Yu-Gi-Oh! (Manga) Chapter 26 Review (AniManga Clash! Season Zero Placeholder)

Hey everyone! Welcome to another episode of “What the Hell is Wrong with Mokuba? Like, Really. Someone Lock This Kid Up.”

Today, Mokuba ‘invites’/psuedo-kidnaps Jonouchi and Yugi to his mansion for a party, but poor Seto is too tired from all of the preparation on his secret project, Death T, that he’s sleeping and can’t be bothered to tend to their guests. It’s up to Mokuba.

Mokuba decides to prepare them a feast – which is really just a bunch of random mundane foods like burgers and kids meals. However, Mokuba has prepared them in such a way that it is more than worth it to eat them, supposedly. The foods are on a spinning wheel, and one of the foods has a treasure inside. The only way to get the treasure is to eat your whole plate of food.

Jonouchi jokes about Mokuba poisoning the food, which he denies, but then Jonouchi eats it, and, yeah it’s poisoned.

Jonouchi is going to fucking die in 30 minutes unless Yugi can beat Mokuba at this game and find the ‘treasure’ without getting the other poisoned plate.

What….the hell…is wrong with Mokuba?

Mokuba is made out to be so much worse than Seto at this point. All Seto has done is rough up a few people and cheat at a card game. Mokuba has threatened Yugi with an uzi, threatened to chop off his fingers if he couldn’t beat him in Capsule Monsters, and now he’s poisoned Jonouchi and is aiming to poison Yugi.

Shadow Game (Kinda)

This isn’t really a Shadow Game because Mokuba’s the one running it, but eh.

Yami spins the wheel and gets the spaghetti, which is perfectly fine. Mokuba spins and gets the chocolate parfait, which is also perfectly fine. Yami notices that Mokuba touched an empty syrup bottle as he was spinning, which Mokuba says is just symbolic of his fate because of the old saying ‘The misfortune of others is like sweet syrup.’ In actuality, Mokuba’s cheating again. The bottle is a switch, and he can stop the wheel wherever he wants with it both for himself and Yami. He also knows where the poison is located.

He has committed the ultimate sin. Mokuba has spat in the face of 4Kids and every America to be American in America.

He poisoned…..

THE HAMBURGER!!

Yami spins the wheel, but he has a trick up his own sleeve. He ties his Millennium Puzzle to the wheel and gives it a strong spin, smashing the syrup bottle and rendering it inoperable. Mokuba no longer has the ability to stop the wheel where he wants – and guess where it ends up.

Mokuba gets the hamburger, and even though he could simply refuse to eat it, he does actually eat it and gets poisoned himself. Yami gets the antidote and saves Jonouchi, but…I guess leaves Mokuba to die? Because the chapter just ends there.

Granted, I assume he has more antidote for such an occasion, and his servants were coming to help him, but still, that’s kinda messed up, Yami. Is that his penalty game?

———————————–

This chapter was pretty unnecessary given that we already had a run-in with Psychokuba a couple chapters back, and some elements were pretty nonsensical. For instance, why did Mokuba choose to put the switch in a glass syrup bottle on the table as opposed to being in a remote in his pocket or on the underside of the table or something?

Not only is it very obvious that he’s cheating, even given the extremely weak explanation he gave, but he’s leaving the switch open to being smashed. Even if Yami didn’t do the trick with the Puzzle, he could’ve easily just gone over and smashed the thing. What would Mokuba do about it?

Then there’s the question of why Mokuba would eat the poisoned hamburger. I was going to say maybe it’s a pride thing, but anyone who would cheat at the drop of a hat doesn’t have much dignity to play with. Mokuba would have just thrown the food and surrendered the antidote.

It wasn’t a bad chapter because it set up the main overarching plot for the next several chapters, and the game was pretty interesting and intense, but it was still technically unneeded.

Next time, Kaiba brings Yugi and Jonouchi to Kaiba Land for a fun day out playing games! Also, to try and kill Yugi’s grandpa! Ya know, just a relaxing Sunday.

Final Notes: So, I play Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Links, and one of Mokuba’s decks is called ‘Poison Hamburger.’ It’s centered around the ritual monster, Hungry Burger. I always wondered what the hell Mokuba had to do with hamburgers because I never recalled him doing anything related to burgers in the anime.

This chapter explains everything.

It’s really weird, because Duel Links!Mokuba will also make references to being really good at Capsule Monsters when that’s another thing that wasn’t carried over into the anime.

---

If you enjoy my work and would like to help support my blog, please consider donating at my Ko-Fi page. Thank you! ♥

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.

---

If you enjoy my work and would like to help support my blog, please consider donating at my Ko-Fi page. Thank you! ♥

AniManga Clash! Yu-Gi-Oh! Season Zero Episode 19: Big Melee! Popularity Contest (Placeholder) Review

Plot: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Breakdown: This was me for 99% of the episode.

And this was me for the remaining 1%.

I don’t want to talk about this episode. If there was ever any episode of this show I’d suggest you skip, it’s this one. Yes, even over the episode where Anzu’s being a horrible person to lure Yami out.

This is a Miho-centric episode, which is reason enough to turn away, but it’s even worse than that. Honda has a meeting with the student council and becomes annoyed with his treasurer who is funneling funds for the council into his Kaoruko fan club. Honda wants more funds for the beautification club, so he posits a challenge. They’ll hold a school-wide popularity contest to see who is more beloved by the school – Kaoruko or Miho. Because that sounds like just the most interesting premise that totally didn’t tempt me to drop my laptop into a wood chipper.

Also joining the contest are Anzu, because she wants the grand prize of tickets to the Beauty and the Beast musical, and Jonouchi because, despite this contest having a bikini section and being clearly geared entirely towards girls, they never barred guys from partaking in it. Also, he wants to sell the tickets because he messed up some guy’s bike or something.

Kaoruko is, obviously, a massively evil bitch. There’s a lot of her and her cronies being catty to Miho and Anzu, and they’re all just terrible people in general. She becomes concerned that she’ll lose, so she obviously cheats. She puts on a folk music tape for Anzu’s hip-hop dance routine, which forces her to quit. Dunno why she couldn’t have just stopped them and said “Hey, this isn’t the right music. Please check the tape.” but whatever.

She didn’t need to sabotage Jonouchi because he got himself disqualified.

She sabotaged Miho by slicing up her bikini, but she was able to find a suitable mermaid costume in the drama department. What I find funny about that costume is that they show her going up the stairs to the high-dive but didn’t think that it doesn’t make sense how she’d easily go up the stairs in a mermaid costume. It literally only shows the tail sliding up the stairs, which is something they didn’t need to show. It’s pretty funny. There’s no way she just climbed up there while carrying the costume and then put it on while on the high dive. She didn’t have that much time. Mermaid costumes are really difficult to get on.

In the final judging, they had a….pbbbttt….I dunno what this is. A wear-a-dress competition? So, Kaoruko does the logical thing – ya know…..the logical thing for characters in Season Zero anyway – and chloroforms Miho in an alley behind the school, rips up her dress and leaves her unconscious on the ground.

Yugi finds her, becomes angry at what Kaoruko did to Miho, changes into Yami and challenges her to a Shadow Game.

Shadow Game

Kaoruko has a bouquet of flowers, so the game is based on that. Yami says they can choose to grab between one to three flowers each, taking turns until the flowers she has are all gone. Whoever pulls the last flower loses. They go ahead with the game, and when they get to five flowers, Kaoruko thinks she has the game locked because no matter what Yami picks she’ll be able to make him lose. If he grabs one, she’ll grab three and he’ll be left with the last one. If he grabs two, she’ll grab two and he’ll lose again. If he grabs three, she’ll grab one, and he’ll lose.

He grabs three, she grabs one and believes she’s succeeded, but when Yami goes to grab the flower, he grabs the one she put in her hair. He only said they had to choose from the flowers she had, not just the bouquet. She’s left with the final flower, making her the loser.

Her punishment game is to get a bunch of wrinkles all over her body (the illusion of such anyway) because, earlier, Miho made a nonsensical burn about her having tighter skin than Kaoruko.

When she’s declared the winner of the contest since Miho didn’t show up, she appears on stage with two ropes in her hands. She pulls them, which causes a bucket of water to dump on her head, for some reason, and she’s humiliated in front of the whole school. So, even though she won the contest, she’s no longer beloved by the school….I guess……because…..water….I don’t fuckin’ know.

Miho’s never seen again (in this episode) after she’s found by Yugi, by the way. The last we see of her is being unconscious on the ground, drugged, with a torn up dress on.

After the contest, Yugi walks home wondering about how he sometimes loses some of his memories. Mokuba rides by while being driven home, spots Yugi and clutches two Capsule Monster pods.

The end.

You may be wondering what 1% part actually made me happy. That was the only AniManga Clash note of this entire episode. Bakura is briefly introduced here when he doesn’t make an appearance in the manga until chapter 50. I love Bakura – always have, even though he is ridiculously shafted throughout the series – so this made me pretty happy. His debut there is nothing like here, so I decided to not cover the chapter yet. Besides, that chapter is covered in another episode.

Yugi was trying to convince Miho to partake in the competition (she didn’t want to enter because she found it to be a bother, and Honda begged Yugi to help him convince her to do it.) While she briefly went in a store, Yugi’s Puzzle started glowing in response to Bakura’s Ring, that, at this point, we couldn’t see. Bakura asked Yugi if he did anything to him, Yugi denied this, and Bakura explained that he sometimes loses his memories. Yugi also has gaps in his memories when Yami takes him over, so this intrigued him.

Miho comes out and instantly falls for Bakura, who is put off by her drooling over him. He doesn’t even say a word in response to her blatherings before he walks away. Miho decided then to enter the contest in the hopes that this random guy she met on the street and doesn’t even know the name of would be her escort when she won. Bakura never appears again in the episode. What a good use of his character.

