AniManga Clash! Yu-Gi-Oh! Season Zero Episode 20 (Placeholder Review)

We’ve finally gotten to the last of Kaiba’s Shitennou – Daimon – and this one’s pretty intriguing. Daimon is basically Kaiba’s surrogate grandfather/mentor, much like Sugoroku is to Yugi. Ever since Kaiba was a child, Daimon taught him everything he knew about games. Back then, Kaiba had a deep and sincere kindness and passion for gaming, but the kindness in his heart vanished over time.

Daimon was very elderly and sick even when Kaiba was a child. You may be wondering how Daimon is Kaiba’s last Shittenou if he was so badly off even back when Kaiba was young. Surely, there’s no way he’s alive now, let alone strong enough to be Kaiba’s Shitennou.

Well, Kaiba loaded him up with cybernetic organs and synthetic….stuff flowing through his veins that allow him to live even though, by Daimon’s own admission, he should have died a long time ago, and is basically a walking corpse. Even a doctor says as much. Daimon has to, for lack of a better word, charge or hibernate in a special pod for most of his day. He can only last about three hours outside of the pod before he is back on death’s door.

Basically, Kaiba turned his mentor into a cybernetic zombie, and that is insane and awesome on levels I can’t even fathom.

Kaiba remains to have a lot of respect for his mentor, enough to do all of this to make him his final Shitennou, but it’s clear his kindness and caring are mostly gone even for someone as important to his past as Daimon.

The only manga note in this episode comes from chapter 40. In the chapter, Mokuba recaps his and Seto’s history, eventually leading up to Kaiba taking over the company behind Gozaburo’s back. In the manga, when he’s faced with this betrayal, Gozaburo commits suicide by smashing himself through the window and falling several stories to his death. He’d rather die on his terms than accept failure. In the anime, we get this scene in real time, not a flashback. However, in this version, Gozaburo is too scared at the concept of dying once he reaches the window and has a heart attack, which seemingly kills him. (Daimon says he wishes to pay his respects to Gozaboro immediately after this happens, so I assume he’s dead.)

Despite the fact that I do like Daimon and really wish he was a character who had been carried over into the 2000 anime, this episode is pretty darn bland. It’s a shame considering it’s the final Shitennou showdown.

A good chunk of the episode is taken up by Daimon and Kaiba’s backstories together. Then Yugi kinda causes Daimon’s car to crash by walking out in the middle of the street to get to a game store.

Daimon’s unconscious when the car crashes and is taken to a hospital. Yugi waits in tormented anguish thinking he’s either badly hurt or killed someone, but the doctor rather non-nonchalantly tells him it’s no big deal because he was already dead before the crash. (By the way, they never say if the driver was okay.) He explains all of the tech and surgeries that are being used to keep him alive long beyond his intended death.

Daimon wakes up and reveals he’s mostly fine. He immediately challenges Yugi to a game of Duel Monsters when he sees the cards in his pocket. Daimon manages to win, but he respects and admires Yugi because he reminds him of Kaiba when he was younger.

Later, Anzu and Yugi go to an amusement park together, and once again Anzu notes that Yugi acts like a little kid and longs to meet “Cool Yugi” once more…..*sigh* Also, she’s a damsel in distress in this episode because why the hell not?

They enter a monster house because Yugi thinks it will scare Anzu and get her cuddling up with him, but he’s disappointed when she starts petting the giant monster animatronics and saying they’re cute.

One of the monster robots grabs Anzu, puts her head in its mouth and she passes out. Kaiba and Daimon reveal themselves in a dome above them, and Kaiba tells Yugi to duel Daimon or else he’ll crush Anzu’s head in the robot’s mouth. Also, the dome somehow reads their minds, and this ability somehow creates perfect holograms of the monsters and everything they’re playing, because I guess that’s literally the only thing they’re thinking about.

Shadow Game (Not Really)

It’s just a simple game of Duel Monsters, so…..yeah none of it makes any sense. They don’t even keep track of the Life Points at all. It’s ridiculous, quite frankly. Out of all the duels so far, this is probably the one with the least amount of explanations outside of that first montage duel Yugi had with the first Shitennou. It’s a little insulting that this episode is all about people who have a great respect and passion for games but then when it comes to depicting one they’re just like “Yeah, just show monsters doing shit. I don’t care.”

Because it takes a staggering 16 minutes before any duel actually happens, they have to slam that gas pedal and rush through this duel. I’m going to try and go through this duel turn by turn to see if I can make actual sense of it.

Daimon sets one card face down (Yes, they finally start using that mechanic, although he doesn’t declare this part of the move.) and then summons Skull Bat with an ATK of 800.

Yugi, now Yami, plays King Rex with an ATK of 1200 and declares an attack.

Daimon states that the attack of the King Rex triggers his trap, Golgotha’s Punishment, which immobilizes King Rex. Also, Skull Bat is able to defeat King Rex now for some reason. I tried to translate the text on the card with Google Translate, but the footage is too low quality, and Daimon’s thumb is covering half of it. The Wiki just says it reduces the enemy’s ATK by “???” I do see an 8 at least, and maybe a 7, but that’s about it.

Either way, they don’t update the Life Point counter, so there’s no way to tell. It has to be more than a 400 point reduction, though, given the ATK point differences between the two at base stats.

Yami plays Big Tree in defense mode with 600 DEF points.

Daimon then summons Bloody Zombie with an ATK of 700 and attacks the Big Tree. Yami activates the trap card he DIDN’T SET FIRST. So glad the continuity is as pristine as ever. The trap is called Miraculous Water, and unlike Golgotha’s Punishment, we actually know what the text on this card says…..and it’s just useless flavor text. “Those who go against its torrents are swallowed up,

and in time give water to the earth.” How the hell does anyone know what traps and magic cards do if they don’t have their effects written on the card?

This is one of the bullshittier cards. Miraculous Water causes a wave to wash over the opposing monster that triggered the trap and destroy them. Not only that, but the water also feeds the tree, prompting it to create and drop seeds. These seeds sprout, and the plant that grows from it destroys the Skull Bat.

Being fair, yeah, that is kinda what the flavor text describes, but if someone did that and pointed to the flavor text as the true explanation, I’d call bullshit. I could believe it destroys the attacking enemy and powers up earth-based creatures, but it doesn’t imply anything about immediately destroying other monsters.

Anyway, again, I can’t determine any Life Point changes here, if there are any.

After this turn, Daimon doubles over in pain. He’s spent too much time outside of his pod and is starting to deteriorate. Kaiba immediately activates a series of tubes that pump Daimon with probably a liter or more of intense painkiller that allows him to continue.

To help him along, Kaiba puts an extremely obvious visor over Daimon’s eyes that allow him to see Yami’s cards. It’s so obvious, in fact, that Kaiba might as well just stand behind Yami and yell out each card he draws. Kaiba, why bother keeping Daimon alive for the express purpose of using his awesome gaming skills to defeat Yugi if you’re just going to encourage him to cheat?

Daimon refuses to use the visor since he’s an honorable duelist who would never resort to cheating.

Daimon plays his…..Isn’t it Yami’s turn?……..Whatever, Daimon plays Golden Pegasus in attack mode with an ATK power of…..uhhh…..Dammit, this series needs to be released in HD.

According to the Wiki….it’s…..000?….Uh….okay…..Why the actual hell would Daimon, this supposed game master, play a monster with no ATK points in ATTACK MODE?

Yami plays Devil Dragon, which, considering it’s just Koumori Dragon, I know has 1500 attack.

The dragon beats the pegasus, so, at the very least, Daimon should be sitting at 500 LP.

Daimon then summons Fairy Ophelia in attack mode with 350 ATK. Devil Dragon defeats it, and Yami wins.

Nevermind. I thought I was watching a duel that followed rules and logic. Silly me.

