Sometime in the 2001 or 2002 there was a period of what felt like months where my parents and grandparents would take me around to different stores to let me look in vain for Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. The second anime to be based on the Shonen Jump manga was airing on Kids WB, and somehow I’d received on of the promotional tapes.
The anime promised a world of hologram monsters, and still enthralled with Pokémon, I was completely on board. I new there weren’t going to be holograms just yet, but I was confident that we’d get there. After all, I owned an N64, and I’d been to EPCOT. Who was I to doubt the miracles of modern technology?
The hologram projecting arenas and duel disks never quite came through for me, but we did eventually find the cards. Over the next few years I would spend a kid-fortune on Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. I got the Yugi, Kaiba, Joey and Pegasus starter decks, sometimes multiples of them. I still have most of them including multiple Dark Magician cards, three Blue-Eyes White Dragons, the Toon World set and a number of promotional cards from magazines, movies and video games.
I didn’t stick with the anime long, and after middle school my card buying became increasingly sporadic. In college, I found myself surrounded by friends who actually played the game, something I never did. I tried to pick it up, but I never got very far with it.
I’ve still got the cards, a couple of action figures, a DVD or two and at least one video game, but I’ve been out of touch with the franchise for a long time. Reminiscences aside, this post is brought to you by Bandit Keith and his American flag bandanna.
The Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise, as mentioned above got its start as a manga published in Weekly Shonen Jump back in 1996. Creator Kazuki Takashi originally wanted to create a horror manga, then decided to focus on battling before finally deciding he wanted to create battle manga where the main character didn’t hit anyone. The franchise is unique among the big monster battle shows in that unlike Pokémon and Digimon, the manga and anime predate the video games and trading cards rather than being created to promote them.
The manga originally featured a variety of tabletop games. Protagonist Yugi Mutou was an enthusiastic gamer who tended to get bullied, and he solved the mysterious Millennium Puzzle, unlocking a gambling pharaoh spirit who began helping him when the stakes were high.
Duel Monsters, the card game that was turned into the popular TCG, wasn’t the central focus of the manga and only became the primary game of the series around chapter 60. Originally called “Magic & Wizards,” (taking inspiration from Magic: The Gathering the extraordinarily popular trading card game) the card game was treated as much more integral to the story when Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, the second anime adaptation, took its start from the Duelist Kingdom arc of the manga in 2000.
The first anime adaptation was Toei Animation’s 1998 Yu-Gi-Oh!, which lasted 27 episodes and was never released outside of Japan. It was a massively abridged telling of the early chapters of the manga, and it never actually made it to the Duelist Kingdom arc of the latter series. However, due to some major differences between the two anime adaptations, the shows are not considered to be part of the same continuity. This anime did receive a short movie in 1999 that featured Seto Kaiba as its antagonist attempting to get the Red-Eyes Black Dragon card.
The manga and the 2000 anime both came to a close in 2004. There were three movies and a spin-off series featuring the original cast. There was also a spin-off of the manga with the original cast, but the franchise continues on.
There have been five successor series to the 2000 anime, all focused on Duel Monsters. All but the most recent have received manga adaptations by other creators in V Jump, another manga magazine from Shueisha, the publishers of Weekly Shonen Jump. The currently airing Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS began in 2017, with simulcasts on Crunchyroll and a manga spin-off announced this year.
Each of the successor series has introduced new elements to the card game so that today’s format is hardly recognizable if the last time you picked up a deck was in the early 2000s. As a kid, I was disappointed to learn that the card game doesn’t work quite like it does in the anime, and most of my friends have put their cards away due to the drastic format changes and complexity brought on by new card types.
The series has spawned 55 video games since 1998 and as of 2016, there were nearly 8,000 unique cards. That’s quite a franchise to grow out of one man’s love for games. As a kid, it hit me at the perfect time. Its plots were deeper and darker, its monsters scarier and its girls leggier than a lot of the media I’d consumed up to that point.
But I’m all out of words so I’m going to wrap this up. Until tomorrow!
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