You’d think in an episode like this that the Shadow Game would at least make up for everything, but no. The game is lame as hell, the twist is obvious, and we’ve already had an instance where a vain character was made to imagine herself as old and ugly in a punishment game. I don’t even understand her ultimate comeuppance. She dumped water on herself and now she’s a laughing stock? Jonouchi danced on stage in the worst drag ensemble possible, got pies and garbage thrown in his face and got thrown out for fighting. A bucket of water is more embarrassing?

Let’s just move on and forget this.

Next episode, Yami faces off against Kaiba’s last Shitennou!

---

If you enjoy my work and would like to help support my blog, please consider donating at my Ko-Fi page. Thank you! ♥

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?

————————————————-

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.

---

If you enjoy my work and would like to help support my blog, please consider donating at my Ko-Fi page. Thank you! ♥

Yu-Gi-Oh! Episode 14: Pitch Dark Duel! Castle of Concealing Darkness | Sub/Dub Comparison

Plot: Mai has been targeted by one of the tournament’s Player Killers, a duelist specifically hired by Pegasus to weed out duelists that are still left behind. He implements the power of shadows and darkness to frighten his opponents and psych them out during the duel. After losing all eight of her star chips, Yugi steps up and challenges the Player Killer to win them back.

——————————————–

After the commercial break, 4Kids reedits and dubs a new conversation before Panik and Yugi start their duel. It adds nothing to the story, so I don’t know why they did that.

Name Change: 4Kids named PaniK (yes, apparently, the K needs to be capitalized.) He had no name beyond Player Killer (of darkness) in the original. That is why he has PK on his jacket. But I guess 4Kids didn’t want to say “kill” so they renamed him PaniK….To be honest, though, that’s a pretty intimidating name, just a silly way to write it.

In the original, PK refuses the bet Yugi offers because six star chips won’t be enough to win back Mai’s eight (Why DID Mai bet eight star chips anyway? She’d only have to bet two in order to get the ten she needs to gain entry into the castle. Can the Player Killers really just straight up force you to bet everything? Also, how is she a straggler who needs to be targeted for elimination anyway? She was like one duel away from getting in. For that matter, if duelists likely get kicked off the island when time is up and they don’t have the proper amount of star chips anyway, aren’t these PKers moot?)

So PK insinuates that if Yugi loses he’ll either kill him or burn him alive along with taking his star chips. In the dub, PaniK says that the bet is fine with 6 to 8 chips, because he doesn’t care. However, he kinda insinuates that he’ll burn him with the flamethrowers if he loses….It’s pretty unclear.

In the original, Mai is surprised that those flamethrowers were in the dueling arena. In the dub, she says PaniK used them on her too. Weird, you’d think 4Kids wouldn’t purposely create that kind of situation. Also, if you knew those were in there, a warning to Yugi would’ve been nice.

Wait, if Yugi’s Winged Dragon attacked and couldn’t defeat any of the monsters, why didn’t the Winged Dragon die or Yugi take any damage to his life points? Did he aim his attack on the arena?

Yugi missed a way that he could figure out the attack power of PK’s opposing monsters. When his Winged Dragon was out in attack mode, he got attacked and Yugi lost 394 LP. That means that one of those monsters has at least 1794 attack points since the Winged Dragon has 1400 attack points. If he played a stronger monster, he could keep learning the attack points value. It’s risky, but it would work and would likely be worth it.

In the original, Mai believes Yugi’s confidence is real after Yugi taunts PK. In the dub, she says he’s making amateur mistakes by telling PaniK what his strategy is (Even though they always do that, every duel ever) because he’s panicking.

In the original, Mai explains that Yugi’s changed up his strategy. If he can’t see in the darkness, he’ll use his voice to penetrate it instead. In the dub, Mai just explains again that Yugi is panicking and PaniK is too skilled for Yugi.

Hm, 4Kids left the WARNING on the screen after the Reaper’s attack. Curious…

Originally, Yugi does show PK the Swords of Revealing Light card, but he sets his card face down without insinuating that it is the Swords. In the dub, Yugi insinuates that the face down card is the Swords, which is why Mai keeps berating him for making mistakes.

In the original, they don’t imply any powerful card of PK’s at the end of the episode. 4Kids threw that in as a teaser, but this is reflected in the next episode preview that always gets removed so it’s not that bad.

———————————

I don’t like this couple of episodes at all. It is, by far, the most nonsensical duel in Duelist Kingdom. Though it doesn’t really start grating on me until the next episode.

Next episode, the duel with PaniK concludes.

---

If you enjoy my work and would like to help support my blog, please consider donating at my Ko-Fi page. Thank you! ♥

AniManga Clash! Yu-Gi-Oh! Season Zero Episode 17: Close Match! A Model’s Invitation (Placeholder) Review

Plot: Kaiba’s third shitennou appears! An idol named Aileen comes to Japan to defeat Yugi on Kaiba’s behalf using Anzu as a hostage. The game? An ancient Indian game called Raijinhai that Yugi has never played before. Can Yugi find some way to win and save Anzu?

Breakdown: The best part about this episode is the absolutely hilarious way Anzu was animated excitedly shaking a box back and forth in the beginning. If you only watch one shot of this episode, please just watch that. You won’t regret it.

As for the rest of this episode……eeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh….First of all, yay, another Anzu-centric episode. Whoo. Hoo. It’s not as bad I feared because she thankfully spends a majority of the episode frozen in total silence, but still. She starts the episode being annoying, and she ends the episode being an absolute bitch. For someone who worships Aileen, a model who looked pretty unique, especially in Japan in the 90s, she’s sure easily fooled by a pair of sunglasses….

Second, the first half of the episode is mostly nothing. It’s entirely setup to the game, which, if you ask me, is too long. Most of the first scenes with Kaiba could have removed, and the scene with her….boyfriend (?) could have been removed too. The scene with her boyfriend, or whoever that was, was meant to show us that she’s really good at games and something awful happens when you lose to her. Somehow, losing to her caused this guy to break his leg. The game she chose was Raijinhai, which, I checked, is not a real game. And, somehow, losing that game resulted in the guy breaking his leg, which was a big deal because he’s a famous soccer player.

While this does inform the viewer that this woman is serious business…..isn’t it a bit better to have that be a reveal? Like she can just be a nice celebrity at first and then boom she reveals that she’s taken Anzu hostage and is one of Kaiba’s shitennou? What we learn about her through these scenes is that she became one of Kaiba’s shitennou because he promised she’d be able to meet smart and famous men to be game opponents that way, which is not exactly compelling. (Also, are women not good enough opponents for her?)

Later, we learn that she’s all about strategy, psyching out her opponents and reading people. She loves games that rely on strategy and reading your opponent and dislikes all games based on random chance. Aileen is actually a pretty okay character. She might be the only half-Canadian half-Indian anime character in existence, which is cool. She doesn’t come off as nearly intimidating enough, though.

I pretty much just like her attitude. She’s not over-the-top evil or a massive jerk. She’s just someone who loves games and outwitting her opponents…..even if that’s not what she ends up doing. She even lost gracefully, and she left Yugi on good terms. I would say that’s a bit weird considering she held Anzu hostage, but who cares? She made Anzu shut up and not move for about ten minutes. It’s all good.

Third, the game of the episode is very poorly explained. Apparently, the people who wrote the Wiki somehow had access to more rules than they presented in this episode because, as far as I saw, it was very random and luck-based. Which is weird because she specifically said she didn’t like luck-based games.

There are a set of figurines kinda akin to a chess set. You have a king, queen, Raijin Indra, Shogun, two Elephants, two Cavalry and two Soldiers. The Raijin Indra is the strongest, it beats everything but can only be used once per game. The king beats everything and is only beaten by the queen. The queen can’t beat anything besides the king. For the rest, I’m assuming the Wiki writers were using what happened in the game to figure out what beats what and pretty much guess because she doesn’t explain what any other piece does.

The game works like this – you have a game board with a screen in the middle. You put the screen up and choose a piece. Then you lower the screen and compare the pieces. If the piece beats your opponent’s, the losing piece is removed from the game. You win by either taking all of your opponent’s pieces, all of their stronger pieces or their king.

It’s very much just a guessing game until you have eliminated some pieces. Aileen goes on about how this is a game of psychology to the point where it honestly seems like she can read Yami’s mind. Part of this mind game is to take Anzu hostage because she knows Yugi/Yami cares about her, referring to her as his girlfriend.

The way she reads Yami is weird and never adequately explained. She invites Yugi and Anzu over after asking Yugi to bring her a really rare and interesting game from his grandpa’s game shop. She has a dance studio in her apartment, somehow, and invites Anzu to come dance. As she gets into a dance pose, Aileen tells her to hold the pose….and she does. She’s in some kind of trance. She’s not conscious, though her eyes are wide open and not focused. She can’t move a thing, and she’s totally silent.

Yami later asks if this ability is hypnosis, and the Wiki says it is, but she doesn’t seem to agree. When she tries to explain this power later, she says “All I do is use words to get into the crevices of people’s hearts.” How did saying “Hold that pose, okay?” get into a crevice in Anzu’s heart?

During the game, it seems as if she’s cheating because she predicts every single piece that Yami uses, but this also makes no sense. It’s explained that she can do this because she rattled Yugi by taking Anzu hostage. Then she used probabilities combined with his disrupted thinking to predict what he’d play.

Here’s the thing, though…..That makes no sense. There are seven pieces. Yugi has no experience with this game. He can’t really make much of a strategy either since it’s largely random. There’s no way she’s accurately predicting every single move based purely on probabilities and the fact that Yugi’s a bit distracted by Anzu being in danger.