Daimon then summons Bug Demonmyst with 200 ATK and 400 DEF, but I don’t know what mode it was in.

Devil Dragon also makes quick work of the bug.

Yami wonders what Daimon is doing summoning weak monsters that will obviously fall to his dragon, and Daimon reveals his secret strategy. He summons Zombiemaster, which resurrects all of the fallen monsters over the course of the duel (from the player’s graveyard) and absorbs their power. The Wiki says it gives Zombiemaster “????” amount of ATK points for each monster and allows multiple attacks per monster resurrected. However, if it is as Daimon explained it, that would mean he’d get 350+200+literally zero added onto 500, which is 1050, which isn’t enough to defeat Devil Dragon.

Whatever, he defeats Devil Dragon.

On Yami’s next turn, he summons three monsters in attack mode.

The first is King Beetle with 1400 ATK, the second is Dark Mammoth (I think) with 600 ATK and the final monster is Mushroom Man with 800 ATK.

Daimon defeats all of them in one swoop because, apparently, another effect Zombiemaster has is being able to attack multiple times in a single turn depending on how many monsters he resurrected with it.

Yami uses Revive the Dead on Fairy Ophelia, which….I don’t think he can do because, at the moment, Fairy Ophelia is not dead. It was ‘resurrected’ by Zombiemaster, was it not? I guess the Wiki acts as if the monsters are more representations of Zombiemaster’s acquired power than actually resurrected, and, looking at the field, Daimon only has two cards out, so maybe that is right.

Anyhoo, Yami revives Fairy Ophelia, which reduces Zombiemaster’s power by whatever since it has one less monster in the graveyard to draw power from.

Yami: “If the dead are revived, Zombiemaster loses its power. Its power returns to normal.” Huh….does that mean Zombiemaster needs at least three monsters in the graveyard for its ability to work at all?

Yami uses Flute of Light on his new Fairy Ophelia which lets himmm…..*Translates flavor text* “Sacred timbre becomes light and evokes the true power of fairies.” …..Hmmmm…….pbbbbbttttttttt….He wins okay?

Daimon collapses after the defeat, and Kaiba walks away, seemingly not caring that his once beloved mentor and grandfather figure is on the floor dying. Yami comes up to him, and Daimon takes his hand pleading with Yami to return the kindness that he knows Kaiba still has deep within him. Meanwhile, Kaiba’s outside stepping on some kid’s orange that fell on the ground. Guys, he’s abandoning his dying mentor because he lost a card game. We don’t need bonus proof Kaiba’s a dick.

It’s implied that Daimon dies in Yami’s arms, and Anzu is freed from the robots. She’s been passed out this whole time? Someone get Anzu to a hospital. That’s not normal.

And, uh, that’s it.

Not much else to say, really. Oh, they do tease Kaiba Land, which will be important for the second to last arc, but other than that, that’s it.

Again, it’s a shame they never implemented Daimon into the reboot. There was a good opportunity there for some extra humanity points for Kaiba instead of just relying on his bond with Mokuba.

Poor Daimon all around, really. The guy chooses to live a sad existence spending most of his time in a pod, only being let out when he’s needed to play games or test Kaiba’s new equipment. And all just to do whatever he can to turn Kaiba back to the kind kid he knew before he passes on, which he couldn’t do. It’s really sad.

Next time, Kaiba kidnaps Yugi’s grandpa and starts the events of the final arc, the Death-T trials in Kaiba Land.

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AniManga Clash! Yu-Gi-Oh! Season Zero Episode 18: Don’t Touch the Forbidden Game/Manga Chapters 46-47

Today’s episode starts out with a dream the character of the week, Imori, is having about the Dragon Cards and the Shin Tsuen Fu (the jar that is sealed beneath the cards.) which I will explain later. The dream seems to show a Chinese emperor or other high-status figure trying to protect the ‘Senhai’ (I couldn’t find what that meant, and Google keeps confusing it with “senpai” but it’s referring to the Dragon Cards and the Shin Tsuen Fu jar. Sugoroku later refers to it as the Ryuuhai, so maybe there was a mistranslation there?) during travel when they’re attacked by a rogue militia. The jar falls, opens and a purple mist emanates from it, revealing a neon green dragon that attacks them all. Gotta say, out of all of the things I thought would come from a jar supposedly holding the embodiment of all darkness to balance the light of the world, I honestly never considered a neon green dragon…..

After the title card, we cut to the main group walking to school. Jonouchi kicks a small bag of garbage at the back of Honda’s head and then whines that he’s so bored with daily school life. He wants more excitement. Dude, we’re in episode 18 of Season Zero. How can you have experienced all the screwed up stuff you’ve gone through to this point and say you have a boring life?

He wants the world to be in terrible danger, and then he can save the world, turn it into a utopia and make Honda the janitor of the world. The group looks on like he’s an idiot, which they should in this instance, before quickly noticing Imori getting bullied. The bullies are forcing him into a game where they try to get coins into a pot by throwing them off the stairs. Whoever gets their coin in or gets closest wins 500 yen.

The first bully gets it in the pot, but it bounces out and lands closeby. It’s Imori’s turn, but Yugi steps up to take his place. Yugi easily flips the coin off of his thumb, onto the stairs, on the boxes below, bounces off a bush somehow and spins along the rim before landing in the pot. Obviously, the bullies whine that he cheated somehow. They try to force him to do it again only to have Jonouchi step in and assert that Yugi followed the rules so he doesn’t have to do it again. Honda steps up to the other bully, and they intimidate them into backing off and leaving.

Anzu compliments Yugi by saying such skills are to be expected from the grandson of a game shop owner. Imori laments that he’s not good at anything and wishes he could be like Yugi.

While Yugi is flattered, Jonouchi is instantly put off by the boy. He approaches Yugi covertly and quietly tells him to not get too close to Imori because he doesn’t like how dark and gloomy he is. In Jonouchi’s words, “He’s a wet blanket. If he gets too close, you’re sure to get moldy.”

While Yugi is in class, he finds a note from Imori thanking him for saving him. Imori tells him that, in order to thank him properly, he’d like to bring Yugi to his secret base.

Later, at Imori’s house, which is quite a nice mansion-esque place, Imori shows Yugi a secret passage in his floor to his cellar, which is his secret base. He likes spending time there because no one can bully him. He has a bunch of old games stacked in shelves on the walls and tells Yugi that his family heritage is loaded with people who treasure games. They spend a lot of time and money collecting and playing them. However, Yugi notices that all of the games on display are single-player games, so he wonders if his entire family had a problem making friends.

Imori asks if Yugi will be his friend, and he happily agrees, making Imori tear up. Apparently, Yugi is his absolute first friend ever. As a sign of their budding friendship, he decides to show Yugi his family’s rarest game – a completely unique heirloom even he’s never seen before. He leads Yugi deeper and deeper into the catacombs of the cellar until they reach a strange door. Even with both boys pushing on it, the door doesn’t budge. Suddenly, Yugi’s Puzzle starts glowing, and he realizes something mystical must be behind the door. After analyzing the door further, he realizes that the sections of the door act as a slider puzzle. When the puzzle is finished, it reveals an image of the dragon from before and opens, revealing the Dragon Cards and the Shin Tsuen Fu.

We cut to grandpa’s game shop which is where we finally (basically) intersect with the manga.

In the start of the manga chapter 46, Yugi, Jonouchi and Anzu are being shown an ancient Egyptian bullfrog game at the game shop before Imori shows up out of the blue to show Yugi’s grandpa his family’s ancient game to figure out what it really is. Sugoroku immediately realizes it’s the Dragon Cards and the Shin Tsuen Fu. According to grandpa, the Dragon Cards were used in ancient times to act as the final test of Feng Shui masters.

