Watch me fall down the Yugioh rabbit hole in real-time? Kinda - it happened so fast!
It all started with me feeling really crappy and sleepy on Sunday. I laid down to keep working on my Pokemon Fire Red Switch save and rest a bit.
I wanted some extra entertainment, so I pulled up YouTube on my phone. (Via my browser, both because Iāve made major moves to just stop watching YouTube altogether and because Vivaldi on mobile blocks most YouTube ads. Itās not a great experience, but that just means Iām even less incentivized to use it. Iāll talk more about this shift in the future.)
This video ended up on my homepage:
This was one of those ālightning in a bottleā moments for me. I loved The Duelists of the Roses as a kid, but I sucked at it. I just didnāt get it. I already struggled to grasp card games much as it was (despite my love for Yugioh), and this one played so differently than normal and didnāt let me input my normal card codes.
I often grabbed every Yugioh game my parents would buy for me just for the cards, but always played them, too, and this one held a special place in my heart.
Plus Iām a sucker for analyzing how bizarrely wrong old game guides were (something I also have nostalgia for) and trying to play games exactly as the guides suggest. So I was hooked.
I watched the video, enjoyed the analysis both of the game I hadnāt looked at in 20 years and of the guide, and was pretty relaxed.
Then I tapped on this one on my homepage:
My biggest issue with my Yugioh nostalgia is that the game is basically incoherent to me these days and this video explains a lot of it. I still enjoy the classic Battle City (and back) era format as a super casual, but thatās it.
This video has a lot of that annoying āretention-optimizationā editing/presentation, but it was neat to listen to an in-depth analysis of this feeling Iāve had for ages.
I took a nap after that. Maybe that was my mistake.
Because uh-oh - now Iāve got Yugioh on the brainā¦
My next recommended video when I needed some āme timeā (and couldnāt game or do much else) was this:
Another video about The Duelists of the Roses - but this time, a dedicated community coming together around the planet to hunt down and document the history and secrets of this game, most of it completely inaccessible to people today (especially outside of Japan).
I both adore these community efforts (and would really love for these communities, Pokemon too, to get updated physical guides together with 20 years of discoveries baked inā¦ SOMETHING more permanent than a fucking Google Docā¦) and learning secrets about a weird, mysterious game from my childhood.
Cool, now I (mostly) understand why my card codes didnāt work and more about the game.
Well now Iām obviously going to try to play again. My undiagnosed ADHD and impatience as a kid made card games difficult, but I can do a lot of gaming things as an adult that I couldnāt before - should be great, right?
I found a single affordable copy of that Prima guide from the first video and ordered it just to have. (Money already spent. Whoops.) Then I went hunting for my games.
I found:
- Yugioh: Forbidden Memories (PS1) - both in box and a loose disc copy
- Yugioh: Falsebound Kingdom (GameCube) - in box
- Yugioh: Early Days Collection (Switch) - still sealed
- My GBA Yugioh games (not interested at this moment)
- Yugioh: The Power of Chaos: Joey the Passion - loose disc
OH MAN now thatās a game I should revisit. I remember waiting in line at Circuit City with my parents and seeing all 3 of the Power of Chaos games on a clearance shelf. One for Yugi, one for Kaiba, one for Joey. Getting a Yugioh game for the PC seemed awesome;- and while I wouldnāt have picked Joey based on the character, I got it because either it was the cheapest or I wanted the specific cards that came in it. (Probably the latter. I remember most of the Yugi/Kaiba boxes had the cards stolen out of them already anyway, maybe that played a role.)
The game was kinda crap. Cheap flash game-like interface, 30FPS cap (which felt ācheapā at the time, even), and lots of annoying Joey lines. But I got to play Yugioh alongside RuneScape 2 and other fun stuff on my computer! How cool.
One other annoyance with it was that it always felt like I was missing cards, like I had an incomplete experience.
Turns outā¦ thatās true! Reading about it on the wiki, it turns out the Joey game was the third/last in the series and you needed the other two games installed to get access to the full card set. Oh boy.
ADHD brain go brr and before I knew it, I had both the Kaiba and Yugi games (big box Kaiba, Shonen Jump special edition of the Yugi one, which was NEAT and I always wanted it as a kid) orderedā¦ More money spent.
Then a plan started to form. I could either: Try and install all 3 games to the same WINE prefix on Linux via Lutris and hope things work hunky dory, or just install them on my Windows XP rig. Looking at the game on the PCGamingWiki to confirm the 30FPS cap memory and realizing it doesnāt even support widescreenā¦ yeah this is a perfect use for that XP machine, anyway.
Along the way I started getting recommended videos like this:
Further confirming playing āreal Yugiohā is just not for me. (The Pokemon Showdown videos like this are very funny, this video just kinda made me sad.)
But climbing back up the rabbit hole a tiny bitā¦ Notice anything missing from my list of finds?
My copy of Duelists of the Roses isnāt there!! Clearly at some point absent from my memory I ditched or lost my childhood copy. So now Iāve built this entire plan, expectation, and even ordered a guide book for a game I no longer even own.
Of course, another trip to eBay, and a copy secured. Thankfully itās not expensive since I donāt dream of getting a copy with the cards still included these days.
One of many reasons I need to avoid YouTube these days is to try and have at least some semblance of control over my own mind. One YouTube video recommendation and now Iām three days deep into a rabbit hole about a topic I hadnāt thought much about in YEARS and spent a good hundred bucks or so. Iāll at least commit to playing the games at some point after they arrive and not making it a complete waste - but the issue is always that the āsparkā is long gone by time things get here, so I have to wait for it to come back sometimes.
Nowā¦ maybe itās not fair to say I hadnāt been thinking about Yugioh at all until these videos hit. While I hadnāt watched any videos on it or searched for it at all, it had been relevant just last week as Iāve been building new sets in the studio.
I finally wall mounted my old (somewhat busted) Duel Disk and put my anime-style cards on it as a pretty freaking sweet piece of wall art:
I ordered these a few years ago from a creator called āOricaā on Instagram. After seeing them work on the cards and post about them, I couldnāt resist. I have the God Cards, Blue Eyes w/ Polymerization and BEUD, etc.
So that plus a couple other smaller Yugioh decorations going in the set technically had the IP on my mind recently - but I wasnāt exactly planning on engaging with it or spending money on it again.
Naturally, one of my recommendations was also this:
Turns out you can get those anime-style cards in a whole-ass booster box now, with tons more from the original series. Thankfully I have enough collectible cardboard that I have no interest in buying more, so no money spent there - but sheeeesh.
Anyway, thatās where Iāve been at with this rabbit hole this weekend. I look forward to actually playing Duelists of the Roses and the Power of Chaos at some point - and hopefully/maybe even Forbidden Memories/Falsebound Kingdom eventually, but I know this will be a fleeting and on-and-off interest. Sigh.