What’s even funnier is that Yugi turns around and does the same thing to her. Once he realizes what she’s doing, he rattles her by predicting one of her pieces accurately. Once she’s rattled, he’s able to predict all of her moves. But here’s the thing….again…..this doesn’t make sense either. Not only should he not be able to do this because of the reasons I just explained, but him doing this trick wins him the game. Why? Wouldn’t they just be stalemated because they can both read each other? Or would they stop letting the other read them and still end in a stalemate?

Oh and the funniest part of this whole game was when Aileen randomly upped the stakes. Apparently, the threat of Anzu forever being a ballerina statue wasn’t enough. She reveals that there’s a door slowly opening in the dance studio. With each piece Yami loses, the door raises slightly.

What’s behind this door?

……Aileen’s pet tiger!

Because she’s Indian and thus has a pet tiger, I guess.

I laughed out loud when this was revealed. How completely random both with the unnecessary stakes increase and the sudden tiger.

Yami kinda uses his powers a little…..I think….or maybe not. His Puzzle glows as he boasts that she has 2000 years of Indian experience with this game behind her, but games were invented in ancient Egypt – so he has 5000 years of experience behind him…..I don’t get it. But whatever.

Yami wins, and Anzu’s safe, Yippee frickin’ skippy……

Oh, sorry. Does it seem like I’m being overly mean to Anzu today? You know, you’re right. I give Anzu too much crap. She hasn’t done anything awful today….Okay, she was kinda rude to Yugi earlier because he didn’t know who Aileen was, but she was okay besides that. Yeah, I’m sure once Anzu wakes up, she’ll perfectly delightful…….*cough*

I was so caught off-guard by what Anzu did when she was released from the trance. It was one of those moments where I had to pause because I was just flabbergasted.

……She slapped the unholy fuck out of Yugi.

For no reason.

He ran into the room, concerned for her, and the instant she snapped out of her trance she slapped him so hard he fell down. She says that he got in the way, but 1) No, he didn’t. He was in front of her when she woke up. 2) Even if he did interrupt her, she was POSING before she was frozen. How do you get in the way of a pose? And 3) He didn’t touch her or do anything. He just ran in yelling her name and she scrambled his face meat with her palm.

Fuck you, Anzu. I can’t believe how much you make me yearn for 2000anime!Anzu. Do you realize how shitty of a character you have to be to make me yearn for Captain Friendship over there?

When all is said and done, Kaiba fires Aileen, and her final words to him are that he’s not as strong as Yugi. Later, Aileen flies back to….wherever she’s from…..wait, did she bring her tiger with her on an international flight…..for a day trip? Or does the tiger stay in Japan? Who takes care of that thing? She said it attacks everyone but her.

As Aileen flies off, she thinks to herself that she wants to play another game with Yugi in the future – a game of love. She’s 19 and Yugi’s like 17, so this isn’t squicky. I just always get distracted when people are romantically interested in Yugi because he looks so much like he’s ten….

This isn’t the last we see of Aileen, however. Apparently, she returns later in the show again under Kaiba’s employ for some reason.

All in all, this episode was fine, just kinda boring, which is a shame for the third shitennou episode.

Just so we’re clear – Kaiba’s shitennou so far have been a guy obsessed with dolls, a guy who was really lucky and a model who could kinda-ish use hypnosis and whose specialty game was one that relied extremely heavily on chance while saying she dislikes games relying on chance and acting as if the game doesn’t rely heavily on chance……….Cool.

Also, I should note that Jonouchi, Honda and Miho don’t appear for a single second in this episode, which is very, very odd. They constantly get shoehorned into episodes that have little to nothing to do with them, but here we have plenty of time to throw them in and they chose not to. Weird.

Next time, we’re finally getting back into comparison territory as we cover chapters 46-47 and an ancient Chinese game where your soul is on the line.

---

If you enjoy my work and would like to help support my blog, please consider donating at my Ko-Fi page. Thank you! ♥

Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monsters | Episode 1: Getting Played Review

Plot: Yugi and Téa are getting into a new game called Capsule Monsters – a spin-off (?) board game of Duel Monsters. Joey wins an all-expense paid trip to India and invites all of his friends to come along, but their plane suddenly crashes on a remote island. While everyone is okay, they’re stuck until help arrives. The group decides to explore the island while they wait, and they quickly stumble upon an unconscious man named Alex Brisbane. According to him, he was exploring a strange Egyptian-esque pyramid on the island with Yugi’s grandpa when he suddenly went missing.

Yugi and the others follow Alex into the pyramid to Solomon’s last location only to see a massive empty room with a strange map covering the floor. As he walks onto it, Joey vanishes in a flash of light. Realizing Yugi’s grandpa likely vanished the same way, Yugi, Téa and Tristan step on the map as well, following Joey and Solomon to find them and bring them home. Little do they realize that they’ve actually become trapped in the world of Capsule Monsters, and they’ll need to play the game in order to leave.

Breakdown: Ever since I did my 4Kids retrospective, I’ve wanted to completely review Capsule Monsters. I won’t be able to do an SDC on it since a Japanese version either doesn’t exist or simply isn’t available, so I thought I’d just do a simple episode-by-episode review on this…spin-off?….Season? Arc? I dunno. Whatever 4Kids intended for this to be.

——————————

The first episode starts with Yugi having a nightmare about Yami, who is clad in gold armor for some reason, fighting a giant shadow creature, who winds up consuming him. Yugi jolts out of bed and reveals that this is a recurring nightmare. He then notices the Puzzle glowing and acting strangely.

Yugi heads out, but then remembers that his grandpa is still gone after suddenly leaving for a ‘secret’ week-long trip. He should have been home that morning, but there’s been no sign of him. Does he not have a phone or anything?

After the theme song, we get such a dramatic reveal of Joey that I really thought this was indeed meant to be a spin-off moment. There’s no reason whatsoever to reveal him so dramatically when nothing is going on. However, no one else gets such a dramatic reveal so I dunno.

Joey partakes in a street contest for a prize of some sort.

Back at school, Téa and Yugi are playing Capsule Monsters, and Téa, being the mostly stereotypical girl character she is, doesn’t bother learning how to play and only wants to play cute monsters like Happy Lover. She duels the same way, basically, but at least she roughly knows how Duel Monsters works and gives a crap about it.

Téa: “I suppose that means your soldier guy is going to fight my flying guy?” Soldier gu—That’s Celtic Guardian. You know Celtic Guardian. You’ve seen that monster tons of times.

Tristan shows up followed soon after by a super excited Joey who explains that he won three tickets for a special trip for all of them…..All four of them. I guess it’s possible that he was showing off the tickets he was offering to the others and withholding his, but why would he do that?

As they walk along, Téa thinks to herself that she has a bad feeling about their trip because whenever they go places terrible and usually supernatural things tend to happen. Well, I mean….yeah, she has a point.

She’s snapped out of her concerns by the voice of Yami, and they oddly note his sudden appearance with a chime like “Oh who cares about all those supernatural threats that tend to follow us? I have my hunky pharaoh now!”

It’s only here, right before they’re about to get on the plane, that we learn this is a six-day trip to India. Before, all he said was they were “tickets to paradise” and literally all the tickets showed were vague images of fields with stone walls with a statue in the foreground.

As they’re flying, the plane starts shaking violently and the first thing Tristan says in response to this is;

“Hey! You messed up my photo, man!”

Either he has nerves of steel, or he’s an idiot.

Their engines fail, and the plane crashes into the water below. We cut to the group, sans the pilots, on shore. Joey complains he lost all of his stuff, but uh…..how? He has a backpack, and it looks like you can still access the plane no problem. Go back and get it? I guess it’s possible that it’s all waterlogged, but if that’s the case then how were all of their backpacks left dry? Why do they even have backpacks? It sounded they were planning on a vacation not a backpacking trip.

Téa says that the pilot, who is never shown again, sent out a distress signal, but it could be hours before they’re rescued. Joey and Tristan immediately decide to leave and wander in the unknown wilderness so their trip won’t be wasted. You guys are going on a six day trip. They said it would take a few hours to get rescued. I’m sure they’d still take you to your destination. Just stay still. But of course they don’t, and I guess it’s made okay because they point out how stupid they’re being.

They stumble upon a man in black robes passed out on the ground. They give him some water and help him out when Yugi notices a black bandanna fall out of his pocket that looks identical to his grandpa’s.

Shocked, the man, Dr. Alex Brisbane, reveals that he was on an expedition with Yugi’s grandpa in the area, but he went missing….I just realized Yugi flippantly went on a six-day trip to India right after he became suspicious because his grandpa hadn’t returned home yet. He DOES have an off-screen mom, and he had to have gone home and packed. Didn’t he learn any more about grandpa’s trip or anything during that time? Was the trip literally immediately after Joey won the tickets?

As they travel with Alex to help find Solomon, Yami tells Yugi that this all seems way too suspicious. They randomly win a trip, they randomly crash, they just so happen to stumble upon the last person to see Solomon before he went missing right in the area they ‘randomly’ crashed in – it’s all too weird. Very good point, Yami. Although it’s so obvious that you really wonder why no one else has gotten suspicious before now. I mean, yeah, weird things do tend to happen to them……I was going to continue, but then I started listing all of the weird things that happen to them in my head, and realized this is probably one of the easier things to accept.

They reach a pyramid, and Alex explains that they were exploring and analyzing this weird Egyptian pyramid that somehow is in India (I assume they’re in India) when Solomon went missing. According to him, this pyramid is the tomb of Alexander the Great who was briefly crowned a pharaoh in Egypt, which is why he supposedly has a pyramid, but the mystery is why the pyramid is in the middle of the jungle instead of in Egypt.

