Okay, normally I have a habit of doing something for April Fools. I’ve reviewed dubs that don’t exist, explored alternate timelines, promoted my books, delved into Keit Ai, and when April 1 fell on a Monday even put up with being hacked by Femt. This year, I wanted to talk about something… still a little goofy, but more on the level.
And you know what? I’ve referenced Yugioh quite a few times and will likely do so again… but even just delving through the Duel Monsters era (the stuff everybody knows and mostly liked) would be more raw episodes of anime than all of Macross March put together. So, since today is a silly day for silly things, how about we talk briefly about the version that can be watched in a reasonable time frame?
Since this is an April Fools entry, I’m going to just sort of do it in an extemporaneous fashion. I’ll still go over the plot of Yugioh and spoil things in broad strokes, but it won’t be a proper “Spoiler Review”. That out of the way, let’s get started.
YGOTAS is a YouTube series put out by LittleKuriboh. It features the footage and plot of Yugioh, cut down to digestible sized, dubbed over mostly by one guy doing all the voices, and skewed for some prime comedy. Some times it laughs at the original, sometimes it laughs with it, and sometimes it just sort of does its own thing for a bit.
Right now, YGOTAS is unfinished. Even if the ambition is just to cover Duel Monsters, it’s somewhere in the fifth and final season, but probably pretty far in terms of real time from the ending. Initially, the show started with extremely low production values (even for a fan dub), five minute or so episodes, and again just one person doing all of this. By the time season four’s adaptation rolled around there was a surprisingly talented voice casts (though some voices remained kind of stupid for humor purposes), and while each episode would summarize multiple episodes of the original, they’d run close to the half hour of a “real” anime episode. There has also been a steady shift from just outright making Mystery Science Theater 3000 style jokes to… trying to relate the plot with some degree of pathos and dignity while also making some pretty funny jokes.
Seriously, if you’re at all interested, just go and watch it.
So, now for the part where I quickly and hopefully somewhat comically summarize what is already a quick and comical summary of a 2000 card game anime.
Yugioh takes place in a universe where the fate of the world, society, and people in general is all too often at the mercy of Children’s Card Games – specifically, Duel Monsters (what we know as the Yugioh TCG in real life), which appears to have taken the world by absolute storm. Maybe this has to do with the fact that specialized arenas (and later portable tech called a Duel Disk) allows the various monsters and spells to manifest as ultra-realistic holograms. As someone who plays a Gwendlyn di Corci deck in Magic, I can see the appeal even if as someone who runs cards like “Toxic Deluge” and “Greel, Mind Raker” in his Gwendlyn deck, maybe I’m not so sure.
The show stars Yugi Muto, a short and cute student in what appears to be high school who possesses the craziest hair you ever did see, as well as a magic pyramid-shaped puzzle that lets the soul of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh act as his taller, more suave, possibly evil, and game-winning alter-ego.
After revealing most of this by dealing with a dragon-fetishizing teen CEO rival, Seto Kaiba, Season 1 follows a clash with a different rich megalomaniac: Maximilian Pegasus. He uses his magical powers to pinch the soul of Yugi’s grandfather, mostly to force Yugi to play in his absurd card game tournament on a private island. Yugi’s friend Joey and his comedy Brooklyn accent also enter the tournament due to needing the prize money for a subplot about his sister going blind that kind of goes nowhere. Yugi’s other friends – Tristan Taylor, Tea Gardener, and Bakura – just sort of come along for the ride since somebody has to be wowed and comment on the cards being played.
Thus we have Yugi and occasionally Joey take on a host of minor antagonists with over-the-top theme decks, including Rex Raptor and Weevil Underwood (Dinosaur themed and bug themed, and played by Bevis and Butthead), Mako Tsunami (The freaky fish guy), and Mai Valentine (The only female character to get serious rep as a player despite never winning an on-screen card game). During this, nobody knows the rules of Duel Monsters and they just sort of make stuff up as they go along. After a brief return by Seto Kaiba to act as a miniboss before getting taken out by Pegasus, we get to the finals and Pegasus.
Yugi takes on Pegasus, who gives us the exposition about how the card game he invented is based on real ancient Egypt magic battles, such that he’s seeking out some ancient Egypt magic items called the Millennium Items. He already has the Eye, Yugi’s Puzzle is another. Bakura has the Ring which also provides some kind of evil spirit to come possess him, but that’s not really dwelled on here or noticed by Pegasus. Through the silly power of friendship, Pegasus’s cheat ability is negated and he’s beaten, thus allowing all the stolen souls to be returned to their former vessels. Joey walks away with the prize money despite being second place and Yugi emerges with the title “King of Games” for his trouble.