By the laws of yin and yang, the Dragon Cards and the Shin Tsuen Fu act as a vessel for all darkness (yang) while everything else in the environment act as light (yin). If the seal is removed from the cards and jar, the darkness will be unleashed and the balance of the world will fall into disarray.

In the anime, the scene is pretty much the same, but Jonouchi and Anzu aren’t there. Instead of yelling at Jonouchi to not open the seal, Sugoroku yells at Imori to not do the same. The game is called Ryuuhai or Dragon Block in the anime.

The Puzzle didn’t react to the artifact in the manga like it does in the anime. Shockingly, grandpa and Imori both notice the Puzzle glowing in reaction to the artifact and just casually talk about it……Okay.

The next day, in the manga, after the group goes swimming at school, Yugi returns to his locker to discover that the Millennium Puzzle is missing. In its place is a note that tells Yugi his Puzzle has been stolen and, if he wants it back, he’ll have to meet the thief alone in classroom C otherwise he’ll lose his Puzzle forever.

When Yugi arrives, Imori is waiting for him with the Puzzle around his neck. He tells Yugi that he’s been watching him for some time. His grandfather left him a lot of books on games, and one of the passages explained the powers of the Millennium Puzzle, claiming that whoever solved the Puzzle would gain the power of the Game of Darkness and become the Shepherd of Darkness. When Yugi solved the Puzzle, Imori noticed that his life turned around. He got friends and elevated his social status. Ever since then, he has sworn to defeat the owner of the Puzzle and become the new Shepherd of Darkness.

He challenges Yugi to a Shadow Game with the Dragon Cards and breaks the seal on the container. After the darkness has been unleashed, he tells Yugi that, according to an ancient Chinese book, anyone who breaks the seal on the Dragon Cards has to partake in a game of darkness, otherwise the land will be cursed forever.

The only way to reseal the cards and tame the dragon inside is to sacrifice a soul.

Back in the anime, Imori walks home with the Ryuuhai while mulling over what Sugoroku told him. He’s cornered by the two bullies again, and the Dragon Block falls out of his hands when he trips, breaking the seal.

I gotta say, for something that could basically destroy the world when unsealed, this thing is ridiculously easy to unseal. In the dream sequence, it was opened the same way, by someone accidentally dropping it, but it’s only “sealed” by a rope that could easily be untied. The easy slider puzzle on the door of the room this thing was stored in was a better seal than rope – and that slider puzzle door is only in the anime. In the manga, this thing might as well be sealed by a warped tupperware lid.

When the bullies realize what he dropped was a game, they challenge him to a match and force him to bet money on the outcome.

After a cutaway, we see an island sink into the sea under a dark sky.

After the commercial break, Anzu informs Jonouchi that Mizuno, one of the guys who was bullying Imori, was found unconscious in the street last night and he’s been hospitalized. Miho talks about how her family was planning a trip to a beach only for them to cancel it once they caught news of the island sinking. Honda blames Jonouchi for Miho’s sadness because he wished for Japan to be destroyed, but Jonouchi says if his wishes came true, Honda would have died ages ago.

…..Someone tell me again why these two are friends.

Yugi looks over at Imori, and his demeanor has changed entirely. He’s got a more confident look on his face, and he’s even got his feet up on his desk. Imori takes Yugi aside and asks for his homework because he didn’t have time to do it last night and there’s no time to copy it now.

Jonouchi comes in, having followed them because he’s suspicious of Imori, and tells Yugi to not listen to Imori because he’s just being selfish. Yugi decides against giving Imori his homework, and Imori takes this as a sign of betrayal to their friendship.

We get the exact same scene with the swimming and Millennium Puzzle being taken with Imori using it as bait to get Yugi to face him in a game. The only difference is instead of Imori telling him to meet him in classroom C, he tells him to meet him at his secret base.

When he arrives at the base, we get pretty much the same pre-game scene as in the manga, but they omit most of the preamble about Imori watching him from afar, swearing to defeat him and becoming the new Shepherd of Darkness. Essentially, in the manga, Imori is almost blatantly a bad guy from the first time you see him whereas in the anime he seems like more or less a legitimately timid and well-meaning kid who just got corrupted by dark magic and perhaps his own dark desires of wanting to hold power over others after being bullied for so long.

In the manga, since the bullies don’t exist there, we don’t get any discussion about what happened to Mizuho like we do in Season Zero. It’s confirmed that he used Mizuho’s soul to reseal the Shin Tsuen Fu.

Shadow Game

In the manga, the Dragon Cards are, well, cards, while they’re Mahjong-esque tiles in the anime, but other than that the game is kept basically the same. I’m still not certain why they changed them to tiles, but I feel like they maybe wanted to avoid having this feel too much like Duel Monsters.

The game is played by putting the deck (or box of tiles in the anime) into the center of the table. From the guidance of Feng Shui, energy collects in the mountains and flows into the land. The deck/box acts as the mountain and the table is the land. The deck is surrounded by five elemental powers – wood, fire, earth, metal and water.

At the start of the game, each player draws six cards/blocks from the deck/box. There is one symbol on each card/block that is representative of one of the elements. Each card also has different levels ranging from one to five, but this detail is missing from the anime version. If you get three of the same element and level, you can summon a dragon. Whoever summons the two most powerful dragons in the end is the winner.

In the anime, they also add in a real world map with bases. Each player gets to decide where the opponent’s base will be.

Each player takes turn drawing cards/tiles. When you draw a card/tile, you have to discard one. The strategy comes in taking note of what cards the other has discarded. You can determine what they’re not summoning by what they’re throwing out and what they’re likely summoning by deducing what’s left to summon.

The way the dragons are more powerful than the others (IE what if you have a level four dragon going up against another level four dragon?) is by the typical elemental advantages. Fire beats metal, metal beats wood, wood beats earth, earth beats water and water beats fire. While they don’t mention it at this point, the elements also work in tandem with each other and offer support.

After Yugi and Imori summon their first pair of dragons, two Water Dragons, level three and four for Imori, and Fire (level five) and Metal (Level unknown) Dragons for Yugi, Yugi explains that the Water Dragons will only be made more powerful by the Metal Dragon. By how much, I don’t know. His other dragon is Fire, so even though it’s level five it’s at too much of a disadvantage.

Yugi is, shockingly, defeated, and his soul is consumed by the Shin Tsuen Fu. Before his body goes limp, he’s able to touch the Millennium Puzzle, which summons Yami into his body. Yami challenges Imori to a match with the same bet conditions – whoever loses sacrifices their soul.

In the anime, Yugi summons two Fire Dragons. Imori, however, has two Water Dragons. Yugi’s dragons are slain, and they suddenly feel tremors in the earth. The purpose of the map and the bases is revealed – whenever one of them loses a battle, the real-life location of their bases will be hit with a natural calamity. Imori chose Tokyo for Yugi, and now some of the (unoccupied, I presume) land in the forest is disappearing as a result. That’s why that island sank when Mizuno was defeated.

The loser’s soul also gets taken by the Shin Tsuen Fu. Yugi lost, so he has to sacrifice his soul, but, just as in the manga, he’s able to barely manage to touch the Puzzle before passing out. Yami takes over and asks for a rematch in order to get Yugi’s soul back – however that works. Imori agrees and reveals that it takes at least three months for the jar to fully consume a soul, so getting Yugi back is still possible.

This time, he chooses Imori’s base location. He chooses the ocean so no real damage will occur. Imori chooses Tokyo once again for Yami.

They draw their cards, and I seriously feel like Imori’s cheating in the manga. Their hands weren’t fully revealed in the match with Yugi, but in the match with Yami it shows that Yami has Earth 4, Wood 1, Water 2, Metal 5, Wood 5 and Fire 2 while Imori has two Water 5s, Fire 4, Wood 5, Water 4 and Metal 4.