Alexander the Great was indeed a pharaoh, and the Egyptians even named Alexandria after him and hailed him as a god after he died. However, he was mummified and buried in a tomb in Alexandria. No one knows where exactly in Alexandria the tomb is as of now, but they’re fairly certain it’s in Alexandria because several people who claimed to have visited the pyramid in the past stated it was in Alexandria.

There was a recent report in 2021 claiming the tomb had been found in Siwa, Egypt, but it hasn’t been verified, and there hasn’t been any updates on that report as of this writing.

Anyway, is anyone going to ask why two professional archaeologists went in the middle of nowhere to investigate an incredibly fascinating out-of-place pyramid that they’re theorizing is the resting place of one of the most famous historical figures ever whose tomb is so mysterious that people have referred to it as the ‘Holy grail’ of archaeological discoveries, should it be found, and went to this place entirely alone and without proper emergency equipment or communication with emergency services?

No? Okay. Moving on.

Actually, while I’m at it, why did none of them go back to the plane and notify the pilots who have radios and stuff? Yugi’s grandpa is missing and possibly hurt or worse. Can someone please make an intelligent decision?

As they wander the halls of the pyramid, Joey accidentally sets off a spike trap that nearly kills him, and Alex, whose name totally isn’t suspicious, by the way, just ignore that, remembers to mention that there are deadly traps around every corner in this place. To avoid them, they have to hang from ledges 50 feet above more spikes and scoot across the chasm as well as crawl in tunnels.

Téa is only now getting suspicious, but not of anything I’ve mentioned. She gets suspicious because Alex seems to know an awful lot about a pyramid he’s only been in once before. Yes, the one thing that’s not all that suspicious is the thing she gets suspicious about.

They reach a fork in the path – one leading up and one leading down. Alex explains that he and Solomon, being the incredibly dumb people we’ve already established them as being, decided to split up at this point. Alex would explore upstairs while Solomon explored downstairs. It’s stupid enough to split up in an unexplored tomb in the middle of the jungle, but they already knew at this point that the place was covered in lethal traps. Why the hell did they split up?

Alex eventually reached a sealed door, so he went back, but Solomon wasn’t there. He took the path down and reached a dead end where only Solomon’s bandanna lay on the floor.

They’re all adamant that Solomon has to be there somewhere, so they all head downstairs. They reach a massive room with a giant map on the floor – a detail Alex omitted from his story. They all believe, for some reason, that the room is so big that Solomon probably got lost in it, so they head off to find him……*lip smack*….The room isn’t THAT big, guys. Is it big? Yes? Is it so big someone would get lost in it? No. There are no walls, and you can clearly see the other side of the room. It’s about as big as a hockey rink. Even if, for some reason and somehow, Solomon did get lost in this room, you’d be able to see him and vice versa.

Joey rushes off to find him, but the instant his feet hit the map on the floor, it glows and Joey is sucked into it. Yugi, Téa and Tristan run off to investigate what happened, only slightly weirded out by the fact that their friend just vanished in a magical floor. Again, though, given their lives at the moment, it’s understandable that this doesn’t surprise them much. They realize that there’s an odd pattern to the map. It’s a mixture of multiple environments such as mountains, jungles and deserts. Yugi thinks that it looks familiar somehow. Alex mentions that this tomb is also said to house some sort of game. Yugi believes that it now makes perfect sense why his grandpa would come on this trip – he loves games. I think him just being an archaeologist would justify him being here, but okay.

Yugi proclaims that he’s going to enter the floor map and find his grandpa and Joey. Téa and Tristan offer to go as well, but Yugi tries to convince them not to go.

Yugi: “Thanks a lot. But I’ve been leading you guys into danger week after week for way too long.” Haha, it’s funny because Yu-Gi-Oh! used to air weekly.

Also, it’s not really your place to act like this is purely your responsibility anymore, Yugi. Joey’s lost too. Besides, if anything, it’s your grandpa’s fault. He’s a very bad archaeologist.

When they jump into the map, they wind up back in the forest, but now they have weird contraptions on their arms and belts that look like they’re meant to hold things.

They also notice strange stone pods around them, and Yugi tells Yami that he thinks something might be inside.

Before Yugi can investigate further, they’re suddenly attacked by three monsters.

Yugi: “I recognize those things!” Yeah, you should. They’re Gokibore, some of the most common monsters in Duel Mons– “They’re from the Capsule Monsters board game!”

Uh, well…yes, that is accurate, I guess. They are in that game too.

*Kamakiriman appears* “That looks familiar too!”

Yeah, it’s a very basic insect card from Duel Monsters. You know, that game you incessantly play every single day of your life?

….Uhm…anyway, Téa and Tristan wind up getting separated from Yugi. They’re being chased by the Gokibore while Yugi gets chased by Kamakiriman. Téa and Tristan manage to escape the Gokibore by sliding into a very small cave that leads down a deep hole and lands them onto a beach. Behind them, they see that a Happy Lover and Thunder Kid have followed them, but they’re posing no threat. If anything, they seem very friendly to them. Téa recognizes Happy Lover from the Capsule Monsters game. I’ll accept this because, as far as I remember, despite Tea having a fairy themed deck, I’ve never seen her use or witness the use of a Happy Lover card.

Briefly back with Joey, who somehow got to the top of a cliff, he’s suddenly taken away by a giant crow-like monster I can’t really identify because I can’t see it very well.

Back with Yugi, he escapes the Kamakiriman by diving into the water, but it follows him when he reaches shore. Just as he’s about to be attacked, Yami shifts into action and jumps away, accidentally touching one of the weird pods. In response, it glows and reveals Celtic Guardian, who leaps into action against Kamakiriman.

Yami: “Why does this all seem so familiar?” Because it’s Celtic Guardian. He’s been in your Duel Monsters deck for age–

*flashback to Yugi and Téa playing Capsule Monsters*

Uh…..are you guys okay? You all collectively seem to have Duel Monsters amnesia. I mean, I get that he touched the capsule which summoned Celtic Guardian, but that is the only factor that would lead back to the board game. You can’t even argue for the map being strictly Capsule Monsters related because that’s just bumming off of Field Spells from Duel Monsters, particular in season one where Duelist Kingdom pre-made their field spells based off of the environment.

Also, I’d like to point out that this is the exact same shot they used earlier (the one I used as the header image), but the one they used in the flashback has an animation error where the capsule to the far right is on the wrong layer, so it looks like it’s floating beside the desk.

Once Celtic Guardian defeats Kamakiriman, he speaks to Yami, which is trippy as hell, and tells him that, for the duration of the game, he shall protect his new master, Yami/Yugi. In a glow of light, he’s sucked into the device on Yami’s arm, which then ejects a capsule just like the ones from the Capsule Monsters board game. This would have been a much more appropriate time to make that connection. Like, have them think this is all Duel Monsters related like normal but then when they see the capsule that’s when they say “No….this is….Capsule Monsters!” But, hey, I’m not the director.

With his new Capsule in hand, Yami proclaims that they’ve found themselves in the world of Capsule Monsters. Just to really drive it home that it’s Capsule Monsters, when they do a big zoom out, they overlay grid lines and Celtic Guard to make the area look like a game board.

———————————————

And that was the first episode of Capsule Monsters…….it was bad.

The animation and art are noticeably jankier than the regular series is, and that’s already not that good. I kept getting distracted by how cheap it all looks. The story, which, again, is something you’d typically give leeway to anyway because it’s Yu-Gi-Oh!, is somehow even sloppier than the writing tends to be. No one is acting or thinking the way I’d think they would be or should be.

Téa is nervous about the trip before they even go, and for no other reason besides terrible shit just seems to follow them, but then she sees absolutely none of the major red flags raised by Alex. The one she does see is barely a red flag. Like “Hm, this archaeologist certainly does know a lot about this place he was researching and has explored before.”

Everyone has Duel Monsters amnesia, which, given how much of their lives revolve around that game, even if half of them don’t really play it, is really, really weird to the point where it’s kinda unsettling. It would be one thing if this was an entirely different game from the ground up. I wouldn’t be as preoccupied wondering why they’re not thinking of Duel Monsters. However, as far as I’ve seen, it’s just Duel Monsters in pods with a weird crystal involved.

In the manga, they had entirely different monsters than the Duel Monsters game so it felt more unique. This just feels like it’s piggy backing off of Duel Monsters.

What’s even worse is that they explain almost nothing about this new game besides you have to play strong monsters and you need to capture your opponent’s symbol thingy, if that ever comes into play. That is a pretty big sin for a gaming anime to commit. You can’t just throw your audience into this completely blind. They don’t even show them playing a full game. They just show Téa gushing about her cute monster while Yugi passively explains two facts about the game.

The only real hook I see from this series is that they have ‘real’ monsters in a ‘real’ environment, but that’s something they’ve already done before several times. Specifically, this feels awfully reminiscent of the Legendary Heroes and the Virtual World (Noah’s) arc. Hell, anytime they have a Shadow Game the monsters are technically real.

But let’s see how the story unfolds further next time.

---

If you enjoy my work and would like to help support my blog, please consider donating at my Ko-Fi page. Thank you! ♥

AniManga Clash! Yu-Gi-Oh! Season Zero Episode 16 (Placeholder) Sudden Turnaround! Threat of the Doctor’s Gown Review

Plot: Jonouchi visits his little sister, Shizuka, in the hospital on her birthday. He soon develops a crush on a nurse at the hospital, Miyuki. A slimy and extremely negligent doctor, Gouyuu, harasses Miyuki to try to get her to date him, much to her clear annoyance. When it gets so bad that Gouyuu gets her fired as a punishment for refusing to date him, Jonouchi takes matters into his own hands to protect the newfound target of his affections.

