but it left a sour impression once I was finally done with it.

I’ve got more Yu-Gi-Oh! coming up. The month isn’t over – but next week, cards won’t be involved. We’ll be talking about dice instead…