After some draws and discards, Imori deduces that Yami is trying to summon a Metal 5 and an Earth 4, but Imori is planning on summoning Water and Wood Dragons to take them out. He has enough to summon a Water 5.

Yami discards a Wood Dragon card, and Imori reveals that you can actually take cards from the discard pile to summon dragons if you want. Yami basically gave him the last card he needed. Yami finishes his hand as well and summons, as Imori predicted, a Metal 5 and an Earth 4 while Imori summons a Water 5 and a Wood 5.

Imori believes he has the game in the bag, especially when he reveals that Water Dragons have the special ability to instantly destroy a Metal Dragon, which, pardon my French, but you’re a cheating sack of shit, Imori.

So Water is specifically powerful against Fire, but it also has the ability to instantly destroy Metal Dragons? Didn’t Yugi say that Metal Dragons power up Water dragons? That’s not the same. I’d expect it to be a case of like Water Dragons get one more level when an enemy has a Metal Dragon because rust or something.

Yami uses his Earth Dragon’s special ability, which is to create earthquakes, to negate the Water Dragon’s special ability and protect the Metal Dragon.

I guess I won’t argue that this could happen given that Earth is strong against Water, but I am just so confused. How did Yami even know of these effects? Even if he can see the helpful-ish diagram that the manga uses, which I don’t think he can, I think it’s just a graphic for our sake, how would he know of these special effects? He just knows certain elements support others.

I’m going to try really hard to summarize what happens next. Imori reveals that his Wood Dragon is powering up by feeding on the water of the Water Dragon. He attacks the Earth Dragon, sucking up the water that he absorbed with the earthquake attack. Apparently, this means that the Earth Dragon is incapacitated. Imori launches another attack on the Metal Dragon from his Water Dragon, but it survives the attack because, apparently, the Wood Dragon took too much of the Water Dragon’s power after absorbing some of its water. The Metal Dragon, despite taking some damage, is able to attack the Wood Dragon and destroy it. However, the Metal Dragon dies in the process for some reason, and also, for some reason, him doing this revives the Earth Dragon.

It’s now just a face-off between the Water Dragon and the Earth Dragon. The Earth Dragon has an advantage over the Water Dragon because the Earth Dragon, again, absorbs the water with its gorges. Imori loses, and, since the jar can only hold one soul at a time, Yugi’s soul is ejected and returned to his body while Imori is left as a soulless husk.

……..The end.

Nope, not kidding. Imori’s just gone forever now. You basically just witnessed a child murder.

In the anime, the game goes a bit different. Instead of summoning Fire and Metal Dragons, Yugi summons two Fire Dragons while Imori summons two Water Dragons. This type matchup obviously results in Yugi losing and his soul being sacrificed to the jar.

When Yami is up, the game goes the same again, only they manage to depict the match in such a way that it’s not so confusing. Mostly because they don’t say anything about special abilities and instead just point out that their dragons support each other, allowing them to survive their attacks. The one time it’s really confusing is when they don’t explain why the Water Dragon’s attack didn’t manage to kill the Metal Dragon. One line of “The Water Dragon’s too weak from supporting the Wood Dragon to finish it off!” would have sufficed.

They show that a giant crevice did open up in the real ocean when Yami defeated the Water Dragon, which was promptly closed up….somehow. I’d think a massive crack in the ocean floor or something would cause more severe and lasting effects, but I’m not an oceanologist.

The rest of the story kinda doesn’t make sense because 1) they added the aspect of the bully getting his soul taken and 2) they basically wimp out on ‘killing’ Imori.

When Imori’s soul is taken in the anime, Yugi’s soul is ejected and returned. However, Imori never explained that this would happen if he won. He never stated the fact that only one soul can be in the jar at one time like the manga does. In addition, this wouldn’t have made sense anyway. If only one soul can be in the jar at any given time and it takes three months for a soul to be consumed in the jar, then what happened to Mizuno’s soul? Did it get returned when Yugi’s soul was taken? Because they never showed that.

Imori is only unconscious for a minute after his soul is taken in the anime. He wakes up not having remembered anything of what happened after the seal was broken the first time and being his normal, timid and kind self again. Yami explains that the jar took Imori’s ‘haughty’ heart and left normal Imori alone. Somehow….Imori had two souls because….he was friendless, lonely and bitter? That’s such a cop out.

Granted, they made Imori so sympathetic in this version that it’s hard for me to complain too much about the poor kid not being a soulless husk for all eternity, but it just seems so lame that their excuse is that he had two souls when he basically just had a dark section of one soul.

The episode ends with Imori and Yami sealing away the Dragon Block for good. Then we get a short snippet of Sugoroku’s speech about how some ancient games and artifacts are best left alone because they could be dangerous…uhm, yeah. Thanks for that?

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This episode was………Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm……an improvement on the manga version. I think making Imori more sympathetic was a good move and having more backstory for him with Yugi and his friends was also a good decision. I just don’t really agree with all the decisions they made in the episode like not fully explaining how Yami won, not explaining if Mizuno got his soul back, randomly adding the map thing (Souls aren’t enough of a bargaining chip? Also, it affected nothing), and making such a piss-poor explanation as to why Imori got to keep his soul.

If Jonouchi’s intuition is anything to go by, Imori wasn’t that influenced by the Dragon Block. He had bad mojo before the seal was broken, so it’s not like you can say the jar created this other soul within him. It takes souls – why would it create a new one in Imori? Unless the logic really is that having bitterness and dark feelings in your heart, even if you’re a relatively harmless and kind person otherwise, can create an entirely different soul in your body, which is just….no.

What I find funny about this is that it reminds me so much of when Yami mind crushed Kaiba and sent his evilness to the Shadow Realm in the 2000 anime dub, and 4Kids passed off his evil half as a separate entity that looked nothing like him.

Was sending manga!Imori’s soul to be locked away forever too much? Maybe. Imori was just a kid, but he did have the power to basically destroy the world in the palm of his hand, and he didn’t give a crap when he used it for his own gain. It’s actually kinda odd that the anime made Imori even worse than in the manga by adding the aspect of them destroying parts of the world when they lost. If they didn’t basically hand-wave Imori’s evil side, it definitely would have negated any sympathy he garnered in the first half of the episode. They were lucky they got off so easily with just a sunk uninhabited island and some empty chunks of land in Tokyo disappearing. He was hoping the entire city of Tokyo would crumble with Yami’s loss.

Winner: Anime

Next episode seems like it will be a weird jumble. It seems pretty Miho focused, which, yaywhoohoofun, but it’s also the introduction of Bakura. This is not mirrored from the manga, so we’ll see what’s up.

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An Absurdly Deep Dive into the History of 4Kids | Part 2: Pokemon – I License You! (1998-99)

To say 4Kids lucked out beyond belief with Pokemon is an understatement. Their existing deal with Nintendo was already very lucrative, but they truly didn’t know full-blown success until Pokemon came on the scene. The Pokemon games had already gained massive success in Japan, due in part to the fact that there were two different versions of the game, Red and Green, and, later, Blue and Yellow, prompting consumers to buy the entire set, or at least Red and Blue or Red and Green, to complete their Pokedexes. It also prompted a lot of socializing with other players since, if you couldn’t afford to buy the other game, you could trade Pokemon with someone else who had the other version.

The game series was certain to be a success in America, and it was, but it was slightly preempted by the anime. Just 20 days prior to the release of the games in North America, on September 8, 1998, 4Kids premiered their first ever venture into English dubbed anime with the premiere of Pokemon.

The first episode of Pokemon that aired in the United States was not actually the first episode in order. To help draw attention to the show and create tension, 4Kids released Battle Aboard the St. Anne with altered narration from its future normal broadcast cut which indicated this was a special preview of the show. At the end, the narrator wondered if the kids would make it through the shipwreck and explained that the viewers would see the start of Ash’s journey the following day when the series would properly start.