Breakdown: Something we never get in the manga, at least during the original run, is Jonouchi’s sister, Shizuka. Meaning this is technically where Shizuka originated and technically one of few things that originated exclusively from Season Zero and carried over into the 2000 series/Duelist manga. Their backstories are still roughly the same except in Season Zero she had typical girl-in-an-anime syndrome of having some vague weakness/sickness that keeps her in and out of hospitals for most of her life instead of her future ailment of having her vision slowly fail since childhood and requires surgery to fix it.

Jonouchi goes to buy a big pink stuffed bear for Shizuka’s birthday and bumps into Yugi, who had no idea Jonouchi had a sister until now. Yugi accidentally gets some ice cream on an evil thug because this is Yu-Gi-Oh Season Zero where everyone’s an evil thug. Jonouchi beats up the thug and his friends to protect Yugi, but the bear gets ruined as a result. He has no more money for a new gift, so he asks Yugi to come with him as he visits Shizuka.

They do a cute little comedy routine when they enter Shizuka’s hospital room as a means of a makeshift gift, which Shizuka enjoys. Soon enough, Jonouchi finds himself quickly infatuated with a kind nurse named Miyuki, who tends to his wounds from the fight.

He must have such a bad hair wound.

A doctor at the hospital, Dr. Gouyuu, is an evil asshole because Season Zero. He has an inordinate amount of patients die in his care because he just doesn’t….well….care. He acts like he does and then later shows that he cares more about his golf game than anything. He can easily walk away from another lost patient and gleefully go on about his golf game, even swinging a golf club around the halls of the hospital almost every time he’s on screen.

If that’s not enough, he also sexually harasses Miyuki and low-key threatens to fire her if she doesn’t quit rejecting him. Lovely.

The next day, Jonouchi arrives at the hospital again to surprise Shizuka, this time with Yugi, Anzu, Miho and Honda in tow as well because Yugi couldn’t help but spill the beans about Shizuka to the others and they wanted to meet her. Soon enough, the others catch onto Jonouchi’s crush on Miyuki and encourage him to go after her.

Honda then does the worst thing I’ve ever seen him do. He offers Jonouchi a bag containing a gift he can give to Miyuki to ‘help her on the night shift.’ I was immediately suspicious, but I had no idea he would do what he was about to do.

Jonouchi gives her the gift, mentioning the part about how it will help her on the night shift, and it turns out to be a frickin’ bra. Miyuki is pissed off, Jonouchi is appalled and all Honda has to say is “Give it up. There’s no chance.”

Honda, what the actual fuck? Jonouchi is visiting his sick sister and has an innocent crush on a nurse and you make him look like a harassing perv to her? Jonouchi did nothing to you. Why are you such an asshole right now?

The pervy doctor skeevs on Miyuki again, though this time Jonouchi confronts him. As he and Gouyuu argue, Miyuki slaps Gouyuu and chews him out for being so disrespectful and uncaring about his patients. She demands he never speak to her ever again and walks away while Jonouchi chases after her.

A woman standing up for herself to an evil incel with power? I only expect positive outcomes from this.

The next day at school, Jonouchi is extremely depressed over Miyuki. His friends are observing him from afar, but for some reason aren’t chastising Honda for clearly being responsible for this mess. Do I believe a nurse probably in her mid twenties at the very least would be interested in a 16-17 year old ex-bully? No. I love ya bunches, Jonouchi, but not only is that unlikely, it’s also pretty inappropriate. But that doesn’t mean he can’t still enjoy her company and have a simple crush – both of which Honda completely destroyed with his moronic prank. She liked Jonouchi just fine before this, and now she thinks he’s a juvenile pervert.

Yugi, being the superior Jonouchi best friend, confronts him and tells him something Jonouchi used to tell him all the time, “You’re not being manly!” Jonouchi laughs and agrees, stating he has a newfound resolve to do his best with Miyuki.

He buys some flowers for her, but when he gets to the hospital Shizuka tells him that Miyuki was fired. From what Gouyuu said, she put a patient in danger by ignoring or forgetting orders that he gave her, but Miyuki doesn’t remember getting the orders, and Shizuka doesn’t believe Miyuki would get such important orders and not fulfill them.

As Jonouchi explores the halls of the hospital, he remembers what happened right after they walked away from Gouyuu. Jonouchi apologized to Miyuki, and she decided to forgive him and change his bandages. As we see Miyuki caring for Jonouchi, we also see Gouyuu outside the door with a smirk.

In present time, Jonouchi confronts Gouyuu, proclaiming that he was with Miyuki when he supposedly gave this order and didn’t hear a thing. He threatens to rat him out, but Gouyuu, being an evil slimeball, counters by saying, if Jonouchi rats him out, he’ll have Shizuka removed from the hospital’s care. The hospital has some of the best treatment in the area and it might be a huge problem if she’s sent away.

Jonouchi begrudgingly agrees to keep his mouth shut, but I don’t quite get why. Sure the hospital may be good, but if he has the power to kick her out, surely he’s her actual doctor, right? Why would Jonouchi want this disgusting negligent homiciding sack of lawsuits caring for his sister at all?

Outside with Yugi, Jonouchi is clearly hurting a lot by this. He has no choice but to protect Shizuka, but it means having to sacrifice saving Miyuki’s job. Seeing Jonouchi’s tears, Yugi immediately summons Yami complete with a foreboding massive shadow on the ground that has the Millennium symbol shining at the top and glowing eyes, which is just the sweetest thing. I know this is a serious and pretty badass moment too, but really the instant he sees Jonouchi crying, Yugi calls Yami out to kick ass in his name. I love these two (or three?) so much.

…..Screw you, Honda.

Yami (and Yugi) are so colossally pissed that we don’t follow Yami through the hospital as he looks for Gouyuu – we follow his pissed off looking glowing eyed and Millennium symbol’d shadow as it rushes around the halls. The effects are, admittedly, kinda janky. They’re pulling some really low-budget old CGI work here or something, but who cares? Yami Yugi is out for blood to protect his baby boy—I mean Jonouchi, and I am HERE for that.

Gouyuu is talking on the phone with someone about putting off another surgery to go golfing (I get the stereotype, but what exactly is Gouyuu’s deal with golf? It’s all he thinks about besides perving on nurses.) and brags to this person about how they had Miyuki fired for turning him down and that’s a ‘natural penalty’ for that. Dude….tone it down. If Captain Planet had villains centered on sexual harassment and malpractice, you’d easily be one.

I really can’t understand how he’s in the position he is, let alone that he might get promoted to head of the hospital. Everyone comments about how he loses a lot of patients, notably way more than other doctors, he’s constantly pushing surgeries back, not caring for patients properly, ignoring them most of the time, harassing the nurses, and he doesn’t seem to be good at keeping his mouth shut about this shit – how is he even employed?

Yami records him saying those things on a tape recorder and plays it back for him in the doorway before challenging him to a game.

Meanwhile, Shizuka tells Jonouchi that Miyuki is leaving the city, presumably to never return, so Shizuka tells him to go to the train station and talk to her. She doesn’t want Jonouchi to have any regrets about her.

Shadow Game

Yami sets up today’s Shadow Game to be Gouyuu’s beloved golf. The twist is that they’re playing in the empty halls of the hospital. The stakes are, if Yami loses, Gouyuu gets the incriminating tape. If Gouyuu loses, Yami keeps the tape and Gouyuu gets a punishment game.

Gouyuu chooses his club and asks what Yami will be using for a club. He grabs Gouyuu’s stethoscope and says he’ll use that. Gouyuu laughs at his choice of a ‘club’ and claims he’s won before the match even starts.

…..Is there no one in this hospital? Why are the halls all empty?

The goal is the Nurse’s Center on the floor directly below them. Gouyuu goes first and manages to cleanly hit the ball down the hall. Yami, using the stethoscope as a slingshot, whacks the ball, causing it to bounce around the walls of the hall before ending up in some room.

With a laugh, Gouyuu goes on ahead while Yami is supposedly left to figure out how to get his ball out of the room and down to the Nurse’s Center.

With a few more strokes, Gouyuu is able to get down to the Nurse’s Center quite easily. As he’s about to hit his ball into the room, Yami’s ball suddenly emerges. He explains that the room he hit his ball into has a neat system – a mail drop. He hit his ball into the chute, and it fell directly into the Nurse’s Center. Hole-in-one.

Uhh…..Is it just me….or does this make no sense? I can understand having a chute system for mail, but why does the mail chute wind up in the Nurse’s Center? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the mail to go to an administration office or, I dunno, a mail room?

Yami smirks and mocks Gouyuu because he knows golf courses very well, but he obviously doesn’t know his own hospital.

Gouyuu tries to attack Yami, causing him to break his precious club and fall over. Yami opens the door to darkness, and Gouyuu is suddenly haunted by the frightening spirits of all the patients that he let die in his care. Yami walks away, leaving a screaming Gouyuu behind.

Meanwhile, Jonouchi finally reaches the train station with the flowers. He gives them to Miyuki only to find that all of the petals fell off as he was running. She smiles and thanks him for them anyway. Jonouchi begs her to come back to the hospital, but Miyuki reveals that she had been planning on leaving for a while. A man approaches, and Miyuki explains that she decided to go to work at a clinic on a small remote island with this man, the doctor who runs the place. It’s implied that they’re interested in each other romantically. She bids Jonouchi farewell, telling him to bring Shizuka by for a visit sometime.

Jonouchi is rightfully shocked and devastated.

The next day, we see Gouyuu on the floor of the hospital surrounded by patients and doctors. He prattles on in a crazy state about how he cares more about golf than his patients while a boom box plays the tape of him confessing to his unethical behavior behind him.

At the hospital, Jonouchi is greeted by his friends who shoot confetti at him and try to make him feel better by openly sharing his pain with them. Honda approaches him and says he understands how he feels, which I thought might lead to a legitimately nice moment and redeem the shit he did earlier a little, because Honda does know how it feels to pine after someone he’ll never have. But no. He goes on telling Jonouchi that he can cry into his chest if he wants, and Jonouchi points out that Honda has a huge grin on his face, seemingly happy that Jonouchi got rejected and is taking delight in his pain.

