It can be easy to forget after watching the series spend decades basking in the global
spotlight, but, unlike most of its toy anime contemporaries, Yu-Gi-Oh was not originally
conceived as a means of shoveling merch down the throats of gullible millenials. Before
it inadvertently spawned one of the most powerful media empires of the 21st century, Kazuki
Takahashi’s only goal with Yu-Gi-Oh! was to tell a story. A really, REALLY weird story,
that somehow only got weirder as it mutated into the marketing monster we know today.
Yu-Gi-Oh, in its initial form, was a crudely rendered Shounen jump horror manga about a
meek Japanese teenager who solved an ancient Egyptian puzzle, and was subsequently possessed
by the angry spirit of a long-dead pharaoh. That dark spirit exacts vengeance on those
who hurt his host by being really good at analog games. And when I say analog games,
what I really mean is murder with extra steps. Okay, to be fair, sometimes, the Egyptian
revenge ghost only punishes bullies by driving them to permanent insanity with dark sorcery,
but he just straight up kills a LOT of em. Like that one – admittedly justifiable – time
he tricked an escaped convict with a gun into soaking himself in vodka and setting himself
on fire to save Tea’s life. Or that other, slightly less justified time he challenged
a classmate to a game of air hockey but on a hot okonomiyaki griddle with a puck made
of ice and explosives, to settle an argument over which class would get the best culture
festival booth. Also this one guy dies because a perverted
talking baby shits in his lap while he’s hooked up to a real ass electric chair in
a haunted house ride. Which is part of the, uh, extended version of the first episode
of the yu-gi-oh anime, where instead of just kidnapping his grandpa for cardboard, Kaiba
builds an entire indoor theme park solely to murder Yugi as revenge for beating him
at a card game. This, we will soon discover, was not a waste
of 10 billion yen, or approximately One Hundred Million Dollars, but rather a phenomenally
forward-thinking business move. After that arc, it’s said, Kids started
writing in to shounen jump asking where they could learn more about the game, or even play
it. And in that avalanche of letters, Jump and Takahashi saw an opportunity to potentially
make the next Pokemon. After a pretty kickass sendoff arc that introduced Bakura in a massive
tabletop RPG showdown for the souls of Yugi’s friends, they gave the manga a soft reboot,
making it entirely about the card game. We all know how this turned out from a business
perspective – Yu-Gi-Oh is one of the most profitable media franchises in history, and
closely trails Pokemon and Magic as the third most popular card game on the planet.
But from an artistic perspective, this business decision did some profoundly wacky things
to the story and worldbuilding of Yu-Gi-Oh. Any plans Takahashi had for his characters
and world had to be reworked to focus on Duel Monsters, and the sudden shift from a scattershot
board game of the week formula to a heavily serialized narrative about a single game meant
the Mangaka had to make a lot of shit up as he went along.
A lot of people like to focus on the ridiculous rules he came up with for duelist kingdom
in particular, and… boy, a lot of those sure are silly. The infamous catapult turtle
gambit is really just the tip of the iceberg, but to me, that zaniness pales in comparison
to what happened to the series’ setting. Takahashi had to find a way to take the visual
excitement of monsters coming to life in Shadow games, and make it a universal aspect of the
series – or else it would just be a lot of dudes dramatically placing paper on tables.
He couldn’t exactly give every character a millennium item without COMPLETELY changing
everything he had planned for the manga’s ending, so instead, KaibaCorps’ “Solid
vision” hologram system had to become a ubiquitous part of the setting.
And it had to happen frighteningly fast. The original version of Yu-Gi-Oh was set in
real world Japan. Or at least, a lawless facsimile of it where our teenager heroes can be physically
attacked on a near daily basis by bullies who want them to listen to bad karaoke, fake
fortune-telling rapists, random street thugs, violent sneaker bandits, an escaped convict,
a solitaire-orist, a TV news producer doing a special on bullying who apparently couldn’t
wait the half hour it’d take for one of those other guys to show up, corporate goons,
and random street thugs again but this time with yoyos.