While I understand what they were doing, this is a little messed up. ‘Will this group of small children die a horrible death via drowning!?….Anyway, here are the goofy adventures of how these small children started their journey!’ Admittedly, that would make my suggested trolling of them just showing the funeral part of the next episode, cutting to black and rolling the end credits a hundred times funnier. ‘And that’s how these small children got here…..and then they died. The end!’ (Thanks to Bluebaron on Twitter for reminding me of this preview.)

Pokemon quickly became 4Kids’ most popular franchise by several miles, and it would retain that title over the entirety of 4Kids’ life. Being completely fair, 4Kids didn’t dub the series themselves at first. They only produced the dub. 4Kids didn’t have their own dubbing studio at the time nor did they really know how to dub anime, so they contracted out TAJ Productions to do the dubbing work.

TAJ originally started out as a music production company, but they eventually started creating English dubs and other post-production work for anime, video games and cartoons after doing several related projects for clients.

It’s unclear exactly how much 4Kids controlled in regards to the dubbing job. According to Bulbapedia, TAJ was responsible for the casting, script adapting, voice recording and mixing. Everything else was handled by 4Kids Productions.

Considering that 4Kids has an extremely distinct editing, writing, dubbing and production style, it can be assumed that TAJ was following a lot of orders from 4Kids when they were adapting the scripts. Pokemon is known for being one of 4Kids’ most loyal adaptations, all things considered, especially in the early years, and I think a good chunk of credit for that goes to TAJ, especially considering that they were responsible for casting, which meant that they were originally the ones who brought in what would become 4Kids’ dream team.

TAJ dubbed seasons one through five of Pokemon, as well as several anime series 4Kids had acquired the rights to over the years (and one live-action show), but, in 2003, 4Kids would take dubbing duties away from TAJ when they created their own dubbing studio. 4Kids would dub Pokemon for three more seasons until 2006 when The Pokemon Company would take the international rights to Pokemon back and dub the series themselves under Pokemon USA.

Funnily enough, in 2006, PUSA hired TAJ once again to help with the production of the dub from their first outing with the special, The Mastermind of Mirage Pokemon, through seasons nine and ten and Movie 09. However, on January 2, 2008, TAJ announced that they were losing Pokemon again when PUSA decided to hire DuArt Film & Video as their dubbing studio for season eleven and Movie 10 onward. In 2013, dubbing responsibilities would be handed over to Iyuno-SDI Group, who dub the series to this day.

One of the aspects that 4Kids had full control over was the music, leading them to create what is one of the most beloved English dubbed anime theme songs of all time with the first Pokemon season’s theme song.

And you can bet your ass that 4Kids loved it some music, eventually selling many of their in-house recorded songs for their properties on standalone soundtracks or compilation albums. 4Kids knew how to make music that was marketable. No matter if it was genuinely great as Pokemon’s first theme or as cringe-worthy as One Piece’s theme song, they always knew how to make earworms. Nearly all of their tracks still stick with many of their fans to this day. Even if we all make jokes about 4Kids and their rapping, there’s no denying that they definitely knew how to make music that was at least catchy and, at most, truly good.

There’s definitely some criticism to be had in that regard, though, as, for the most part, changing all the music for Pokemon or any other show or movie was entirely for their own profit. Selling a soundtrack they made for the property makes them much more money than if they tried to sell the original soundtrack, if they were legally allowed to do so in the first place. Instead, they would choose to remove a great bulk of the music from any property they had, Pokemon included, for many years, and made their own soundtracks and CDs that they could sell and make profit from. Little to none of the revenue from those CDs would need to go back to the original owners since 4Kids made the music on their own and only used the logos and other imaging from what they licensed to sell the product.

4Kids, under LCI, had also partnered with Hasbro to make them the main toy licensee for Pokemon while also signing on a reported “over 100” domestic licensees for other products, including Kraft, General Mills, Welch’s, Colgate-Palmolive, Scholastic and American Greetings. They were going in hard with Pokemon once they knew what they had on their hands.

In November of 1999, 4Kids needed to take Pokemon to the next level with the premiere of their first ever dubbed theatrical movie, Pokemon the First Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back, as well as their first Pokemon Short, Pikachu’s Vacation.

And it was…….a complete mess. 4Kids decided to absolutely mangle the movie from what it originally was. They removed the 20 minute long backstory segment of Mewtwo and the other clones. They changed Mewtwo’s motivations to make him, as Norman Grossfeld, President of 4Kids Productions at the time, stated “clearly evil.” This change included making Mewtwo want to completely destroy the world when he didn’t in the original so American audiences wouldn’t be confused by the morally ambiguous Mewtwo who was struggling with existentialism and self worth in the Japanese version.

As mentioned before, they also completely rescored the movie to, quoting Grossfeld again, “better reflect what American kids would respond to.” while also including numerous American pop music tracks, several songs of which have absolutely nothing to do with the movie, lyrically. I’d say the most confusing track on the CD is ‘Don’t Say You Love Me’ by M2M. There’s 100% no romance in here, so it feels completely out of place.

While the pop music thing was obviously done for the sake bolstering soundtrack sales, the score, which would be released on its own separate CD, didn’t need to be made, and the comment about creating a new score to better suit an American audience makes no sense. This statement has no studies or anything to explain why they didn’t think American children responded well to Japanese music, especially orchestral music that had no vocal track. If they wanted to make English versions of the songs with lyrics, fine, completely understandable, but they didn’t, because they very, very, very rarely ever did that, especially in their early years. It’s pretty clear that they were just trying to cover up the fact that they wanted to sell their own soundtracks to the movie. This is especially true since, as Dogasu notes, the orchestral background tracks they omitted from this movie are kept in the dubbed versions of future episodes.

However, replacing the score and nearly all music for their properties will very much become the norm for 4Kids from here on out, whether they actually went ahead with a soundtrack release for the property or not.

Oh and, something interesting that I found while researching for this retrospective – 4Kids recognized that they made the Pokemon identification errors with Pidgeot being called Pidgeotto, Scyther being called Alakazam and Sandslash being called Sandshrew, but they left in the errors on purpose. Why?

According to the audio commentary, they wanted kids to notice….for some reason? I dunno, to make them feel smart or something? They also thought it was plausible for Team Rocket to make those identification errors since they’re dumb.

……Of course that doesn’t change the fact that only two of those misidentifications were Team Rocket’s doing. The third, Pidgeot/Pidgeotto, was done by it’s own Trainer, and with a Pokemon that we’ve seen many times before since Ash has one, which is completely inexcusable if not downright insulting. It’s clear that 4Kids just realized the errors too late and didn’t care enough to fix them or own up to them honestly.

They probably should have been a little more careful with their identifications considering we were literally being taught how to correctly identify every single Pokemon in existence by their silhouette in every episode of Pokemon with the ‘Who’s That Pokemon?’ segment. This really was just a gold star moment for 4Kids in regards to both being incompetent while also being disrespectful to their audience.

4Kids would continue to frequently make Pokemon misidentifications, most notably and most commonly in their movies and short films. So either they continued to do this on purpose for no other reason besides to make them look foolish or they seriously didn’t notice nor care until it was too late – and even then they still didn’t really care.

My money’s on the latter, especially considering that they practically flaunted how little they really knew of Pokemon and how little they cared about making mistakes in this realm when they made the ‘Trainer’s Choice’ segment during Advanced Challenge. ‘Trainer’s Choice’ was a multiple choice question game for viewers to play during commercial breaks that replaced ‘Who’s That Pokemon?’ in the English dub while the Japanese version had removed the ‘Who’s That Pokemon?’ segment and replaced it with a normal eyecatch.

