Plot: Jonouchi is training with Grandpa to be in an upcoming tournament. He comes in eighth, but still has a lot to learn. After watching the finals of the tournament on TV, Yugi gets a mysterious package containing a glove, some stars and a videotape. As he pops the video in, he sees the creator of Duel Monsters, Pegasus Crawford, on the screen proposing a duel to Yugi.
He drags Yugi into a strange shadow world to play a Yami no Game, a game played with real monsters and real consequences. Whoever is ahead within fifteen minutes wins. If Yugi wins, he’s left alone. If he loses, he has to go to Duelist Kingdom for a tournament being held by Pegasus. Will Yugi win or will he lose something precious to him?
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Weevil and Rex have much better voices in the Japanese version. Rex’s voice in the dub is insanely nasally and it sounds like he has a throat infection. Weevil’s voice is horrid in the dub. He sounds like a cartoon weasel. Rex’s voice in the Japanese version is very plain, but much less grating than the dub. Weevil’s voice is incredibly fitting in the original. It’s a very soft and methodical voice that leads you to believe he’s hiding something. Weevil’s not a kind-hearted person, and you can tell he’s not trustworthy just by his eyes, but his voice adds some degree of mystery about his true intentions.
Name Changes: Dinosaur Ryuzaki is changed to Rex Raptor, and Insect Haga is changed to Weevil Underwood. I find no reason to prod 4Kids about this since they were just taking Japanese lame pun names and changing them into English lame pun names.
The poster for the upcoming Duel Monsters tournament is completely redone for the dub. However, the Japanese poster was incredibly lame IMO and the dub one is far superior. Congrats 4Kids. I complimented you.
Subbed:
Dubbed:
….HOWEVER, as you can see, there’s no text on the dubbed poster, so there’s no real reason why he’d be so entranced by it. It’s also an awful advertisement for the tournament. There’s no information written on it at all, so it doesn’t even really count as an advertisement for the tournament. Since 4Kids is so paint-edit hungry, you’ll eventually see that practically every sign and advertisement in their shows is useless.
There’s no real reason given in the dub as to why Joey wants to join that tournament. In the original version, it’s heavily hinted that it’s because there’s a three million (?) dollar reward. Grandpa says he wants to cleanse Joey of his impure intention of simply getting money from dueling by teaching him the heart of the cards. Then Joey screams as they fade out. In the dub, Grandpa basically starts grilling him about all sorts of Duel Monsters questions.
In the original version, Jonouchi makes it to the final eight in the aforementioned tournament and most of their conversion on the couch includes mentions of it. In the dub, they act as if he never even competed. I do have to say, it’s incredibly impressive that Jonouchi made it that far just by a few weeks of training. He really sucked at the game before. As for why this is changed from eighth place to never competing in the tournament at all, well, I really believe they wanted Joey to be almost a complete rookie out of the gate so they removed this small plot point.
Pegasus in the original is very entertaining to listen to. He constantly switches back and forth between English and Japanese. I don’t mind Pegasus’s dubbed voice at all. In fact, it’s pretty fitting, but he does sound immensely creepy sometimes.
I understand Pegasus’s power to see other people’s cards and read their strategies, but he can’t always have the right card in his hand to counter whatever the other player is planning.
The duel between Pegasus and Yugi is heavily changed, at least dialogue wise. In the dub, Pegasus takes this opportunity to tell Yugi all about the story of Duel Monsters. He explains that they’re in a Shadow Game in the Shadow Realm and how the game was made using real monsters in ancient Egypt blah blah blah. They even put the final winning attack in the Pegasus vs. Yugi battle in there for no good reason besides it’s the one in the first season that looked the most Egyptian-y.
In the original, they only talk about Pegasus’s upcoming tournament and how he’s using his Millennium Eye to win.
In the original, Yugi seems very honorable in that he wants to destroy his controlled Devil Dragon instead of the Piper, which has lower attack points, thus would suffer the most damage. He wants to destroy the dragon first because he has a duty to his cards to not allow them to be under the control of a malicious being. In the dub, Yugi just gloats and mentions nothing about duty. He just attacks the Koumori Dragon and moves on.
Yugi mentions that he could win if he stalls until the time runs out when he’s ahead in life points. However, he doesn’t want to because that wouldn’t be a legit win to him. Dub!Yugi makes no mention of this ‘loophole’.
Next episode, it’s off to Duelist Kingdom!
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The Anime Madhouse 