Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters

Name(s): Yu-Gi-Oh! / Yu☆Gi☆Oh! Duel Monsters / Yugioh / Yu-Gi-Oh!: Duel Monsters / Yugioh: Duel Monsters / 遊☆戯☆王　デュエルモンスターズ.
Format: TV series (224 episodes)
Release Date(s): April 18, 2000 – September 29, 2004
Studio(s): Gallop
Related: Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie – Pyramid of Light (2004)

Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters Review

I’ve followed the Yu-Gi-Oh! (YGO) card game since its 2001 debut in North America, which is frightening even to myself. Occasionally, I took hiatuses from the card game whenever it got old. I’ve since returned to the actual game, these days through Master Duel and Duel Links. I have no intentions of ever quitting it outright, either. I like to say I would if the game became unplayable enough, but I’ve been through some bad meta formats. Regardless, the anime lost appeal as I aged.

It should be obvious why. The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game offers extremely complex deckbuilding and an endless number of strategies that reward the effort you put into them. The anime, however, is intended for children—it only becomes worse the more you examine it.

My Background

When the YGO fad at my school died and you started to get made fun of for still being into YGO, the anime series was in the middle of the Battle City arc. I spent less and less energy keeping up with the show, and while I caught fragments of the series up until the arc’s conclusion, I eventually fell off of it altogether.

Well, I got into a pretty heavy Yu-Gi-Oh! phase in the spring of 2020. I became curious about revisiting this series from my childhood and convinced myself to watch it as background noise while playing video games and such, which is something I normally never do for anime. Criticize my methods all you want, but I was never going to spend the time watching a mediocre 224-episode series, giving it the same amount of attention as I would for Legend of the Galactic Heroes. I’m going to be fucking dead some day, and you can argue I still spent more time on this series than it deserves.

The 4Kids English Dub

Such background watching required that I go with the 4Kids English dub. Since I was in this for a nostalgia trip anyway, I decided it’s fine. This is despite 4Kids’s (deservedly) terrible reputation for its puritanical levels of censorship and cultural whitewashing. While I still hate the publishing company and what it represents, I found the experience to not be as bad as I expected.

Though it becomes truly staggering the amount of euphemisms they come up with to replace death, these alterations usually have little to no impact on the plot, character motivations, and stakes. Practically speaking, does it matter if a character’s loss sends them to an eternal black void instead of death? If anything the former is a worse punishment. On one hand, the answer means 4Kids’s censorship is especially idiotic and pointless. On the other, it incidentally retains more of the original artistic intent.

Adults Writing 4Kids

Really, the censorship is the least of the dub’s problems. What’s far worse are the absolutely agonizing swarm of puns straight out of those “1001 Wacky Kids’ Jokes” books that sat bent and creased at the back of your childhood bookshelf. Holy shit, the extraneous dialogue in this series is atrocious. I’m not sure what the original Japanese lines were—presumably jokes as well—but regardless of who’s responsible, I hated this aspect of the show.

Another issue is the utterly bizarre alterations to the story that don’t even have the motive of censorship. Take for example that characters’ original Japanese names are kept or changed at seemingly complete random, or the addition of filler episodes exclusive to the Western syndication while at the same time leaving out the series epilogue. Yeah, they were at the fucking finish line and still hit the brakes. 4Kids execs are psychotic.

It’s Not That Bad

Really, though, the dub is fine. I have no doubt the sub is superior at least in terms of the script and story integrity, but I don’t believe for a second that it would’ve radically impacted my opinion of the series, so don’t bother trying to convince me. I’ve also been around the block enough times now where I could recognize most areas where the localization made alterations to animation or dialogue, and my brain would just fill in the blanks.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters Verdict

Got bored of writing this. Show’s lame. A lot of the game mechanics are completely arbitrary and ruin the sense of suspense or audience investment. Certain characters are dropped at random, many subplots go nowhere, nearly everyone in the show is identical between their first and last appearance, the animation is trash quality, and the same music samples used throughout the series are maddening.