Over the course of the use of this segment, 4Kids made many errors, some more obvious than others. Some of them were misunderstandings of Pokemon types, what had advantages over what, ignoring that some Pokemon had immunities to certain types, while many other mistakes were just flatout embarrassing like frequently misspelling Pokemon names, sometimes giving Pokemon other Pokemon’s names (like mislabeling a Beautifly as a Nuzleaf and then later mislabeling a Sealeo….as a Nuzleaf), and, of course, the most famous Trainer’s Choice mistake, claiming Arbok evolved into Seviper.

To 4Kids’ credit, they did hire someone during Advanced Battle to handle the segment who seemingly knew more about the franchise that 4Kids had owned the rights to for about seven years at that point. Lawrence Neves was credited as handling the segment from then on, and the mistakes lessened by a significant amount, but some fairly obvious mistakes and even another name misspelling remained until the segment was finally removed after PUSA took over.

The film had additional issues in that it was originally released in widescreen in Japan, but the English version had to use a 4:3 aspect ratio, which caused some issues with the cropping and required some additional edits to keep characters in frame when they were talking, but this was more of an issue with Warner Bros. that would be a continued problem for several movies. In 2016, this issue was fixed for this movie as it was finally released in 16:9 widescreen.

Audiences also didn’t appreciate that the English movie was trying extremely hard to jam an anti-violence message down viewers’ throats when it’s based on a series centered entirely around battling captured monsters who utilize incredibly violent and dangerous abilities in battle. All of that seemingly made okay because the Pokemon fighting in this movie during the clones vs. originals match were doing so without the aforementioned dangerous abilities – they were punching, kicking and slapping, which is much less harmful.

They did imply that this was worse because, unlike in Pokemon battles where Trainers or Pokemon will usually stop when the match is clearly decided, they were intending on fighting to the death in the movie’s battle. Still, it came off as largely hypocritical and most likely 4Kids’ desperate attempt to placate parents’ groups who had come to lambaste Pokemon as a whole for being a series about ‘glorified cock-fighting’ that solved most problems with violence.

Even the short, Pikachu’s Summer Vacation, the title of which had been shortened to Pikachu’s Vacation, didn’t get away without being sufficiently messed with. While some edits are understandable, such as changing the Japanese text to English, and removing the end credits to be included in the movie’s end credits to ensure parents didn’t walk out of the movie thinking the short was the entire movie (This was seriously was a viable concern. Some people have stated that, even with the credits removed, some parents tried to leave after the short was over, thinking the short was the movie, and their kids had to convince them to stay.) some changes were not. The most notable being changing the narrator from a gentle woman, voiced by Satou Aiko, to the Pokedex, for some reason, as well as changing the entire score, again, and messing up the opening credits.

While Pikachu’s Vacation didn’t retain the end credits, they did keep the opening credits, and they not only got names wrong, but they wrongfully attributed some credits to the incorrect people. You can see an entire Japanese/English breakdown on BulbaGarden here.

Problems with the movie and short aside, 4Kids knew a major marketing opportunity when it saw one. This was not only their first theatrically released movie, but it was also their first theatrical movie release of a majorly popular franchise when the movie already proved to be crazy successful in Japan. They went hard with their marketing. They not only had the normal trailers and newspaper spots, but they also hooked people in by offering exclusive Wizards Black Star promotional Pokemon cards in select theaters that showcased Pokemon from the movie and short, such as Pikachu, Mewtwo, Dragonite and…..Electabuzz? …Electabuzz wasn’t in the first movie….?

*one Google Search later*

Okay, according to Bulbapedia, an Electabuzz was in the movie as a Pokemon belonging to one of the Trainers in the wharf (Not one of the three who made it to New Island). I honestly didn’t believe that, so I re-watched that scene, and yup. There it is.

That is literally the only shot of that Electabuzz. It doesn’t even reappear in the end when they’re back in the wharf after having their memories erased. There are so many more Pokemon I can think of that were more prevalent in the movie that would have deserved that exclusive card spot much more than Electabuzz, but I guess they just liked Electabuzz, and I can’t say it wasn’t in the movie.

Nintendo of America or 4Kids or both made a deal with Burger King to produce toys based on the first movie that would be distributed in Kids and Big Kids Meals – little Pokemon plushies that were encased in plastic Pokeballs that doubled as keychains. Oh and there were also the INCREDIBLY COOL 23 karat gold plated Pokemon cards that you could purchase separately at Burger King.

There were six different variations to collect – Mewtwo, Togepi, Pikachu, Jigglypuff, Charizard, and, for some reason, Poliwhirl. Again, I didn’t believe Poliwhirl was in the movie. But, again, technically it was. In the same panning shot where you see Electabuzz briefly, you also see Poliwhirl from the back.

*shrug*

I guess I should also question Jigglypuff’s inclusion, but it was an established semi-regular character in the show so it’s not that questionable. Also, maybe it counts by proxy because there was a Wigglytuff in the movie.

I had several toys from this, including two of the gold Pokemon cards (Jigglypuff and Togepi) and one of the plastic Pokeballs with which I got a little stuffed Meowth.

Sadly, the plastic Pokeballs were later found to be a suffocation risk, which resulted in the deaths of two children. On December 11, 1999, 13-month-old Kira Alexis Murphy suffocated in her playpen after half of the ball stuck over her nose and mouth. Burger King eventually recalled the toys, but they were heavily criticized for acting too slowly – at first refusing to recall the toys after the initial death because they didn’t want to incite a panic in their customers. It wouldn’t be until another child nearly died from suffocating on the toy that Burger King agreed to recall them. Even then, they tried to keep it lowkey until the US Consumer Product Safety Commission pushed them on the situation.

To their credit, after that push, they did launch a pretty massive recall effort with commercials explaining the situation airing on TV, offers to exchange the Pokeballs for free small fries, warnings all over Burger King itself as well as the trays, bags and items and even a dedicated 800 number to call for information. However, even with the recall efforts, another child, four-month-old Zachary Jones, wound up dying a month later from suffocating on a Pokeball.

Burger King would eventually get sued by the families of the victims, which was settled for an undisclosed amount, and they quickly made changes to their safety practices and warning labels to prevent future incidents from happening ever again.

Upon the release of Pokemon The First Movie, despite the various issues, it was immediately a massive hit. In Japan, it was the second highest grossing film of 1998, grossing ¥7.6 billion. It debuted at number one at the box office in the US with $10.1mil on opening day, was the only anime film to ever achieve such a status until 2021 when Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Mugen Train debuted in America, was the highest-grossing movie based on a video game until 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and finally wracked up $85.7mil after closing on February 27, 2000.

In fact, it was such a highly anticipated movie that kids were actually skipping school in droves on the Wednesday that it initially premiered, feigning sickness, and it was so widespread of an issue that it came to be known as the Pokeflu.

Despite being so successful with audiences and financially, it wasn’t nearly as well received by critics, and the entire accolades section of the Wiki, barring one entry, is nothing but nominations for the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, which was pretty much just the Razzies before they became a thing.

The movie was nominated for Worst Screenplay for a Film Grossing More than $100 Million Using Hollywood Math (Takeshi Shudo), Worst Screen Debut (for all 151 Pokemon), Biggest Disappointment (Films that Didn’t Live Up to Their Hype) (Toho (the original Japanese distributor of the movie) and Warner Bros.), and it won Most Unwelcome Direct-to-Video Release (All nine Pokemon videos released in 1999, including this movie, which is weird because Pokemon The First Movie obviously wasn’t direct-to-video….) The only good award it won was the Animation Kobe award for theatrical films, and, being fair, that was purely a Japanese award for the Japanese version.

