Anime has become a global phenomenon nowadays, appearing on large streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu. Jumping back people would only experience the shlocky anime from the Sci-Fi channel for example or be like me and see the kid’s shows and shonen animes broadcasted in the 90s and 2000s. Pokemon, Dragon Ball, and the one that spawned a card game when it didn’t even intend to Kazuki Takahashi’s Yu-Gi-Oh. While nowadays Takahashi’s story has ended, the card game has been kept alive by Konami each with a new anime series and protagonists with crazy hair. However, I want to go back to the first three episodes of the Yu-Gi-Oh anime. While nowadays I know the original premise like the back of my hand, pretending I know nothing shows the weird situation that this anime was put in.
I want you to imagine watching this anime for the first time so bear with me. We get a brief summary of past events: how ancient Egyptians played games with dark magic and that a pharoah sealed that power of the games away in the power of millennium items. In the present, highschooler Yugi Muto solved the Millenium Puzzle and awakened the power within it.
With this prologue, you would expect the first episode to be about this mystical conflict coming into the modern-day or introducing it. Well, your right…in regards to the second episode and beyond. The first episode deals with an elitist gamer named Kaiba stealing a rare duel monsters card from Yugi’s grandfather (subsequently ripping it apart) and Yugi’s Grandpa challenging Kaiba to a game as revenge. He beats Kaiba, casting some sort of spell which puts Kaiba in a coma. Yugi decides to duel him, transforming into a different person, to get back at Kaiba for stealing his Grandpa’s card. Now the intro implies that Yugi goes through some sort of transformation based on the art, but the nature of it is not elaborated on in the first episode. There is also Kaiba’s younger brother Mokuba who appears after Yugi does some magic thing to Kaiba’s mind. We have a few unanswered questions after watching the first episode: what is the magic power Yugi has unlocked, who is Mokuba, and what happened to Kaiba?
To answer these questions, we have to go back to the original Yu-Gi-Oh manga, long before the entire franchise was focused on a card game. This manga was not published until after the anime got a massive following, along with the Yu-Gi-Oh! Duelist manga (where the Yu-Gi-Oh story we all know was original). The plot begins with Yugi solving the puzzle and how he became friends with Joey and Tristan (called Junoichi and Honda) after defending them from the bully Tetsu, despite the fact, Joey and Tristan bullied Yugi previously (which was a flashback in episode 3). What didn’t happen in episode 3 was Yugi turning into the spirit of the Millenium Puzzle (which I will be calling Yami Yugi) that challenges him to a game as revenge and inflicts a Penalty Game (a magic punishment) on him for losing. This was the premise of the manga, some terrible people would cause trouble for his friends (like assaulting one of them) and then Yami Yugi would enact a Penalty Game after he proves his superiority as a gamer.
This is where Kaiba made his debut, with the exact setup only instead of technology Yami Yugi uses dark magic to bring the cards to life and caused an illusory death as a penalty game. Now, this is not the duel shown in the first episode of the anime. What was also not shown was the initial meeting with Mokuba and his attempted to poison. After Mokuba failed, Kaiba came back and attempted to injury Yugi and his friends by various means, including not limited to: attempted death by electrocution (twice), attempted decapitation and attempted murder by a serial killer. Finally, Kaiba dueled Yugi one more time, happening the exact same way in the anime and ending with the same thing. The main difference was that the Penalty Game (Mind Crush) forced Kaiba’s soul to reconstruct his heart to get rid of the evil side (also Mokuba gave Yugi their tragic backstory).
Eventually, Toei animation adapted the first manga into an anime series, but that never came overseas. We got the adaptation of Yu-Gi-Oh with none of the backstory of the original manga. This was a problem because various character relationships and plot points were already established: how Yugi met his friends, Yugi’s battle with the Kaiba brothers, and the introductions of Shadi and Bakura (and Yami Bakura). The latter had to be reintroduced during the first arc as a pseudo-repeats of the introductions. The Kaiba introduction in episode 1 merged the conflicts of the Kaiba encounters to make a duel with intense stakes.
In my opinion, it is a fun duel but lacks the previous context to make it stronger. Kaiba coming back in the manga as an event because he was the first person to come back after a Penalty Game. Furthermore, the friendship symbols written on Yugi’s friends’ hands before the duel with Kaiba has more narrative weight because not only was it written after Yugi’s grandpa nearly died (which was intentional kidnapping in the manga), but also after they escaped death and injury multiple times from outside parties. When Yugi gathered the 5 pieces of Exodia to win the duel, it turned the smiling hand imagery (a symbol of their friendships) into the card game as a way to show their power together. Their bond is enough to overcome the raw strength of Kaiba’s Blue-Eyes White Dragon cards. This lack of context turns a climactic battle in the manga, into a way to establish the initial character introductions.