It was, in case I didn’t already make this clear, a GLORIOUSLY WEIRD manga. And it continued
to be GLORIOUSLY WEIRD long after its Pokemon pivot.
But it was at least somewhat grounded in the recognizable reality of the late 90s, until
suddenly, in the space of just a few months, we’ve got an island full of massive holographic
arenas (or less massive holographic glass battle boxes, in the manga), which are replaced
just a few months after that by satellite-linked, arm-mounted card game computers that can project
monster holograms ANYWHERE. They also, conveniently, allow KaibaCorp to
spy on anyone in the vicinity of a duel disk, anywhere within the range of those satellites.
Which I’m sure would be pretty controversial if anyone ever found out about it, but Kaiba
manages to keep that gross violation of privacy secretforever. Which is… pretty true to
the horror roots of the manga, and also a fairly prescient depiction of a tech billionaire
for a story written in the year 2000. Though Seto Kaiba actually invents the things he
sells, so it’s not one to one. Kaiba – mostly driven by a desire to win
a card game against one guy – accelerates the technological development of the series’
world to the point that it goes from being a work of dark, Egyptomania-fueled contemporary
fantasy – stardust crusaders without the punching – in spring, to a full blown proto-cyberpunk
dystopian nightmare by fall. As an aside, that cyberpunk story still leans
heavily on horror-tinged egyptian mysticism, which makes for a metal as fuck genre mashup.
Goofy hair metal, to be sure, but metal nonetheless. And it lends itself to some pretty great filler
arc concepts. In what other anime would you see evil corporate Executives exacting vengeance
for their termination via VRMMO Isekai, alongside a story where an ancient Atlantean cult is
stealing souls to resurrect their eldritch god? I mean, yeah, episode to episode these
arcs are a drag, and dropping one in the middle of the battle city finale was an… odd choice,
but the underlying ideas are really cool. I digress though. Kaiba – and KaibaCorp
– are absolutely terrifying by the series end, but to fully understand how they got
there, we must also look at the meteoric rise of Maximillion Pegasus and Industrial Illusions.
See, another interesting (and short-lived) aspect of the Yugi-verse in 1996 is the fact
that people in it do things other than play THE ONLY GAME, like read comics, or watch
pornography. On VHS, by the way. They were still using
VHS tapes when Kaiba invented holograms. Duel monsters is already a big hit in America
by the time Kaiba and Yugi first square off in the manga – like, about ten percent of
the entire US population circa 1996 plays it, which perhaps explains how Pegasus was
able to buy a whole island and build a castle on it - but in Japan, at least, it’s still
just taking off, and people still play other games, like Pop-up pirate, rock-em-sock-em
robots but with monsters, chess but with monsters, not virtua fighter, and not Digimon.
By the start of Yu-Gi-Oh: Duelist in early 1997 though, all of those games have vanished
entirely. Duel monsters is all anyone does or talks about, ever, and the lone attempt
we see to launch a competing game – Dungeon Dice Monsters – goes up in smoke almost
instantaneously. In the anime, not even the direct backing of Industrial Illusions can
help Duke Devlin’s odd fusion of D&D and Chinchiro take off. Nobody wants to play anything
but duel monsters. The game becomes so ingrained in pop culture
– practically overnight – that by fall of that same year, nobody bats an eye when
the entirety of Domino city is taken over by a battle royale tournament. And by 2004,
professional duel monsters is apparently a viable enough career path to support a cutting
edge private dueling academy that also gets its own island. For perspective, we only started
seeing esports schools in the last few years, and those all cover multiple different games.
