This game is such a core memory for me and it's one of those things that I expected to stay in my past and not really come up often until like a few years ago it became a popular speedrunning target and that's just where we are now.

This game was straight up shenanigans, its rules were based off of the early manga...like...sort of? But it also went off to do its own thing and. It was just the best thing we had at the time. I'm still fond of it, all things considered. It's a game that's so esoteric and weird and bizarre in an attempt to try and be normal that it just sticks with you.

IT DON'T MAKE NO DAMN SENSE.

..But I kind of love it for that. My earliest memories of Yu-Gi-Oh! are of watching the anime on Saturday at 8am and this damn game. Maybe I never really thought about how much this breaks the rules because of how much the anime just constantly breaks the rules.

On a real note, if you can get past the grindy nature of acquiring cards this is a real short romp with familiar enough characters and cards. The RNG on what cards your opponent pulls is really B.S though, That's unforgivable.

Yu-Gi-Oh's early games are interesting to go back to because, unlike basically every other card game I can think of (even ones that went through major publisher changes like WoWTCG's transition to Cryptozoic or the Pokemon TCG away from WOTC), there was a period of time where the rules of the game didn't really exist. The first Yugi major was played through Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters for the Gameboy, for example. What we know as Yugi wouldn't solidify until Konami's OCG ruleset in 2002, which would be exported around the world (banlist changes aside). As a historical artifact of a card game property without a card game (no, the Bandai version doesn't count), this is a really cool video game to have access to, especially stateside.

This game still sucks to play through, though. I wish it didn't. Even as a condensed version of the card game, with the core rules the game has, I think there's some fun to be had with contact fusions and deck building. If you enjoy breaking out the SMT fusion chart, this is the card game for you. The balance of the game is horrendous, with decks and board states that cheat and that the player cannot consistently overcome, even with proper deckbuilding. You're going to lose a lot, and being a PS1 game, getting into another match takes an unreasonable amount of time. I would have rather the game been way too easy, but let the target audience for this game play around in a sandbox full of cards and effects that would only apply to this weird, at the time 3 year old import title than have the game in its current state. It's not like the game can be beaten in an afternoon as is! There's a good amount of fights and over 700 cards to choose from.

If you want to give this a go, there is an active modding scene with tweaks to the gameplay on either end. As a stand alone title, it's hard to recommend playing through the entire thing.