The Indigo League series of the Pokemon TV show as well as the first Pokemon movie cemented 4Kids as being a staple in the childhoods of an entire generation, no matter if 4Kids cared about such a thing or not. Truth be told, looking back, the first Pokemon movie’s complete mutilation was a huge warning sign of things to come for the company. It was the first window into their true views on their audience and their level of respect for their licenses. However, as children, fans simply didn’t tend to notice nor care. In fact, many, like myself, were most likely completely unaware of most of the issues with the movie until they were well into adulthood, if they ever learned about them at all, and by that point 4Kids was already long gone.

Still, even I treasure the first seasons of Pokemon and the first movie no matter what 4Kids did to them. Being so tough on the first movie when I initially reviewed it actually hurt my heart because of how beloved it was and still is to me. It’s a terrible commercialized shell of what it once was, but I’d still easily sit down, watch it and enjoy it right this second, just as many other people who were fans as children can also attest.

Pokemon was certainly the goose that laid the golden egg for 4Kids. Financially, they were growing quickly as a result. In just the three months of 1998 that Pokemon had been on the air and the video games and TCG had been in stores, 4Kids enjoyed a 46% jump in revenue from $10,116,800 in 1997 to $14,767,429 in 1998. And for 1999, revenue jumped 310% to $60,482,269. Their net income skyrocketed over these three years from $739,135 in 1997 to $2,743,069 in 1998 and an impressive $23,638,426 in 1999.

One last note for 1999 before we move on – there was a lawsuit where 4Kids as well as Nintendo and Wizards of the Coast were named as defendants. The plaintiff, the law firm of Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerachon, on behalf of all Pokemon trading card consumers, sued them, claiming their trading cards were illegal gambling, especially in regards to some packs containing rarer cards than others. The lawsuit was requesting an unspecified amount be paid back to consumers in monetary damages.

In a funny turn of events, the aforementioned law firm that started the lawsuit backed down when they realized that 4Kids was actually one of their clients. Even though they had withdrawn, reportedly three other law firms were continuing with the lawsuit. According to the financial report for 2000, the lawsuit was dismissed without prejudice because the plaintiffs couldn’t or wouldn’t prove why their case shouldn’t be dismissed due to lack of standing. It was appealed, but the appeal was denied in 2002, and the dismissal was upheld.

Next – Part 3: 4Kids 2000

Previous – Part 1: 4Kids as a 4Baby

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AniManga Clash! Yu-Gi-Oh (Manga) vs. Yu-Gi-Oh Season Zero Episode 2/Chapter 4

Plot: Anzu secretly gets a job at the local restaurant, Burger World. She doesn’t want Yugi or Jonouchi to find out because they might blab to the school and get her fired. Anzu needs this job to save money because, after she graduates, she intends on moving to New York to study dance.

However, there are more pressing matters to attend to – such as the escaped death row convict who has decided to pay Burger World a little visit.

Breakdown: The anime starts with a scene where Sugoroku reacts to the news that Yugi completed the Millennium Puzzle. He wonders why Yugi hasn’t changed at all when the glyphs on the box explained that the person who completed the Puzzle would get dark knowledge and power. This scene isn’t present in the manga.

Seems a little messed up for Sugoroku to give this thing that is imbued with dark magic to his grandson. It would be a different story if he didn’t actually believe it, but he does, so he pretty much wanted his grandson to be the host of ancient dark magicks without his consent or knowledge….

The escaped prisoner in the manga is known only as prisoner 777, which matches his 777 tattoo and the guy’s heavy belief in superstition and luck. In the anime, he not only gets a name, Tetsu Tasaki, but he also gets a nickname, Tetsu the Hedgehog, presumably because of his extremely spiky hair.

Miho is obviously not part of the discussion about Burger World in the manga since she’s only in the manga for one chapter (and this isn’t it). Honda also wasn’t there in the manga. He takes the time out to remind Jonouchi and Yugi that stopping anywhere on your way home from school is against the rules.

I find it kinda stupid that Miho believes Jonouchi when he theorizes that Anzu became a prostitute for old men for extra cash, especially to the point where she starts stalking Anzu to ‘save’ her.

The anime adds in a failed burglary attempt from Tetsu as well as him getting pissed while eating at a ramen shop. The news report is claiming he’s the prime suspect in a string of bank robberies when he didn’t steal anything.

I can’t help but get a fanfiction vibe off of Miho. Her personality’s not perfect or bland enough to be a Mary Sue, and she certainly doesn’t have the plot impact for that either, unless you have a thing for Honda or Jonouchi, so she comes off as a very inserted character when you read the manga alongside the anime. She’s always just kinda there or doing something other characters are doing. Hopefully that’ll change as the show goes on, but that would just mean we’d deviate more from the manga.

Also, they assume Miho is now Anzu’s fellow prostitute.

Do I have a dirty mind if I laughed when Jonouchi pointed out that Anzu bought a bentou meant for stamina….when they’re theorizing that she’s a prostitute now?

For the record, he was pointing out that they’re pricey and delicious.

And so Honda’s also so stupid as to believe that, just because they had a nice lunch, Miho’s also a prostitute that needs ‘saving.’ *sigh*

They insert another botched robbery from Tetsu. This time he did steal something – Marie Antoinette’s jeweled necklace, but he later hears over the car radio that it was fake. However, thirty jewels did go missing from the same store that weren’t fake. Despite not getting the real jewels, Tetsu gets suspected yet again.

Now Honda’s leaving with the girls and acting suspicious, leading Jonouchi to think he’s probably dating some old rich lady.

They finally decide to follow all of them to get to the Burger World plot. As you guessed, since Honda and Miho weren’t part of anything in chapter four, them getting hired at Burger World is anime-exclusive.

The detective investigating Tetsu’s escape is not present in the manga. Also, this guy could easily pass as Honda’s dad.

Tetsu’s anime design doesn’t include his facial tattoos. From all I’ve seen, I assume he also doesn’t retain his brief personality trait of believing in luck or superstition either. It is very possible that Tetsu isn’t meant to be the guy from the manga given these changes and that his name is never given in the manga, but they kept his face and hair basically the same, so I’m left to assume he is.

In the manga, Tetsu just enters Burger World and holds up the joint, which is kinda dumb for an escaped prisoner, if you ask me. Why don’t you just plaster a giant sign on your face that says ‘ARREST ME!’?…..Oh wait, he kinda already did that with the easily recognizable facial tats.

I think for the sake of extending the run time, they decided to make Tetsu a master of disguise instead, so it’s a mystery trying to figure out who in the restaurant might be him.

The manager (Shown to the left of the detective depicted above) is not in the manga, but I’m sure he’s just an innocent extra. Please ignore his character design, which looks like he just shivved a guy in the alleyway before his shift. He has a sad/worried expression so he’s obviously a good guy.

I really don’t think any detective worth his salt would put civilians in danger, especially teenagers, by making them look for the ARMED ESCAPED CONVICT WHO WAS ON DEATH ROW. And, in the end, he just flashes his badge and asks everyone to show him their legs (Tetsu’s leg was injured upon escaping) anyway, so this was all pointless.

They don’t obey him, but he made the request AFTER the kids looked for themselves by pretending they were retrieving toys.

To extend this even more, they include the fact that the cops lost another escaped prisoner not too long ago and that they never found him – Jirou the Yellow Spider. And, oh my god, guys, he was the creepy as shit restaurant manager. Wow. Color me surprised.

He was the one robbing the places before Tetsu could, based on his in-depth knowledge of Tetsu and being employed at Burger World. He knew what places he was going to rob, but Tetsu had a habit of getting a burger before going out to do the deed, which gave Jirou the opportunity to rob the places before him. Lots of conveniences needed to fall into place for that to work.

Jirou, by the way, becomes the main baddie of the episode, not Tetsu as it was in the manga. I guess I’m okay with this alteration.

