CHILDHOOD NOSTALGIA INCOMING: LEAKED YU-GI-OH! EARLY DAYS COLLECTION IS A MONSTER-SIZED BLAST FROM THE PAST
Remember begging your parents for Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and settling for the GameBoy games instead? Well, get ready to relive those moments of compromise because a recent leak suggests Konami is about to drop the mother of all Yu-Gi-Oh! collections.
WHAT'S IN THE VIRTUAL DECK BOX?
According to a leak by Nintendeal on twitter making the rounds (and causing more excitement than finding a Blue Eyes White Dragon in a booster pack), the Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection will reportedly include a whopping 14 games. We're talking everything from the OG Duel Monsters to 7 Trials to Glory, basically every game that ate up your AA batteries in the early 2000s.
THE FULL LINEUP
The leaked list reads like a who's who of handheld Yu-Gi-Oh! history:
Duel Monsters (aka "The One That Started It All")
Duel Monsters II: Dark Duel Stories (Before Dark Duel Stories was... Dark Duel Stories)
Monster Capsule GB (That weird one your friend swore was awesome)
Dark Duel Stories (Yes, again, but different this time)
Duel Monsters 4: Battle of Great Duelist (The one with the surprisingly decent AI)
Dungeon Dice Monsters (Duke Devlin's fever dream made playable)
The Eternal Duelist Soul (When the card game finally felt "right" on handheld)
Duel Monsters 6 Expert 2 (The one that made you feel like a pro)
The Sacred Cards (AKA "We Heard You Like RPGs With Your Card Games")
Reshef of Destruction (The one that made you question your life choices)
Worldwide Edition: Stairway to the Destined Duel (The online dueling pioneer)
World Championship Tournament 2004 (When things got serious)
Destiny Board Traveler (The black sheep that somehow worked)
7 Trials to Glory: World Championship Tournament 2005 (The grand finale)
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOUR WALLET?
While pricing hasn't been leaked (yet), this collection represents pretty much every major Yu-Gi-Oh! handheld game from the franchise's golden age. We're talking about enough content to make even Seto Kaiba consider it a good investment.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Beyond just being a nostalgia bomb, this collection could be huge for preserving these games. Many of these titles have become increasingly difficult to find legitimately, with some fetching ridiculous prices on the secondary market. Plus, having them all in one place means no more swapping cartridges like it's 2003.
Of course, since this is still a leak, we should believe in the heart of the cards but maybe keep our expectations in check until Konami makes an official announcement. Still, if this list is accurate, it's about to be time to d-d-d-d-duel all over again.
Here's hoping Konami has figured out a way to let us trade cards between games, because if not, we're about to relive the frustration of building our deck from scratch 14 times over. But hey, at least our parents can't tell us we're wasting our money on cards this time.