Again, screw Honda. Please just write him out of this show and take Miho with him.

———————————–

This episode was pretty good. It was adorable seeing Jonouchi have a crush, even if I knew it was going to end in heartbreak. At least Miyuki was fairly nice about it instead of making her the villain or just a jerk or something. I wish we got more focus on Shizuka because, at the end of the day, we learned nothing about her besides she’s nice, loves her brother and is sick. Unlike in the 2000 anime, where we learn she’s……nice…..loves her brother….and is sick….

The Yugi and Jonouchi moments in this episode were sweet as pie, and that scene where Yami charges off in a shadow form to hunt down Gouyuu in vengeance because he saw Jonouchi crying is mwah perfect.

Gouyuu was as over-the-top as any Yu-Gi-Oh! villain, but he was built on a very real type of person. There are more sick misogynist guys in power who are more than willing to fire women for the horrific crime of turning them down for a date than I care to think about.

The one truly bad spot in this episode was Honda. What the heck was up with Honda today? Why was he so cruel to poor Jonouchi all because he had a crush on a nurse? The only good thing he did in this episode was loan Jonouchi the money to get Shizuka a teddy bear, which he didn’t even know was the intention of the money, but screw him entirely otherwise in this episode.

Next time, Kaiba’s third Shitennou shows up – a supermodel who can seemingly predict all of Yami’s moves.

---

If you enjoy my work and would like to help support my blog, please consider donating at my Ko-Fi page. Thank you! ♥

An Absurdly Deep Dive into the History of 4Kids | Part 24: Everything Changes (Conclusion)

So, class, what have we learned over the past 24 blog posts and 100 pages besides the fact that I desperately need a life?

All joking aside, this wasn’t really a passion project or anything, more of a long-standing curiosity that I wanted to explore, thought would just take a few days to research and write, not two months (even as all the parts were sitting in my scheduled posts queue for weeks after finishing the entire thing, I still went back and edited them many times), and wound up finding so many rabbit holes that I think I literally am a rabbit now.

However, I am very glad that I decided to write this up because it helped me understand a lot about why 4Kids was the way it was, a lot of their business practices, what was happening behind the scenes, why they truly died, and I even got to do some sleuthing and maybe clear up some rumors. Maybe you even learned something and had some fun. I hope so.

I think a big takeaway here, though, is that 4Kids, at the end of the day, wasn’t this big boogeyman of anime, when you get down to it. They were mostly just….grossly incompetent. I know it seems weird to say that of such a big name as 4Kids, but, they pretty much were. They propped up their business on a few big titles with no plan as to what they would do should those titles be taken away, they lucked out with a few huge licenses, especially Pokemon at the start, they greatly overestimated their skills and knowledge in the industry, and then whined that Japan didn’t consistently come up with more merchandisable cash cows for them to license on a regular basis as if that was in their control.

They disrespected their audience, which earned them ire, they disrespected anime and manga as a whole, which earned them ire, they disrespected their peers in the anime (and manga) industry, which earned them ire, they didn’t bother to do proper research on their own licenses before obtaining them or research into Japan and how their economy and content works despite working with their properties for years, which earned them ire, and they constantly wanted a pat on the back for doing so much for anime while also desperately not wanting their audience to know what they were consuming was anime….which earned them ire.

Even their production of merchandise and marketing, two things you’d think a licensing company that has existed for over four decades and has had several massive properties under its belt would be able to do quite well consistently, wasn’t all that good at times. From not properly advertising certain shows to supposedly not getting a toy deal for Mew Mew Power to their ridiculously spotty and frustrating release schedule for DVD and VHS releases, especially in regards to ‘uncut’ releases, to making a deal with Miramax and Harvey Weinstein for the Pokemon movies to the disaster that was Toonzaki. It’s amazing how they were both very good at marketing and advertising while also making some incredibly baffling and poor business decisions.

Some things were out of their control, of course, especially the financial crisis and the overall death of Saturday morning cartoon blocks, but many aspects of their downfall were their own doing. If you want to look at the Yu-Gi-Oh! lawsuit from a different perspective, the fact that they said they’d do anything to keep the Yu-Gi-Oh! license, including go bankrupt, was a little on the insane side. I get that Yu-Gi-Oh! was their top earner and losing the license would have been the death of them anyway, but it seems very immature and backwards to basically stamp their feet and say they’d rather kill themselves than let someone else do it. Even if they did rightfully win the lawsuit in the end, they didn’t get anything substantial from it, and they had to have known that.

I won’t really hold Chaotic’s situation against 4Kids because that was also largely out of their hands. It was just a financial gamble that failed in a time of economic turmoil. Again, even without the financial crisis at the time, Chaotic likely would have just been a fairly beneficial property to them through the rest of their years. I sincerely doubt revenue from it would have saved them from their eventual fate. They probably would have just sold it back to CUSA or someone else in the bankruptcy auction. Looking back, maybe one of the reasons 4Kids didn’t want to give up the license to CUSA was because they had injected so much of their own money into it that any offer CUSA gave probably didn’t seem like it was worth it, even though, ya know, it doesn’t make them ANY money by latching onto it forever.

I do think they also had a big issue with their all-or-nothing attitude. They were constantly dead set on finding the next huge thing – the things that would rake in insane profits and make them the top of their field – but they were very bad at long-term strategies. Let me be completely fair and clear – I don’t have a mind for business, much of it goes over my head, but even I can tell that they had a big problem with this. Even when they did say this property or another would be a big earner for years, they either dropped them early because they weren’t being massively successful immediately or they would keep the property but give up on it in spirit, so to speak, by just letting the license rot in their hands.

This reflected very well in their aforementioned attitudes towards Japan in which Al Kahn said anime and manga in Japan were dying because they hadn’t had any generation-defining merchandisable hits in over a decade, which was objectively wrong in a lot of ways. If he thinks an entire country is “over” just because their anime and manga sales were down for a bit, even to the point where he gave up on licensing anime for three years as a result, then it’s not surprising that he views his company in the same way.

This was even reflected when they tried to branch out a bit into female-oriented shows. Winx Club did well, but they had it taken from them because the creator didn’t like what they were doing with it. They gave it another go with Mew Mew Power, which also did well, but dropped it halfway through because they couldn’t get a toy deal for it. Magical DoReMi was good, but it wasn’t good enough so they dropped it. And they didn’t even dub Precure because they likely thought ‘Why bother? If there’s one thing we’ve learned here it’s that there’s no money with girl stuff.’ And then there was whatever the hell they were trying to achieve with Capsule Monsters, which comes off like they gave up on that idea almost immediately while also having no real direction on what they wanted it to be in the first place.

I do concede that a large amount of 4Kids’ edits, as with other child-demographic anime dubs at the time, were a result of FCC constraints and regulations, but I’ll only concede so far with that assessment. Yes, certain edits were necessary to meet broadcast standards, but many of their edits, such as their localization efforts, changing entire soundtracks and removal of all things text, were squarely on 4Kids. As far as I know, the FCC has no regulations about changing foreign content to better suit young American audiences. The only entity that really benefits is 4Kids. In their eyes, it made them more marketable and appealing, and the only people getting offended were the pre-existing fans who knew better, and most of those people weren’t in 4Kids’ target demo, so they didn’t care. Also, let’s not overlook the fact that some of their edits were just entirely nonsensical, and many of their content edits were still commonly present in their movies, which are not controlled by the FCC.

Let’s also not forget that many of their practices were a result of just being terribly condescending to their audience. From making things way too obvious through dialogue changes/additions, editing scenes around or even having new animation created to drive certain points home to thinking every single second of a show needed to have music or talking in it to keep kids’ attention to making mistakes in their dubs and not fixing them on purpose just because they didn’t care and then later claiming it was on purpose as a little weird Easter egg thing.

4Kids, as much as it sucks to say, weren’t entirely wrong when it came to those views, either. Looking back as fully grown anime fans, yeah, we see how bungled the dubs were for a variety of reasons, and we feel rightfully disrespected as fans, but, back when we were kids, most of us didn’t care. The fact that 4Kids, by design, made their shows to trick viewers into not thinking they were watching anime (which failed after a while) definitely had a hand there, but I can’t honestly say that my experiences looking back at enjoying these shows is in any way tarnished knowing what I know now because 4Kids, despite their backwards best efforts, helped make me an anime fan, and they wound up being a significant part of the anime boom in the late 90s and early 2000s.

I don’t attribute my being an anime fan to 4Kids because other shows dubbed by other companies, such as Sailor Moon (DiC), Digimon (Saban) and Dragon Ball and DBZ (Ocean/Funimation) and a slue of others certainly helped push me there too, but they were a big part of it. Plus, many of the shows that they dubbed are now available in high definition subbed versions (not all of them, admittedly), the ones that aren’t weren’t made unavailable or obscure because of 4Kids (It’s likely some people only know of a few obscure shows because 4Kids dubbed them once upon a time) and they also helped pioneer anime streaming options with 4Kids.tv, Toonzaki and even their Youtube channel.

4Kids isn’t even really special when it comes to them mangling their properties. As I’ve already covered in my Sub/Dub Comparison series, companies like DiC, Saban and Nelvana were awful in their own rights with similarly awful and confusing changes, but what makes 4Kids special was that they were the best damn manglers who left a trail of shows and movies in their wake. All of those other dubbing companies had rather limited libraries of anime compared to 4Kids. They wanted that kid anime market cornered, and they cornered it as much as they could. They were the kings of mangling, and I say that with legit praise because they were so much better at digital paint and editing magic than any of the aforementioned dubbing companies.