We putter around a bit with some jerks who try to take over Seto Kaiba’s company by trapping him, his little brother, and also the gang in a full-dive video game, meet a couple of other minor characters, and then launch into Season 2. In this, Seto Kaiba wants to be relevant, and thus hosts his “Battle City” tournament, where he takes over the entire city (through means of money) to run a card game league with pick-up games anywhere and everywhere thanks to inventing the Duel Disk. Also, supposedly the rules of the game will be followed this time, but good luck with that.
In any case, Battle City! In addition to Kaiba’s excessive tournament, there’s a McGuffin now in play in the form of the Egyptian God Cards – one-of-a-kind cards containing the power of literal gods. Kaiba is given one (Obelisk the Tormentor) by their keeper, Ishizu Ishtar, but the other two are held by her crazy little brother and the new villain apparent, Marik. The tournament and its rule about winners getting to claim rare cards from losers is intended as a ruse to recover the God cards.
Marik, like way too many Yugioh villains, really likes to use mind control and psychic powers, mostly focused through his Millennium Rod and in the Abridged Series primarily effectual on people named Steve. Thus we have card games against various minor villains from season 1, some episodic goons, and Marik’s various mind-controlled Steves who would really like to put lethal consequences into children’s card games if not for 4Kids usually censoring them down to banishing people to the Shadow Realm. One of them even drops a God card for Yugi – Slifer, the Executive Producer (aka Slifer, the Sky Dragon). Marik retains the last God card, Mega Ultra Chicken (aka Winged Dragon of Ra), as his personal ace monster.
After dealing with probably too many of these random goons, we get the cut to the top eight, who will duel it out starting atop Kaiba’s giant airship. These are Kaiba himself, Yugi, Joey, Marik (pretending very poorly to not be Marik, under the pseudonym Malik), Marik’s henchman Odion (pretending to be Marik, and taking some deadpan shots at his boss while doing so), Bakura (Evil again), Mai Valentine (Somehow), and Ishizu (again, through no known victorious duels). Round 1 sees Joey survive Odion (who ends up in a coma), Yugi beat Bakura (who ends up in a coma), Kaiba defeat Ishizu, and Marik take down Mai (again, coma. Card games really take a lot out of you, at least when God cards and the shadow realm get involved). After Odion goes down Marik is also overtaken by his super-evil dark alter ego, who may or may not be named Melvin. After all, Marik was… childishly evil. Melvin? Total psycho. Do not hug him, it will end badly.
The show is then hijacked by an evil plot by 4Kids Entertainment to destroy the Abridged Series. This would be the main plot of Season 3, which the Abridged Series characters, particularly Yugi, are keen to point out is a huge waste of time. Of course, being a huge waste of time that’s over the top and insane even by the standards established by Yugioh so far, it’s pretty funny in Abridged form.
The actual version of the plot is that the dead biological son of Kaiba’s adoptive dad traps everybody in a virtual world, complete with the guys who did that back in the second part of season 1 as his henchmen. He plans to steal Seto’s body and return to the world of the living, while the Henchmen (in Abridged, 4Kids executives who canceled the series) try to do likewise to the other characters, of course through beating them in card games. We spend a long time in a world that doesn’t need to have any logic or reason, Tristan gets turned into a robot monkey for a bit, Melvin wanders around the airship reminding us he’s still evil, Kaiba’s deceased adoptive dad comes in right at the end to hijack the villain status, nuclear launches are detected… you know all sorts of puttering just to get us to the second and third rounds of the Battle City finals.
I feel like while the writing in the Abridged Series picked up steadily, it showed off a lot of growth in the virtual world arc, making something that was clearly interminable actually fun, both by satirizing it (and good ol’ 4Kids) and by actually giving the larger emotional moments the weight they were meant to have. Most of the time.
The battle city semi-finals see Melvin go up against Joey (Sending Joey to medical, but somehow not in a shadow realm coma as he recovers rather spontaneously), and Kaiba take his required loss to Yugi in a surprisingly clean and fair card game for a show where everybody cheats and uses magic. Thus we have our required final match between Yugi and Melvin, in which Marik is convinced to be good and let the Melvin persona get absolutely destroyed. Thus all the evil Melvin did is undone, Yugi gets all the god cards, and Kaiba blows up the island they landed on before escaping in his own absurd dragon-shaped plane because he’s not about to let this go out on a sappy note.
Thus we enter Season 4. Like the Virtual World, Season 4 is widely panned by fans of Yugioh and has a mess of weird plot nonsense, which makes for great abridgment fodder. It features some new villains, a soul-stealing cult dedicated to something called the Orichalcos, led by a lisping guy from ancient Atlantis who serves a giant monster known as the Great Leviathan and is pretty much about giant monsters attacking people (for real, not as holograms), bikers, rats, and plot contrivances. The primary weapon is, of course, card games, and specifically the Seal of Orichalcos card that magically causes whoever loses a duel with it in effect to have their soul entrapped by said lisping Atlantean, Dartz.