The implications of this are clear and, frankly, terrifying. After achieving a near total multinational
tabletop gaming monopoly in – at most – the 6 years between Pegasus taking the millennium
eye and Duelist Kingdom, Duel Monsters just… kept expanding, picking up more and more players
and fans, spawning more and more jobs for pro-players, game designers, and accessory
manufacturers alike, until it became the dominant force of the entire global economy. Not to
mention, culture. Now, it’s reasonable to say that isn’t
ENTIRELY down to the game’s success as a game. Duel monsters is, after all, a modern
revival of real ancient Egyptian magic - itself derived from an even older tradition lost
beneath the waves of time - that allowed its practitioners to summon spirits, gods, monsters
and demons born from human souls to do their bidding, and which could, in its most potent
form, pierce the very veil between this world and the next, plus some other worlds besides.
Those reality-warping properties eventually turn the cards into a key component of the
Ener-D system, a synchro-summoning-driven perpetual motion generator that can power
an entire city the size of Tokyo, with plenty of energy left over to fuel card games on
motorcycles. So, to be fair, there are practical applications for duel monsters that go some
way toward explaining its increasingly undue influence on the series setting.
But, to be balanced, all of that was discovered a LONG-ASS time after Industrial Illusions
achieved its simultaneous Cultural and Economic victory and fundamentally rewrote the rules
of human society. The fulcrum of all that economic leverage was just one card game.
Perhaps a supernaturally addictive one on account of the ancient soul magic – I would
love to see the televangelists of yugioh’s America freaking out about that - but still,
a card game. Even back in 1997, the Big Five, seasoned
executives who built their fortunes through more traditional, non-card based industrial
wage and rent theft, could already see the writing on the wall street. They conditioned
their sale of KaibaCorp to Pegasus entirely on the already unfathomably successful CEO’s
ability to win one duel against one child. And then he didn’t, and the whole bajillion
dollar deal was off. Which turned out pretty well for KaibaCorp,
in the long run, if not for those five guys specifically. Under Seto Kaiba’s renewed
stewardship, the company saw continued growth and success. Which only makes sense, given
that Seto was the one with the foresight to pivot the whole business toward game and card
game accessory development, a choice that made the company EXPONENTIALLY more profitable
than it ever was with its old business model. Which was, uh… arms manufacturing.
This, I believe, signalled the beginning of the end for the old Military Industrial Complex
that had defined the 20th century. In its place arose a new Duel Monsters Industrial
Complex, that would similarly shape the 21st, while causing similar amounts of human suffering
until Yusei Fudo solved wealth inequality forever by getting one bridge built.
Hm… am I perhaps making a mistake by so closely scrutinizing the economic logic of
this series? No. Definitely not.
Thanks to their head start in gaming, and a close connection with Industrial Illusions
forged through Kaiba’s early duel monsters tournament successes, KaibaCorp was able to
ride the peak of that wave of change all the way to the bank. And then buy that bank. And
the bank next to it. Like, holy shit, they have so much money it should be illegal. Also
it should be illegal to have far smaller amounts of too much money, like, billionaires are
parasites, but it is fun to talk about this harmless fake one.
Y’know how, at the end of battle city, Kaiba built a big, stupid-expensive-lookin’ tower
on his dad’s old military base, solely for the purpose of playing card games on it, and
then blew the whole thing up after playing three card games there, just to make a statement?
Yeah that’s barely even a flex for him. You probably expect me to point to the company’s
ownership of Duel Academy island by the early 2000s as a sign of their immense success.
But you need to understand that, by that point in this story, private island money was chump
change to Kaiba. The Dark Side of Dimensions movie is set in 1999, two years after the
end of the original manga, and by that time, with 90s technology, Kaiba’s able to completely
finance the research, development and CONSTRUCTION of a space elevator AND attached orbital platform
that’s shaped like his company logo because fuck you who’s gonna stop him?