Even on Cartoon Network where they were more lax on that stuff because their anime was geared towards older kids and teens, and adults with Adult Swim, they had to make edits to suit airing. Some famous examples include Naruto and Yu Yu Hakusho. I specifically remember sloppy paint edits on Yu Yu Hakusho where you’d see the digital paint very obviously shaking as it was covering up wounds and middle fingers. And obviously there were awkward edits to replace Yusuke’s swearing. Even on Adult Swim there was some instances of editing for content. I remember Blue Gender had a sex scene hinted at in the next episode preview with a few clips between Marlene and Yuji, and it just wasn’t there in the episode on Adult Swim where it is there in the Japanese version.

This stuff happens. Sometimes, their dubs were just legitimately entertaining because the cast and writers were having a ball with the show. Their music could even be legitimately good. It was a crap shoot with them sometimes.

Speaking of the cast and crew of their shows, I really do want to emphasize that, in my opinion, they were the best parts of 4Kids. I poke fun at some 4Kids actors’ acting abilities and even just their voices sometimes, and I make fun of a lot of writing choices, but as far as I’ve seen the regular 4Kids cast and crews typically had a blast doing what they did and were proud of their work. For many of them, 4Kids productions were their first foray into mainstream voice acting work, and for some of them it was their first venture into voice acting period. They also seem to be good with the fans, happy to talk about their experiences and were understandably upset whenever a project they were working on fell through, especially in the situation with Pokemon where the rug was pulled out from under them from all angles. The main problem in 4Kids’ wheelhouse were almost always the executives, especially, yes, Al Kahn.

That being said…..there’s a reason 4Kids died when many other dubbing or licensing companies went through similar hardships and came out on the other side with their feet on the ground. As I just mentioned, 4Kids was terribly pigeon-holed. They were exclusively, well, for kids. Older kids and even teens and adults may have had a place in their audience, but their demographic was kids.

When you’re dealing with a kid demographic, you have to work in a landscape that is probably the fastest changing landscape in media. Kids grow up super fast. They outgrow Kids WB and move on to Toonami. They outgrow Toonami and move on to Adult Swim. They may not move on to other anime at all. Within a few years you have an entirely new audience of kids you have to impress with things that are new and exciting, and in the world of licensing, especially when you’re primarily licensing imported shows, you’re chained to whatever is being offered/is available in other countries.

It’s true that trying to make certain properties more fitting for newer audiences helps keep properties alive for years, just look at some of the American kids’ properties that have existed for decades without changing a whole lot, but when you’re dealing with licensing other properties that you don’t have a whole lot of creative control over, you need to find different avenues to evolve.

The thing is that they recognized this. Their problems with having few big properties holding them up and focusing on a demographic that practically demands constant change was in nearly every single financial document as concerns about their company, but they very rarely presented anything that would help solve that issue.

They did create 4Sight, which would’ve been a fantastic move to branch out into older audiences and get a more stable income stream, but, as all-or-nothing attitudes go, they pretty much went the ‘nothing’ route with 4Sight. They didn’t make any big moves with it. They barely made any small moves with it. It pretty much just sat in a corner collecting cobwebs for half a decade.

Toonzaki was a weird outlier in this regard because it’s almost like they went too far in the other direction by having a streaming site where a lot of graphic titles were offered alongside uncut 4Kids properties with no parental controls or age confirmation that I could see. This would have been the perfect project for 4Sight, but they didn’t give it to them. It was entirely a 4Kids website.

Localization is an issue too, but not fully. Yes, some references and jokes need to be changed because they just don’t translate well in English, but that usually not the problem. They were worried their audience would be put off by foreign things. Or, for some reason, an American audience would never be able to connect with Japanese characters and settings. But then again, you’ll never know if the localization is what killed it in the States either. It was largely a matter of gambling with pretty much any property 4Kids acquired.

They were also largely stuck on broadcast TV. They had trouble with releasing movies after a point, and their DVD production and sales were incredibly inconsistent and lacking, something that got exponentially worse when they attempted to release uncut DVDs. Other companies also took to TV a lot, but they tended to be better about releasing uncut DVDs. For example, people complained a lot about Naruto’s censored airing on Cartoon Network, but the uncut version was made readily available as the series aired, starting when the series premiered and completing the DVD releases when Naruto ended its run on TV.

By the time 4Kids broke out into streaming, they just handled it badly. Streaming their edited shows on 4Kids.tv? That’s great. Streaming those and some uncut stuff on their Youtube channel? Awesome. Toonzaki, however, was a great idea that was also somehow a massive mess in practice. As I mentioned, it’s just weird to have a 4Kids streaming service that had so many graphic titles with seemingly no parental blocks or age confirmations. If they were comfortable streaming uncut Yu-Gi-Oh! titles on their Youtube channel, why did they feel the need to use that as a tentpole for Toonzaki? Why not just release the episodes on 4Kids.tv, maybe with a warning or something, and keep all non-4Kids stuff on Toonzaki?

Their official promotions, few of them as there were, didn’t push it as the place to get uncut Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes, just anime in general, but literally everywhere online that’s what it was being hyped as because the little information available, again, mostly from Mark Kirk’s interview, was that it was a 4Kids website for their uncut shows for general audiences. When you don’t have any other frame of reference, that’s what people are going to run with.

They also didn’t seem to realize that just being an aggregate site for anime sourced from other websites with only Yu-Gi-Oh! titles being unique wasn’t a good long-term plan. They acted as if they’d host more stuff directly on their website in the future, but they never did. Everything was hosted from Hulu, Crunchyroll, Funimation, Viz or other places for the entirety of its life.

That’s not entirely on them since the landscape for streaming was in its infancy back then, especially when it came to licensed properties, but still. It was a decent idea sitting on a bad execution. And while it came during a time when 4Kids really needed that opportunity to grow, it also came at the worst time because this was just a year before the Yu-Gi-Oh! lawsuit. If they had a longer lifespan, maybe they could have ironed out the kinks with Toonzaki, but I really doubt it.

A part of their downfall was also the death of Saturday morning cartoons. Animated shows were no longer something only available on Saturday mornings, making their inconvenience a bother. Why would I wake up early on a weekend to catch an anime that I can watch anytime streaming? Or get on DVD later? Or catch on syndication on another network? Or why watch those shows when cartoons are constantly on Cartoon Network, Disney Channel and Nickelodeon? Or why watch those cherry-picked kidified anime when I can watch a big variety of less edited shows on Toonami or Adult Swim, or, hell, even blocks like Anime Unleashed on G4 Tech TV?

They were also prisoners of their merchandise. They treated every property as a merchandise machine. Al Kahn and Mark Kirk said it straight out – if they can’t merchandise it, they’re not interested in it. A large portion of their money came from toys and other kids merchandise, which was also evolving at a breakneck speed as Al Kahn pointed out several times. The problem there was evaluating it improperly a good chunk of the time. I don’t really think they allowed a lot of these shows to have enough time to secure an audience before they decided the merchandise wasn’t worth it. They dropped so many shows because of merchandise when they barely had a few episodes to a full season under their belts.

Honestly, the lawsuit really was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. 4Kids was already on the ropes, they were teetering on the edge, and that lawsuit pushed them over and they couldn’t recover. If it wasn’t the lawsuit, it would have been something else very shortly, I guarantee it. It may seem overly pessimistic, but I just didn’t see 4Kids having a significant future anymore. They were consistently going down for years and could barely even glance up a few times. Either they would have died shortly on their own anyway or they would have stumbled into some miracle property that would save them from the Shadow Realm (and Tai Chi Chasers was not going to be it), and even then I can imagine that would only eek out a few more years for them. They just didn’t have the steam to go on.

At the end of the day, when everything is said and done, 4Kids was and still is an icon….an icon of what, is up to you, but it’s still an icon. Let’s be honest, we still have a blast with 4Kids shows just in poking fun at their ridiculousness, and some still enjoy them legitimately. I won’t deny for a second that, even though doing my SDCs of 4Kids shows chips away at my soul sometimes, the shows still commonly wind up being fun either because I’m legitimately enjoying it or I’m just laughing at the 4Kidsisms.

I’m not going to dance on 4Kids’ grave, but I’m also not going to mourn it. 4Kids was, somewhat fittingly, a product of its time. There’s just no way a company like 4Kids could survive today. There are too many sources of good, loyal dubbed anime, and there are plenty of kids anime that are dubbed just fine and made readily available to children because many dubbing companies today will dub a wide range of anime for a nearly endless demographic from kids to adults to every gender and across every genre. And if you don’t like dubs, subtitled anime, official or fansubs, are readily available at thousands of sources.

Maybe we could have seen an entirely different 4Kids over time, but I doubt it. Also, there was a certain charm with shows being on Saturday morning lineups that you really can’t get anymore, and I think 4Kids thrived on that one very specific area that we can’t replicate now. 4Kids cut out a niche for itself and dominated in that one area, and there just wasn’t a place for it once that niche was gone.

It’s an entirely new world for kids, and it’s not a world for 4Kids.

4Kids will always have a special place in my heart for helping me discover some of my favorite shows and helping spark my love of anime. I won’t excuse what they’re guilty of, and I won’t overexaggerate any good they did. I’ll just say “Thank you, 4Kids. As much for dying as for living.”

Part 23: Where in the World is Kahnmen Sandiego?

---

If you enjoy my work and would like to help support my blog, please consider donating at my Ko-Fi page. Thank you! ♥

An Absurdly Deep Dive into the History of 4Kids | Part 21: It’s Time to S-S-S-S-S-S-SUE! (2011-2012)

Yes, everyone, we’re finally here. It’s the Yu-Gi-Oh! lawsuit – the thing that finally killed 4Kids…..Kinda.