This is not a bad introduction, but knowing this info shows how the team for the Yugioh anime had to make some concessions to give the audience enough context into the character’s relationships to briskly moving on to the new material. That new material comes in the second episode. Yugi gets invited to a tournament by the creator duel monsters, Maximillion J Pegasus, to partake in a tournament via a video recording. However, Pegasus used the recording to initiate a shadow game between him and Yugi which resulted in Yugi’s grandfather having his soul taken. This leads to the main conflict of the first arc and is also Yugi’s getting his grandfather back is his motivation. The sequence also establishes Pegasus as another person with a Millenium item and exposition about Yami Yugi’s backstory.
This place would be the perfect starting point if not for the baggage of the first manga. With that said I have come up with two possible ways to write around this complication. The first idea is to have the episodes appear in chronological order with a few time skips to each point in the prologue. This is a very straightforward approach, but the main problem here is that the various time jumps would only happen at the beginning of the show which would make it inconsistent. Certain shows do have prologues that jump in time, but not twice for only very specific events. The second idea is to have the Pegasus episode as the first episode and then cover Yugi meeting his friends and the Kaiba duel as a flashback. This works better because it establishes the main conflict in the first episode.
However, some would say the duel with Kaiba is still important information and would need to go first, especially since it establishes the rivalry and how Yugi’s reputation as a card game player went up exponentially. I have determined a compromise between these to approaches. Have it take place during the Pegasus encounter, but have Pegasus show a video of Yugi defeating Kaiba on live TV before Yugi and Pegasus have their first duel. This would establish the rivalry in order and also show the effect of Yugi’s victory. Then we could have the duel with Pegasus and get into the main conflict. As a side note, I actually like the flashback of Yugi and Joey becoming friends because it takes place right before they are about to start their duelist kingdom journey. Its a calm before the storm. However, the Kaiba and Yugi grudge match cannot be truly replicated because of the anime not using the manga’s continuity.
There is one more character that has been neglected by the first few episodes and that is Mokuba. I have previously elaborated on Mokuba’s backstory and it isn’t necessary to adapt it in the second anime. He should still be given more screen time because he is a non-entity during the first few episodes until he reappears later in the series. There should not be any episodes focusing on his, but adding him to the scenes with Kaiba would give him more of a presence. There are two approaches to Mokuba that could take in the first episode. He could be Kaiba’s lackey reinforcing his bad behavior or he could be the nervous sibling being behind Kaiba in certain scenes and attempt to stand up to him when he goes too far with Yugi’s Grandpa. Even without focusing on his character, you can still reveal information about Mokuba’s character through his interactions.
I have gone over various ways that the Yugioh anime slightly misses the mark in terms of structure and conveying information, but there are a few times it was done well. The most major example of this was Bakura and Yami Bakura’s re-introduction. He was originally the final enemy of the manga and a timid character with an evil half from his Millenium Item, nearly defeating Yugi in a demonic tabletop game. In the anime, the main characters met Bakura and Yami Bakura took over challenging them to a duel monsters shadow game. The reason these sequence works is because it was moved until the middle of the arc instead of being put at the beginning. Bakura was one of the supporting characters in the manga, but the anime put him as more of a side character role in the anime. They changed his character to compensate for the situation he was put into and also foreshadowed his Yami Bakura’s role as a background antagonist in the later arcs.
The second was to recreate the tabletop game as a duel. The characters becoming their miniatures were re-interpreted as the characters becoming connected to their favorite monster cards in the previous scenes. They even managed to recreate Bakura coming out from his subconscious to help by having him posses his favorite card when his Yami Bakura played the character. The second way this worked was by establishing Yugi Muto is distinct from Yami Yugi when he possessed the Dark Magician card Originally in the manga Yugi admitted he had another personality before he fought Kaiba for a second time. Instead of putting it into the beginning of the series (with no buildup whatsoever), the showrunners placed the reveal into a dire situation much like the Kaiba duel. They integrated the necessary plot information in a different situation but has the same tone allowing for the information to be easily conveyed. There was no place in the source to give this information so they created their own situation for it to happen. Making new material may not always be executed well (for example, this sequence has problems since it is a card game instead of a tabletop game which makes certain moves more ridiculous), but it is an option that gives writers more freedom and is not burdened by continuity.
Make no mistake, I am not saying that the Yugioh anime is worse because it was not adapted in the most ideal way. Writing in general and adaptations are hard to pull off. Anybody who does it semi-decently has my respect Nonetheless, I still hope to show these events could have been adapted and possible solutions when put in these kinds of situations. Potential writers (including myself) get to writing and think outside the box.
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