Yugi’s motivation in this is of course not threatening any person nor the fate of humanity, but the fact that Dartz’s henchmen go and steal his Egyptian God Cards. That’s a good enough reason to travel the world (or at least to Somewhere in California, which is somehow convenient to everywhere the plot needs people to be) in order to stop the evil schemes of the Orichalcos. Dartz sends various henchmen including random bikers, card-game-players with silly accents, and recruited older characters like Rex, Weevil, and a possibly-brainwashed Mai (who is now voiced by an actual woman in YGOTAS. Also, somehow she and Joey are love interests to each other) in order to try to stop them. This, along with various magical sendings, swarms of rats, those giant monsters… you know, plenty of filler for the action set pieces. The season teams Yugi and his normal friends list up with both Kaiba (since Dartz is trying to take over his company) and Rebecca Hawkins. Who is Rebecca Hawkins? A girl who appeared once in season 1 with a grudge against Yugi’s grandfather, now appearing with an updated design, crush on Yugi to complicate the already absurd and out-of-focus Yugi-Pharaoh-Tea love triangle, and a grandfather who is an archaeologist and supposedly knows things about Atlantis.
In the midst of this, we get a lot more fantasy stuff with a parallel world of Duel Monsters (Which Pharaoh insists is Middle Earth), Magic Dragons, Chosen Ones (Yugi, Kaiba, and Joey) and according to the Abridged Series characters if you care about this, you probably shouldn’t.
Partway through the season we do get one turn that, at least as presented in Abridged, seems honestly neat: Pharaoh loses to one of Dartz’s henchmen, but Yugi prime sacrifices himself and is the soul taken by the Orichalcos, forcing Pharaoh to go through the latter parts of the season with massive guilt rather than his usual partner. Coupled with a sometimes botched and sometimes well-delivered idea that the amnesiac Pharaoh might have been a terrible person in his first life, this does seem to be the crux of some attempts (successful or otherwise) at dramatic work.
Thus, as everyone conveniently meets up and tries to get some photos enhanced, there ends up being a struggle at Dartz’s evil hideout in San Francisco. This reveals, without much of the previous attempts being relevant, the location of Dartz’s real evil stronghold. Since the US military admits that the only way to stop Dartz is through card games, the gang (minus Joey, who lost his soul a little in the process) gets a lift to Dartz’s lair where Kaiba and Pharaoh can team up to beat him in a card game. Despite his attempt to pull soul-searching BS and inability to pronounce his words clearly, this ends up only being Dartz’s first health bar, as despite losing quite a few stolen souls (including putting Joey back in action and getting Yugi merged back up) he goes ahead and wakes up the Leviathan so that we can play a card game against a giant eel monster, or at least use the Egyptian God Cards on it.
And… this is more or less where I’m going to stop. This summary probably isn’t all that useful because of how hacked down it has to be, so let me just hit the high notes.
YGOTAS makes it clear that part of the fun of actual Yugioh is its melodrama, putting huge absurd stakes on card games and having people react in huge absurd ways even if there aren’t any real stakes. It doesn’t always makes a lot of sense, but it knows how to use theater and overacting to sell the drama of something that probably shouldn’t be all that pressing, a formula that’s been repeated elsewhere with great frequency because of how effective it is at being fun even when it’s not good.
Whether in their running joke abridged forms or the ones those are based on, the characters at least try to be memorable. The big, silly themes of the minor antagonists, where everyone has a gimmick, are part of this, and even the leads manage to be loud and usually have a great deal of personality even if they don’t really have all that much depth. Deriving from YGOTAS, you’d expect the over 200 episode run to be a little light on that score. This isn’t Selector; YGOTAS is more than happy to point out that the show finds explaining the function of each trading card to be more important than establishing emotions or character. But hey, at least that way you’re sure to understand what silliness is going on and be primed for the actual products the show wants you to buy.
Even if YGOTAS is a comedy abridgment of a 4Kids dub, it makes it easy to see both what’s goofy or awkward about Yugioh, and what probably attracted people to it in the first place. I’ll be honest, Yugioh was not something I grew up with. While I’ve engaged with it in more forms than just YGOTAS, I didn’t watch the show back in the day, and was a dyed-in-the-wool M:tG player when it came to children’s card games. But, appropriately or ironically, The Abridged Series was one of the things that made me really take notice and come to understand why, even if it didn’t mean a whole lot to me, people loved this stuff. We all had our favorite franchises growing up, many of them were over-the-top goofy and a lot of them transparently existed just to sell merch. Yet these marketing vehicles, these half-hour commercials, have stuck with entire generations for good reason, daring to be loud and weird and fighting to leave an impression on an audience with not the longest of attention spans while also struggling to maintain their stories for massive syndicated runs. It’s a kind of television that’s easy to overlook, but impossible to forget. If Yugioh was that show for you, more power to you.