This is in addition to the R&D money they simultaneously spent creating a dimension-warping
full dive virtual reality system and developing fully sentient AI. Again, in a world that
still uses VHS. And on that note, a significant portion of the orbital facility seems to have
been built for the SOLE purpose of having one of those AI analyze the millennium puzzle
down to a subatomic level and reconstruct it in a Zero G environment. All so that Kaiba
could have one last grudge match with the Pharaoh and then definitely do some other
stuff with him after. “it’s true, I went to a lot of trouble
recreating the pharaoh’s deck, strategies, even his perfectly coiffed hair. In fact,
that part is what took the longest.” Barring a level of embezzlement that simply
does not square with the long term sustainability of his company, this means Kaiba has SPACE
STATION WING MONEY set aside for ENTIRELY PERSONAL PROJECTS, a good 6 years before GX
even begins. And he just keeps getting RICHER from there. A few decades later, KaibaCorp
has the resources to effectively remodel the entirety of Domino city – again, the Yugi-verse
equivalent of the world’s largest, city, Tokyo – into the fully dystopian Neo Domino
City that serves as the stage for 5Ds. Which is its own kinda kookoo bananas. As
is GX. But both were clearly designed as vehicles for Yu-Gi-Oh as a product before they were
stories, and there’s just something about the strange confluence of genuine artistic
intention and absolutely shameless brand exploitation we see in the original Yu-Gi-Oh that makes
its story and world feel… special. In rising to meet the narrative needs created
by an absurd and unprecedented economic opportunity, Kazuki Takahashi ended up building an absurd
and unprecedented economy for his world. One that’s only gotten more absurd as the series
has continued in perpetuity and those needs have gradually overshadowed his original vision.
Yet that vision – of a dark tabletop gaming story driven by ancient magic and prophecies
that is ultimately about the importance of the connections we make over the table – still
resonates in a very weird way. And after spending over 200 chapters selling
pieces of cardboard with bits of text loosely inspired by the zany game rules he made up
as he went along – Takahashi did get a chance to spend a year finishing the story he started.
At least in some fashion. The final Millenium World arc of the manga
is kind of a triumph – it returns the series focus to magic and pg-13 horror. And it breaks
away almost entirely from the hard rules of the card game, instead focusing on the more
chaotic, unstructured ancient Egyptian monster battles that inspired it – which feel like
a weird intersection of Pokemon and Stand Battles. It revisits the hands-down coolest
non-TCG concept from the original “season zero” manga, and realizes it in a compelling
and immersive manner only made possible by the years Takahashi spent honing his artistic
skills on the weekly shounen grind. And when it does finally return to the card
game for one last hurrah, it is a real HURRAH – a tense, for once truly uncertain-feeling
back and forth duel with interesting, well-thought-out strategies and counterstrategies that speak
to the distinctive playstyles and personalities of both players. A final reckoning between
the timid boy who learned to be strong from the ancient hero who shared his heart, and
the dark spirit who learned to maybe not murder people so much and also make some friends
from a kind young man. It’s a tight, personally satisfying ending
for the characters that thankfully isn’t influenced much by the direction of the rest
of the franchise – though in turn, of course, it doesn’t have much influence on it. While
Yugi Mutou and the Pharaoh were able to save the world from certain destruction at the
hands of the dark lord Zorc Necrophades, they were ultimately powerless to stop the darker
lord, late stage capitalism, from slowly consuming the society around them, leaving nothing but
THE ONLY GAME and the holographic corporate surveillance network on which it runs.
So when Yugi says he wants to make his own game one day in Dark Side of Dimensions, it
reads as more tragically shortsighted than endearingly optimistic. He is unknowingly
dooming himself to toil in fruitless obscurity, while, without his competition, Joey is probably
looking at a decently bright future as a pro duelist. One of the only viable career paths
that will be left in the coming years. But hey, let’s cut em some slack, like everyone
who graduated in 1999, they had no way of knowing.
And I don’t really know how to end this video, beyond that depressing note, so uh…
fuck marry kill kaiba, yami yugi and duke devlin? Leave your answers and detailed explanations
in the comments below, and if you’d like to watch a less existentially horrifying video
about either card games or worldbuilding, check out the videos on the left side of your
screen now. I’m Geoff Thew, Professional Shitbag, signing
out from my mother’s basement.