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Card Game Featured Writers Releases + Spoilers Anime Video Games Other
Magic
This Space |
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Baneful's Column
Duelist Kingdom was the nostalgia bomb that started it all.
Originally the Japanese manga involved other games (not just
Duel Monsters) and was a bit dark, but eventually the manga
strip that focused on a card game (then named Magic and
Wizards) was so popular, Kazuki Takahashi wanted to focus on
it. And he also made it less explicit to appeal to a
wider audience.
So, the anime begins right off with Yugi Muto, a short shy
kid who originally was bullied and had difficulty making
friends, but in finding the ancient magical item, the
Millennium Puzzle, he met his first friend Yami-Yugi (an
enigmatic alter ego from the Puzzle, from thousands of years
ago) who co-inhabits Yugi's body.
In doing this, Yami gives Yugi the confidence he needs to
meet his other friends such as Tea, Joey, Tristan, et al.
And friendship is one of the core motifs that is ingrained
into the viewer time and time again.
Then and Now
The manga was made for older audience, but cartoons needed
to be marketed for kids. The theme of friendship was
emphasized in the anime, ad nauseum to some, since parents
generally want their little ones to watch shows with moral
lessons to them - not just escapism. Fans of the card
game who are older do find the friendship speeches hokey and
the need to explain every minutia a bit frivolous.
Nothing will stop parents from finding the show tedious and
boring, but it makes it easier for younger impressionable
kids.
Duels are paced relatively slowly and each card's effect
(though most monsters don't have an effect to begin with) is
explained so that newer players are kept in the loop.
Also, a lot of the characters (like Weevil, Rex, Mai, etc.)
were zany, over-the-top and unrealistic when it came to
their personality and motivations.
There's a rule for storytelling in literature and cinema:
Show - don't tell. Let them figure it out for
themselves. Don't use characters as a mouthpiece.
But for a show targeted to a young audience, young 10 year
old Baneful probably wouldn't have understood the subtext.
Kids aren't really mature enough to get subtlety yet,
though.
In many cartoons, there are entendres and cultural
references in there that only older teens and adults would
get. It adds a certain dimension, in that you can
watch the same show 10 years later and get something
different out of it, that totally went over your head
before. The Yugioh anime is different, and maybe
that's the beauty of it: It's exactly the same as it was
whenever we last left it.
Easy it is for me to deconstruct a children's cartoon with
an adult lens, but there must have been a lot of merit to it
if I both adored it as a kid and occasionally rewatch it now
on Hulu and Netflix.
Takahashi did a great job creating a world full of magic,
mysteries and new things to constantly be discovered.
New monsters to collect, new spells and traps to spice up
the duels, the arcanity of the Millennium Items as well as
Yami's past.
The Mechanics
The reason why Duelist Kingdom is a great introduction to
the series is because it introduces its elements in bits and
pieces without overwhelming the viewer with spoonfuls of it
directly. Although, the most significant part of the
plot doesn't happen until the 5th season of the original
anime series, Dawn of the Duel, the seasons before allow it
to build up very well.
The plot is simple. Pegasus, magnate and creator of
duel monsters, kidnaps Yugi's grandpa and Yugi is invited
into his tournament to save his grandpa. This
tournament was used to lure in people with Millennium Items,
like Yugi, as Pegasus was corrupted by the Millennium Eye
and wants more Millennium Items.
The tournament also attracts and introduces Bakura, an
innocent angelic person corrupted by a malicious alter ego
of the Millennium Ring. Bakura would serve an
important role later on, but the first season effectively
foreshadows his role.
Another key facet to the plot is the rivalry between Seto
Kaiba (symbolized by the Blue-Eyes White Dragon) and Yugi
Muto (symbolized by the Dark Magician). Yugi defeats
Kaiba in a duel, banishes the evil side of his spirit to the
shadow realm and at that point, Kaiba seeks to beat Yugi in
a duel so he could reclaim his #1 status as the world's best
duelist.
There is a deeper connection between Yugi and Kaiba that
slowly unravels throughout the series, but it's up to the
viewer to figure it out. Showing only 3 Millennium
Items gives the viewer some space to compare what they have
in common and their overall link in the lore's history
without overwhelming them.
If we want to get even more plain obvious into what makes
Duelist Kingdom so iconic, for both better and worse, it's
the gameplay of the duels. The rules of Duelist
Kingdom were different than those of the actual Trading Card
Game. There were only 2000 life points (instead of
8000), direct attacks were not allowed if the opponent had
viable monsters to defend with and players didn't have to
tribute to summon high level monsters.
What kept the game balanced in the anime was the fact that
strong LV6 and higher monsters were rare and hard to come by
so the duelists couldn't just pack their decks full of them.
But the duels were simplistic. It would consist of
purely monsters attacking other monsters.
Occasionally, there would be a spell or trap card, but
otherwise it was very strategy-light.
There were often moments where characters would overanalyze
a simple play (like summoning a weak monster) under the
pretense of it being a complex strategy. There were
also the notorious moments when cards would have strange
effects they don't actually have in real life.
For example, Mystical Moon "washes away the opponent's
ocean", Machine monsters are unaffected by magic-based
attacks and Labyrinth Wall turns the field into a 3D spatial
maze. But it's important to keep it in context because
Duelist Kingdom was written before the actual card game
itself was being developed.
So, at the time they didn't have much to work with.
They needed to inject some flavor (a bit of surprise factor)
in it with made up effects and rules such as terrain-based
ATK power boosts and so on.
Yin and Yang
There's a lot of memorable moments in the first season,
Duelist Kingdom. The duel between Yugi and Bakura,
where each character was spirit live in the duel. The
tag team duel against Para and Dox. Seeing Kaiba's
Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon was pretty badass.
In a rare flash of depth for the young anime, the loss Yugi
suffers from Kaiba in their second face-off atop Pegasus'
castle adds a lot to the story and heavily foreshadows the
issues that Yugi and Yami-Yugi both face.
Yugi was the shy timid boy who taught Yami-Yugi friendship
and compassion. In turn, Yami-Yugi, as an older
mentor, taught Yugi how to be more confident and assertive.
The two sides ultimately are in distress in the duel where
Kaiba threatens to commit suicide if he loses. Yami-Yugi
sees winning the duel as the most pragmatic way of saving
the world from Pegasus, whereas Yugi sees killing Kaiba as
morally wrong in absolute terms.
Yugi forfeited the duel to save Kaiba's life, but this
resulted in a distrust toward Yami-Yugi and lack of self
confidence overall. This scarred Yugi for quite a
while in the season, but it showed that the relationship
between Yami-Yugi and Yugi is two-sided, they would need to
work their differences out and both learn from each other.
It demonstrated to the viewer that they don't necessarily
have everything figured out and that the deep dark mysteries
hidden beneath the surface of the Yugioh lore were far from
being solved.
To wrap things up, Duelist Kingdom might not be the deepest
season as far as gameplay goes, the most profound in
storytelling or necessarily the franchise's creative peak
(it still stuck close to fantasy tropes like dungeons,
beasts, castles, soldiers, etc.).
It did, however, make the most important step. It
established the fundamental structure of the Yugioh anime
franchise.
- Baneful
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