Tetsu originally explains that he’s going to blindfold Anzu instead of mute her with the cloth because people are more scared when they’re blindfolded, not muted. That’s why they blindfold convicts when they’re getting executed, not mute them. (That’s not really the reason. Depending on the method of execution, it’s either to prevent any innocent people watching from seeing the executed’s eyes pop out, or to help the executioner and any viewing parties to further detach from the event because the prisoner might look them in the eye.) He takes that opportunity to tell Anzu that he was on death row, which indicates that he almost certainly murdered someone in the past. In the anime, the only line that’s kept is about blindfolding being frightening, and they don’t even keep the comparison with muting there.

By the way, the colors in this episode are the worst I’ve ever seen in the entire series…or anime…or life. I don’t know how anyone greenlit this or slept at night knowing there wasn’t a warning on screen about possibly going blind. Yu-Gi-Oh Season Zero doesn’t exactly have an appealing color palette to begin with, but my god this is horrendous.

Look at this – orange on darker orange striped walls, orange booths, lime green shirts, forest green pants/skirts, red and yellow ties, salmon colored hair – and then there’s Tetsu and his outfit.

Wine colored jacket with a blue and white striped shirt, apple green pants, and his bright yellow on dark swamp green hair. And look, the floor is purple. Fucking PURPLE. It’s like they beat this episode to death with a washed out rainbow.

Just so we’re clear on the situation right now – Jirou escaped prison several months before Tetsu did, altered his face to be unrecognizable as Jirou but still very clearly criminal-y, decided to live an unassuming life for a while then suddenly reverted back to crime once he knew he could pin the robberies on the recently escaped Tetsu.

Here’s what I don’t get, though. There was a report of Tetsu getting hit on the leg by a prison guard, but that didn’t happen to Tetsu, it happened to Jirou. However, this was several months ago, presumably. Why has the bruise not faded yet? And why would Jirou go to the trouble of surgically altering his face to cover his identity but not remove the giant spider tattoo from his back?

Shadow Game

Outside of the opponent being Jirou not Tetsu, the game is exactly the same barring the very end. They each agree to only use one finger of their choosing during the entire game. Whoever uses a finger that is not the declared one, loses.

Jirou/Tetsu chooses his right index finger, the one on the trigger of the gun. Yami chooses his right thumb. Upon the game’s start, Jirou/Tetsu instantly decides he’s going to pull the trigger. However, Yami uses his thumb to ignite a lighter. Jirou/Tetsu’s cigarette has yet to be lit, so he lets Yami’s last gesture be lighting it for him.

He lights the cigarette then drops the still-lit lighter on Jirou/Tetsu’s left hand, which happens to be pouring Russian senowolf vodka, which is 90% alcohol. I initially thought this had to be made up because 90% alcohol is a ridiculous amount, but after some research, there are alcoholic beverages that go even higher, up to 192 proof, which is 96% alcohol. Wow.

Jirou can’t move his hand without the lighter falling, nor can he shoot the gun without the recoil causing the same result. He’s now pouring so much alcohol that it’s getting all over him, meaning he’ll quickly go up in flames if the lighter is dropped.

Here’s where the two versions shift. In the manga, Yami gets Anzu away from the danger and Tetsu remains still. However, he opens his mouth long enough to say ‘But….I’m lucky….’ which causes the cigarette to fall out of his mouth, igniting the flames. It’s confirmed that Tetsu burns to death in the inferno. (Also, Jonouchi is bummed he didn’t get to see the guy self-immolate………)

In the anime, Yami gets Anzu away from the danger, but Jirou realizes he can just put down the gun and grab the lighter, which is…..cheating, yes, but Yami kinda cheated first as he had to move some of his other fingers to both drop the lighter and get Anzu away (It should be noted that, technically, Yami cheated in the manga too, he even makes a finger-gun hand gesture when he was still playing – and there it’s kinda worse because Tetsu got a penalty game when he should have won. He deserved it, of course, but it wasn’t really fair.)

Jirou decides to shoot Yami for what he did, but Yami declares a punishment game since Jirou cheated. He’s trapped in an illusion of burning forever instead of it actually happening. It can be argued that this is actually worse because at least Tetsu’s pain ended in the manga.

There’s an anime-exclusive ending with Anzu quitting her job in order to spend time with Yugi, and Miho and Honda getting jobs at the new beef noodle joint because Miho wants to buy clothes and Honda wants to get her out of her clothes.

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Overall, I really like this manga chapter because of how badass and vicious the shadow game is (even if Yami cheated), but I can’t deny that the anime pulled off the overall story much better.

The concept of having two criminals on the loose with one framing the other for their crimes while simultaneously screwing the other out of loot is really interesting. I think it’s a bit unfair that the actual culprit makes his first appearance 2/3 of the way into the episode, but that’s not a dealbreaker. Also, even though Tetsu was a thief and probably an ass, I think we spent too much time with him in the anime for me to want to see him burn to death, so shifting to the other guy is fine with me.

In the manga, Tetsu escapes prison, then the next time we see him he’s holding up Burger World. He murdered a guard while escaping, and we know he was on death row, so he was likely a murderer to start with. That’s why no one’s really shedding any tears for the guy once he dies (though it is insanely odd that Yugi, Jonouchi and Anzu just….don’t react. Or, if they do, react poorly. Yugi doesn’t acknowledge it and says he’s hungry, Anzu thinks about sexy Yami, and Jonouchi, as I mentioned, was just disappointed he didn’t get to watch a guy burn to death….)

With Jirou, it’s a bit odd because we only know him as a thief to this point. Guards did fall in the escape, but it’s unclear if they died, and if they did that would be Tetsu’s doing not Jirou’s. He does attempt to kill Yami at least, but I still think the perpetual hell of constantly being trapped in an illusion of being set ablaze is a bit harsh for the guy who actually did fewer terrible things than his manga counterpart who, in my opinion, got off a tad lighter.

Hehe…lighter.

The only part of the anime that I think gives it marks in the negative category is the added stuff with Miho and Honda. I already don’t care for Miho, and Honda following her like a puppy is just pathetic. The fact that so much of the runtime is dedicated to them stalking Anzu and later Miho and going through the same motions three times was trying my patience. They do a similar thing at the very end, and that almost made me want to give this one to the manga, but I’m choosing to be above that.

Winner: Anime

Final Notes: If you’ll recall, this story was briefly touched upon in the 2000 version of the anime. In a flashback as the group was climbing the stairs to get to Pegasus’ castle, Yugi and Anzu reminisce. She remembers Jonouchi and Yugi randomly coming to Burger World and discovering she worked there. She angrily dumped ketchup all over their meal, as she does here (Though, in the manga and Season Zero she writes ‘I won’t forgive you if you blab’ in the ketchup. And that’s pretty impressive, to be honest) However, there’s no escaped prisoner plot or anything like that.

In the 2000 anime, she later gets a card in her locker telling her to meet someone in the gym after school. If she doesn’t, the person will tell her secrets. She instantly believes it’s Jonouchi or Yugi because they’re the only ones who know her secret.

She goes to confront them but finds a creeper lying in the shadows instead. He attacks her and is about to film a dirty video and/or rape her, but Yugi, somehow knowing about the situation, intervenes. Yugi gets knocked out, as does Anzu, and Yami comes out to play. He challenges the creep to a Shadow game, which is a simple ‘draw to see who gets the better card’ deal. Yami wins and mind crushes the creep, saving Anzu.

It’s a far cry from the badassery of the original story. I get that it was probably too dark for this version, but Yami practically needed sick guitar licks during this Shadow Game. The 2000’s version is pure luck or heart of the cards schmaltz.

Also, as an added bonus, the colors on the uniforms in the 2000 version didn’t make my corneas commit seppuku.

Next time, we’ll catch up with some stuff in the manga that isn’t covered in the anime up to chapters 9 and 10 (Which is covered in episode 3.)

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