On March 24, 2011, TV Tokyo and NAS terminated their licensing agreement with 4Kids after an audit reportedly showed that 4Kids was making several millions of dollars in secret on their properties by making agreements with Cartoon Network, Majesco and Funimation and hiding much of the money they got from the “kickbacks.” (It should be noted that none of the mentioned companies are being accused in this lawsuit) TV Tokyo and NAS had a clear-cut 50/50 split for any revenue involving Yu-Gi-Oh!, and their audit allegedly revealed that they weren’t being given their full share as a result of these under the table dealings. 4Kids also reportedly improperly claimed numerous deductions amounting to over approximately $3mil including insurance coverage, the cost of the audit and the cost of dubbing the series, when they had a contract that stated 4Kids would accept the responsibility of all of those costs.

In the lawsuit, TV Tokyo and NAS requested $4,792,460.36 in damages.

According to the abstract of the legal proceedings, the audit occurred sometime in Q1 of 2010. A letter outlining the accused offenses was delivered to 4Kids on June 25, 2010. 4Kids would respond with their own letter disputing the allegations on June 29.

On December 20, ADK sent another letter finalizing the audit’s findings, claiming 4Kids owed them $4,819,000 in total. Again, 4Kids sent a letter back disputing the allegations.

On March 24, 2011, 4Kids received a letter from NAS on behalf of its parent company, ADK, to terminate their agreement from July 1, 2008 to claim the rights to Yu-Gi-Oh!. 4Kids disputed the termination, calling it “wrongful and devoid of any legal basis” because the termination notification did not meet the ten business day notice agreement made in their initial contract. TV Tokyo and ADK didn’t agree and sent another letter asserting that their termination was legal and final. That same day, they’d file a lawsuit for the alleged owed amount.

They had tried to settle this issue outside of court immediately following the audit. TV Tokyo and ADK made an undisclosed offer to settle the matter. 4Kids refused. At the request of ADK and TV Tokyo, 4Kids wired $1mil as a gesture of good faith in order to get negotiations started to settle the matter entirely. In response, TV Tokyo and ADK reps met with 4Kids in the US to work things out, but “4Kids abruptly terminated this meeting without a resolution to any of the outstanding issues.” Less than two weeks later, the lawsuit would be filed.

And Al Kahn would respond by…….

Not being there.

Mysteriously, on January 11, 2011, Al Kahn would retire from his role as chairman and CEO of 4Kids Entertainment one year after the audit and two months before the termination and lawsuit would go down, handing down the reins temporarily to Director Michael Goldstein.

“After almost 25 years, I have reached the point in my career where I want to relinquish my responsibilities at 4Kids. The last several years have been particularly difficult and demanding with the business of 4Kids being buffeted by the financial crisis. After helping steer the company through challenging times, I have decided that it is the right moment for me to retire. I believe that going forward, Michael Goldstein and the team of experienced 4Kids executives will do an excellent job for our clients and for our shareholders.”

Of course Al Kahn had to pat himself on the back for getting them through the financial crisis, when, ya know….they didn’t. They survived it, but they didn’t “steer through (it).”

Poor Michael Goldstein. Kahn just made him conductor of the train a few seconds after they passed a “Bridge Out Ahead” sign. What I find especially funny is that Michael Goldstein was actually older than Al Kahn was at this point – Goldstein was 69 while Kahn was 64. This will only get even funnier once I cover where Al went once he ‘retired’.

I know I can’t prove it, and I know anyone who went through the recession leading any company would probably want to retire, but you can’t tell me this is a coincidence. This is way too close to when all this shit went down for me to believe that Kahn didn’t know a storm was coming and he needed to grab a lifeboat and dip out of there before the situation got even worse for them.

On April 1, 2011, 4Kids made a statement claiming they would do whatever it took to retain Yu-Gi-Oh! and their business, including filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Five days later, after an unsuccessful settlement proposal to TV Tokyo and ADK, they would do just that. 4Kids Entertainment and 11 affiliated companies went bankrupt, listing $23,372,000 in assets and $16,526,000 in liabilities, and they would list several creditors to whom they owed money, such as The CW ($1,987,000) ADK ($4,221,626 – I would imagine this is an unrelated debt as it wouldn’t make sense to be the same money being requested from the audit.), the previously mentioned TPC ($4,700,000), and, strangely, figurehead of Chaotic, Bryan Gannon to whom they owed $80,000 for some reason.

In previous reports, they did keep owing Gannon, CUSA and Apex money for expenses involving Chaotic’s productions, so maybe that was due to some leftover outstanding payments, but they don’t note exactly what it was for. From a note in the 2010 annual financial report, it’s also possible they still owed Gannon a little bit of severance pay or some other fees in regards to shutting down TC Digital Games and TC Websites and subsequently laying him off.

The bankruptcy hearings would put the lawsuit on hold until the bankruptcy court allowed them to proceed. The judge also ordered a hold on the Yu-Gi-Oh! termination, meaning 4Kids could still use the license until the lawsuit proceedings restarted and they made a decision about the validity of the termination. This was done as a means to prevent Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL from being sold to any other companies in the meantime, considering 4Kids had already started working on the series and teasing its release and would suffer financially if TV Tokyo and NAS sold it during the litigation.

On June 10, 4Kids filed countersuit against TV Tokyo and ADK for wrongful termination of Yu-Gi-Oh!’s license citing the aforementioned failure to notify them at least ten business days in advance of the termination.

No one really had any faith that 4Kids would win this lawsuit, mostly because a lot of people either just really wanted 4Kids to die as a result of the litigation because of their disdain for the company and its practices or no one believed that they didn’t deal under the table and steal from the Japanese companies because 4Kids bad.

However….4Kids believed in the heart of the cards.

Yes, 4Kids won this lawsuit. On December 29, 2011, the bankruptcy court (to which the suit had been moved as per the agreement of both parties) ruled in favor of 4Kids, agreeing that TV Tokyo and NAS did not give at least ten business days of notice before termination of the contract, so the termination was void and the rights to Yu-Gi-Oh! belonged with 4Kids.

Many people believe that 4Kids purely lucked out and weaseled their way out of punishment for shady business practices on technicality, myself included when I first started writing this article, but it seems that’s not true either. The judge ruled that, in response to the claims that 4Kids owed TV Tokyo and ADK/NAS money as per the audit, the findings were “99% meritless.”

According to the judge in the lawsuit,

“Even if it were the case that Licensor had properly complied with the formal notice of breach and termination requirements in the 2008 Agreement, the termination was nonetheless ineffective because the notice sent by Licensor was substantively defective. Plaintiffs’ purported basis for termination – 4Kids’ failure to promptly pay the royalty underpayment reflected in the audit – was improper because the amount owed to Plaintiffs, if any, was nowhere near the $4.819 million amount asserted in the termination letter and the purported notices of breach.”

As for that 1% that was given merit, one that 4Kids did not dispute, they only owed $48,000, which was largely offset by the $800,000 credit that they got on March 24, 2011. The court was so firmly in favor of 4Kids, that they criticized the Japanese companies’ mention of “good faith”, claiming that “If anyone is the victim of a breach of trust, it is 4Kids.”

On February 29, 2012, 4Kids, TV Tokyo and ADK/NAS settled 4Kids’ countersuit. TV Tokyo and ADK/NAS would pay $8,000,000 to 4Kids as a result on March 27, 2012. 4Kids would continue to hold the license for three months until they had a bidding war between 4K Acquisition Corp, a subsidiary of Konami, and Kidsco Media Ventures LLC, an affiliate of Saban, for a variety of 4Kids’ assets including the coveted Yu-Gi-Oh! license. On June 26, 2012, Konami won big.

While Kidsco got some of 4Kids’ assets, like broadcast rights to Dragon Ball Z and Kai, under a new agreement with Toei and Funimation, Cubix, Sonic X and the CW block, Toonzai, which Saban would rename to Vortexx, Konami acquired the full rights and assets to Yu-Gi-Oh! and other titles. This basically made 4Kids ‘victory’ in the lawsuit pretty much moot. They were even able to acquire 4Kids’ production materials such as domain names, music, sound recording rights, any production or recording/editing equipment, office supplies, furniture, computers and more from 4Kids’ offices.

Oh and they would also be taking 4Kids’ offices.

As of the acquisition, Konami would create 4K Media, made in place of 4Kids Productions, which would officially shut down on August 14, 2012. According to an interview with Yumi Hoashi, Konami Digital Entertainment Vice President of Card Business, “Some” of the employees from 4Kids Productions would be retained in order to maintain the same branding and “messaging” but it’s unknown how many of their employees they retained.

As a final note to 2011, 4Kids acquired the South Korean/Japanese series, Tai Chi Chasers on March 22, 2010 and released it on September 17, 2011. It was the first new anime 4Kids had dubbed since Dinosaur King in 2008. According to Al Kahn in his conference call for Q4 of 2009,

“4Kids needs to return to its roots as a licensing and merchandising company [that] specializes in bringing wonderful Japanese programming and merchandising to the rest of the world.”

Quite the turnaround from claiming anime and manga were dying and that profitable shows and franchises for the US couldn’t be found in Japan.

4Kids stopped producing it on June 2, 2012 due to the bankruptcy and loss of 4Kids Productions. Tai Chi Chasers was not acquired by any other licensing company, even with so many of their assets being sold off. 4Kids would retain the rights as 4Licensing until 2017 when the rights expired/4Licensing died, but no one to date has picked up the North American or international rights. It’s now only in the hands of Toei and Iconix Entertainment.

At the end of the year, 4Kids had a net revenue of $12,346,000, down from $14,478,000 in 2010. They had a net loss of $17,084,000.

Next – Part 22: Time 4 Change

Previous – Part 20: It’s Time to Get Your Game Revved Up!

---

If you enjoy my work and would like to help support my blog, please consider donating at my Ko-Fi page. Thank you! ♥