Yu-Gi-Oh! S0 ★★★☆☆
Seeing as I’ve been on a Yu-Gi-Oh! nostalgia trip I decided to give season 0 a watch for the first time. Interesting seeing all our friends in a slightly different context with some different stories and also Bulma Miho is here.
As there’s no official English dub this is also my first time hearing this version of the characters. Yugi always looked younger than he should but here he sounds like an actual baby with Yami sounding more like how I would have expected Yugi himself to sound. Anzu doesn’t seem feel much different from Téa, Jonochi is more pervy than Joey and Honda is a weird fascist about keeping the school clean and obsessed with Miho but at least that gives him something to actually do as a character compared to Tristan. Miho herself is just annoying and adds pretty much nothing.
It does feel like it has somewhat of the opposite pacing problem compared to Duel Monsters. Instead of having multiple episodes dedicated to one match of the same card game we already know the rules to, most of the runtime of each episode is set establishing the villain of the week and then the somewhat perfunctory shadow game is rushed through at the end. Funny how so many of the villains get palette-swapped versions of the school uniform and then in Kaiba’s case continue to wear it even though he immediately stops going to school after his first episode, even as he shows up more and more and we get to see Duel Monsters gradually swallow the franchise (though, like with the Duel Monsters show, a quick pivot and disappointing pivot back to Bakura for the finale). You can also see the actual rules of the game get figured out as it goes too, with it starting to actually feel more like a real game with actual rules in the duel against Daimon.
Seeing Yami develop is also interesting. From the start even though Yugi blacks out when Yami takes over Yami still seems to have parts of Yugi’s personality and memories and clearly cares about Yugi’s friends. It is treated much more as a different side of Yugi here than it ends up developing into as he becomes his own character and also less evil.
Other random thoughts:
- Yugi you cannot just see a man with dark skin and robes and go “woah, an Egyptian!”
- I feel like Seto Kaiba acting so nice in his first episode must have caused him physical pain.
- It is so funny how he just immediately starts obsessing Yugi to the point of stalking after losing one single game against him.
- Also what did Kabia plan to do if he did, in fact, end up killing a bunch of teenagers and one of their grandparents in his death tower in front of a live audience of thousands of people?
- I enjoyed evil Mokuba with his ridiculously oversized fur coat.
- The Blue Eyes White Dragons are a bit more monstrous and a bit more Geiger-y in a way that I like here.
- The fact that the characters compare Monster World as a cross between a board game and a console R.P.G. and that Yami Bakura is using a laptop to run the calculations for the scenario makes it seem like the writer had never heard of T.T.R.P.G.s and accidentally reinvented them for the purpose of writing the Bakura episodes, which would be very funny if true and I am not going to look up if it is or not.